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To start, a couple of questions: Are Manchester United terrible? Are Manchester United good?
Are Manchester United too unstable? Are Manchester United unkillable?
Have Manchester United made any progress? Are they regressing from last season? Did they spend more than any team not named Chelsea in the transfer market and fail to improve?
Is Casemiro done as a world-class midfielder? Is Casemiro the most important player in the squad? Is Casemiro 31 years old?
What is happening with Mason Mount? Is he doing things you can't understand?
Are these defenders good enough? Can you trust any of them?
Isn't six points way more than they had at this point last season? Don't they have a goalkeeper who can pass now? Aren't a lot of players injured?
Didn't they finally buy a striker? But isn't he 19? And hasn't he scored only nine total goals in a major European league? But isn't the point more that he's actually a striker? A living, breathing, moving, human body who understands what to do when the ball gets near the penalty box?
Isn't Bruno Fernandes their new captain? How could anyone think it's a good idea to make Bruno Fernandes a captain of anything? But maybe Bruno Fernandes is the perfect captain for this specific team? Is this team good? Is this team bad?
The answers to all of these questions are "yes," and the answers to all of these questions are "no."
Manchester United have entered their chaos era, and it's unclear if they'll be out of it any time soon.
A brief history of last season
Remember how it started? First they lost 2-1 at Old Trafford to Graham Potter's Brighton. The next week: a 4-0 thumping away against Brentford. The two savviest clubs in the league dismantled the one with lots of money, no direction and no plan. Even Erik ten Hag couldn't overcome this -- or, perhaps, specifically Erik ten Hag couldn't overcome this.
In both matches, United controlled more than 60% of the ball, but both games were filled with failed attempts to play the ball out of the back under pressure. David de Gea couldn't do it. Harry Maguire couldn't do it. Christian Eriksen, one of the best passers of his generation, also couldn't do it. At least, he wasn't comfortable dropping deep to do it:
After that, they ditched the passing out of the back, beat their tormentors Liverpool 2-1, and went on a run of wins that eventually even had some commentators considering them to be genuine title contenders. (They were not.) At Ajax, Ten Hag's team pressed as high as possible and dominated possession. At United, this collection of players -- minus Cristiano Ronaldo, whom Ten Hag impressively marginalized from the club -- could certainly try to press high and to circulate complex possession patterns, but that wasn't likely to lead to winning.
Instead, if I can dumb down their approach, they ceded control of the ball, didn't have their full-backs get forward much, and then used a combination of Marcus Rashford running in behind and midfielders, including Casemiro, bombing into the box to create enough attack. They didn't have a viable center-forward, and the winger opposite Rashford -- whether it be Jadon Sancho or Antony -- hadn't shown himself capable of any kind of reliable offensive production, either.
The concept of "tactics" has frequently been complicated to the point of utter incomprehensibility these days, but it's ultimately about playing in a way that creates the optimal balance for your squad between attack and defense to produce the best goal difference possible. Some teams are better off trying to keep the ball down at the other end, while some need to sacrifice some control in exchange for the open spaces created when they turn the ball over.
United opted for the latter, and that seemed about right. They underachieved the cost of their squad, but this wasn't a team pieced together with any kind of plan or any focus on the idea of "value." It was just a random grouping of sometimes-good players whom no stable club would have ever purposefully pieced together.
Except, everywhere else, they overachieved.
Despite the sixth-best goal differential and expected-goal differential, they finished third, and they did it in a way that was very different from the Premier League's typical top four. They ranked seventh in their total share of final-third passes, seventh in the difference between their number of penalty area touches and their opponents' penalty area touches, and eighth in overall pressing rate.
And now ... this
Man United's acquisitions this summer seemed to suggest that continued evolution was in order. Although United still have a lot of players who are most comfortable in transition moments, your ceiling can be only so high when you're not able to control the ball for long stretches.
Onana might be the most proficient ball-at-his-feet goalkeeper in the world, and he was replacing perhaps the least proficient one. Mount, one of the better pressers in the league, came into the midfield. And Rasmus Hojlund was signed at center-forward not just because of the potential goal scoring he could provide, but also because of how involved he was in buildup play at Atalanta.
Now, it's still pretty difficult to differentiate between what a team is trying to do and what a team is actually doing. A source close to the USMNT brought this up to me after their loss to the Netherlands and former United manager Louis van Gaal in the round of 16 at the World Cup. The match was characterized by many as a kind of tactical masterclass by the Dutch, who controlled only 42% of the possession, got outshot by the Americans and scored with their first two shots on target.
The source refused to accept that any team like the Dutch goes into a match planning on having such little control of the ball. To them, it meant that the USMNT did something right to be able to control as much of the ball as they did, not that the Dutch let them have it. And I tend to agree, but I also can't know for sure.
