Ratcliffe gives Amorim time and picking some fun football rule changes

0:22hello and welcome back to the stadio podcast i'm Musa kwanga i'm ryan hun Ryan, how are you doing? Doing alright, thanks man. How are you? I'm very good because I'm very chuffed. You're pointing, you're doing a lot of pointing. Yeah, because I feel like we were both in the start line and I got there first. I was like, I'm going to start this podcast. I'm straight in there. You did. We just straight in. I've got this, don't worry. How are you, man? I am, well, much, much better. Very excited, doing lots of bits of writing here and there. Got some cool travel coming up, of which more a bit later.

0:53I'll talk about that close to the time, or maybe at the time. But yeah, I'm good. You should talk about it just after you've left. Yes, I will. I was here and now I'm not. Listen, they can't find me. We hope everyone's staying safe and well. Quick bit of admin. Don't forget to sign up. If you're listening to this on the free feed, go and sign up to Patreon. Listen to this whole episode in full, ad-free, and every single Stadio episode in full, ad-free, on the Stadio podcast membership. Or if you want to sign up to the Stadio social club, you get access to the Discord as well as the podcasts. and all other kinds of perks.

1:27So go to patreon.com forward slash Stadio you get 15 % off if you sign up for a year. If you sign up for a social club membership for a year you get a membership pack as well which will be going out to everyone probably in about a month's time. The first batch which we're excited about. Other bit of admin. London Live Show at the Southbank Centre. This is your daily reminder to go and buy tickets for Stadio's show at the Southbank Centre. our first live show at the South Bank Centre Thursday December the 4th go and get those tickets we're not going to do a show on Monday we're going to do it on Tuesday that's just because of some travel and logistics so the first show next week will go out on Tuesday so if you don't see a show on Monday that is why I think that's all the admin there's been a lot of Manchester United news recently there was a great piece that Laurie Whitwell wrote for The Athletic just about what this new Carrington is like and that there isn't space for everyone and not everyone's kit gets washed.

2:28You have to wash their own kit. You have to wash their own kit. But the thing that I wanted to talk about, because we did talk about Reuben Amarim a couple of weeks ago, was Sir Jim Ratcliffe saying that Amarim needs three years to prove that he's a great coach. So he said, he has not had the best of seasons, said Ratcliffe. This is from a BBC article. Reuben needs to demonstrate he is a great coach over three years. That's where I would be. I think that's, how do I say this? I think that's quite good messaging. Because, you know, everyone talks about the dreaded vote of confidence by the owner or the chairman.

3:02But they never, when people go, oh, we really believe in the manager, they don't actually give a time frame most of the time. so what this does is this basically goes oh this guy's fine until next year and if you think about the players brought into united to take the players taken out you can criticize actually um amaran for for example onana trusting him as long as he did you could you can criticize him for that because that was something which was clear to even the most casual observer but if you think about who's been brought into the club and all the moving parts it doesn't actually make sense to be like just sack this dude because you brought in people for his system and you need to let that work and breathe a bit like who is it pep pep of all people pep talked about this the other day he was like people talk about title races he said it's too early for all of this it's like seven games in and and it was a good when it was the context of title racing united will not be in a title race again until i leave my 50s but in terms of how early we judge a season it's really healthy to have someone just go actually here's a really big time frame we should be looking at to see how this works um i like this i do like there's not many things of his messaging i've enjoyed including this week alone but i liked that he came out and said that actually so do you think that that's going to help the noise about around manchester united now do you think that's just going to be it's hugely hugely does yeah yeah of course it does because it stops it being week to week it's like when people came out and like you know people came out and back to arteta it just makes it like oh we're in this for the long run and there was i don't know exactly what the messaging was around Arsenal but I did feel there was a point of Arteta's tenure early on where he got that contract when people were a bit like oh he's got a new contract oh that's interesting can I say as well I got cooked on Twitter for something I posted I just checked in recently and I posted something about it was a couple of Arsenal fans were cooking me something said in 21 because I was really excited by all these brilliant attacking players they had including Sancho and of course I wrote that in 21 when it was not yeah and I was like actually I remember thinking do you know what yeah I got wrong that all these players would do well United but I'm quite chuffed that I backed Arteta from back then and I think you need to give you need to give a coach time you think of Arteta like compared to now if you think of like when he was struggling at Arsenal to now if you'd said to those people can you imagine Arteta a few years later having this I think most of those fans would have been like I cannot.