However, there's one area of the game where a team will frequently try to act on some kind of preplanned strategy: goal kicks. Last season, United's average goal kick traveled 47.1 yards -- longer than all but five other teams in the league. The percentage of their goal kicks that traveled at least 40 yards (63.1%) was the fifth highest in the league. This season, their goal kicks are traveling 32 yards on average -- the fifth-shortest mark in the league, while the percent of goal kicks over 40 yards (33.3%) is also the fifth-lowest number.
So, they're trying to control more of the ball -- and they're also pressing more aggressively. Through three games, they've won possession in the attacking third 29 times -- nine more than anyone else in the league. On a per-game basis, that rate has almost doubled: 5.4 possessions won in the attacking third last season, compared to 9.6 this year.
Although they're doing more of the things you'd want to see if you're trying to produce sustainable high-level point totals -- building out of the back, pressing, etc. -- it's unclear if it's working.
Despite pulling out a one-goal win, United were truly awful against Wolverhampton Wanderers at home on the opening week of the season. They were great in the first half against Spurs and then were quite poor in the second half. And against Nottingham Forest, at home, they flipped it all around: terrible in the first 45 (went down 2-0), overwhelming in the second (won 3-2).
The completely erratic nature of their performances -- not from game to game, but within the games themselves -- speaks to a team that is trying to do the things that lead to high-level dominance but doesn't have the personnel to do them consistently. United are attempting three more shots per game than they were last season, and they're allowing three more shots per game -- which means they're attempting a smaller share of the shots from their matches than they were a season ago. They're also registering five more touches in the box per game ... but they're allowing nine more.
In fact, they've allowed more touches in their own box than they've put up against their opponents so far this season:
The most concerning part of that image is that it has come against one of the easier out-of-the-chute schedules in the league. Both Wolves and Nottingham Forest are expected to be battling relegation all year, and those matches were both at Old Trafford. Tottenham away isn't a particularly easy fixture, but that was just the club's second game without Harry Kane and its second match under Ange Postecoglou.
United finished 15 points clear of Spurs last season. On aggregate, they probably should have beaten Spurs, but almost all of their dominance was packed into the first half:
So where do they go from here? It's obviously still quite early, and let's not forget: they do have three more points than they had at this point last season. They can still add another player or two by next weekend. Hojlund hasn't played a minute yet due to an injury, while both Luke Shaw and Mount missed the most recent match. (Shaw is expected to be out for several weeks, with reports of United looking for an extra full-back to fill the gaps.) But on the eve of the season, the Sporting Index betting-market projections had them finishing on 73 points -- closer to Liverpool in third (76) than to Newcastle in fifth (68). As of Monday, their points projection had dropped down to 69, ever-so-slightly below Newcastle in fourth.
United, of course, have dropped only three points this season, and it's not like they would've been expected to take much more than six points from these three games anyway. So, there are other issues that have led to a drop in confidence about how good United might be this season.
For example, I don't see why United couldn't have a more aggressive press, but it's more of a question of whether that's worth it. The same goes for their efforts to keep more of the ball.
With the ball, do they have the players who can both create measured spells of possession and then also break down an opposition defense with it? Two-thirds of their starting midfield (Bruno and Casemiro) completed fewer than 80% of their passes for United last season, and Mount's career average at Chelsea is south of 80%, too. Those are all well-below-average completion rates for all midfielders, especially so for the ones who play at the theoretical best teams in the world.
For all his virtues, Rashford has never been a high-touch attacker who can exploit deep defenses. The other winger role has been a bit of a black hole in terms of producing goals and assists, and Hojlund is much too young and too raw to expect him to immediately stabilize the team's possession play.
By having these high-risk players attempt to work the ball more patiently, you're going to be creating more turnovers for yourself, which can be fine when paired with a good counter-press, but at least so far this season, it doesn't seem like Casemiro has the legs to mop up every time (and it's a lot) the first line of the press gets broken. Mount is a great presser, but that role can have only so much of an impact on its own. That's clear in how easily and how often United's opponents are breaking into their penalty area. And even if Casemiro does still summon up what we're used to seeing from him -- he's turning 32 in a couple of months! -- there's no one else on the roster who could come close to replicating his theoretical impact if he gets hurt.
The back line, meanwhile, is the same one we saw last year -- a solid-ish unit that benefitted from not-too-aggressive positioning from both full-backs, which meant no one player was being asked to cover too much space on his own. Yet they haven't held up this season amid all the chaos in front of them. Their best defender, Lisandro Martínez, is also quite a chaotic player whose performances seem to net out at a decent level but vacillate from elite to poor.
So, this might just be the new normal for United, for the rest of this season. They'll blow some teams off the field, they'll get blown out, they'll suffocate you with their press, they'll slice you apart from a goal kick, they'll easily get bypassed and give up breakaways, they'll turn the ball over in their own defensive third. They might even manage to do all of it over the course of a single 90 minutes.
- Ryan O'Hanlon, ESPN.com writer
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