5:24Dude, we were, I've said this before, but like, but I think that's probably why I've been quite big picture and fairly zen about Arsenal not getting it over the line in the league the last couple of years. Don't get me wrong, I would, I think Arsenal need to get, get it over the line this year. If they are involved in a title race and they push it to the wire, I think that they kind of need to win something this year, big. And I don't mean like, a Carabao Cup's not going to do it. And to be honest, I don't think an FA Cup's going to do it either. I think it has to be a league or a Champions League, which is not easy to win.

5:58But the reason that I have been a little bit more on the side of like, well, yeah, I mean, you know, it's disappointing, but they were really good. It's just because Arsenal were a million miles away. A total mess. They were a million miles away from being one of the best four sides in Europe. If you think of the ceiling of Arsenal's best player they've raised, forget the floor of the squad, but the ceiling of the squad, they've raised that year on year. It was Gabriel Jesus. And that's not because he's a brilliant footballer. And they did that in a very, very short time. I think it's easy to forget how hard it is to break into that top two, three.

6:41It's very, very hard. so looping this back to Manchester United and Ruman Amarim because I think that it's possible to get there and I think that if you look at the time frame that it would need to get anywhere close to Manchester United being consistently challenging for top four again or even challenging for the league it's going to take multiple windows it's going to take more departures more signings coming in and I don't think it's going to I think the only thing that I would be a little bit worried about actually let me rephrase that because if you actually look at where Manchester United's squad is there are a lot of players that they want to get rid of and they can't they can't find the people to sign them permanently so what's going to end up happening with I think a lot of these Manchester United signings is they'll either let them go for free or they'll let them go on for a massively reduced fee so that the clubs that sign them can incorporate some of that transfer fee into wages for those players.

7:49It's basically where Arsenal were when they needed to get rid of Aubameyang and Ozil and Nicola Pepe and all of these signings that were on a lot of money that were quite marquee signings but just didn't fit into what Arsenal wanted to do anymore. And that takes a couple of cycles. Ruben Amman has only been there a year. yeah they've made some good sign-ins and they've spent a lot of money in the summer just before he arrived but that wasn't for him so I think that this from Ratcliffe is smart and I wonder if it's going to just temper expectations a little bit and I don't know maybe galvanize is the wrong word but shift the perceptions from the fan base to be like okay look this is the long game getting on all of these players' backs isn't going to really do them any good, there's definitely going to be a lot more pain before it gets better.

8:44But this is what it is. It's clever because, look, I'll tell you why it's clever. Because by extending the timeframe over which Amarim is going to be judged, by extending that, by saying, oh, look, if he's got to the end of the season or he's got till January, then every individual result assumes a greater significance than it should. A humiliation against Grimsby in the Carabao Cup in that context is not as bad as, oh, he's got till Christmas, right? Then it means that every point, everything matters, everything. You say three years, then it's kind of like, it's almost, it's slightly demoralising to one of his most intense critics, because then you're going, oh yeah, he's not going to sack this guy until at least the summer or at least early next season.

9:28Which I think actually, in the context of all of this, it's not the worst thing. these players you've got a good core there in terms of the attackers you do have quality these are you know Kunya Mbumo Seshko these are good forwards right they're good forwards that a manager could come in and work with and if it's disastrous if it's absolutely disastrous then you can sack him at the start of the summer and start looking but I think this is just I think it's smart communications and you don't often see that from A Jim Ratcliffe or B owners in general that was a preview of today's episode of stadio if you want to join up for ad-free podcasts extra podcasts access to the stadio social club and more you can join us at patreon.com forward slash stadio