I think RVP had seen us sell all our best players and not replace them properly.
No other club in Europe sells so many to our direct rivals and who then to get success they wouldn’t have got here.
Cole to Chelsea, RVP and Sanchez to Man U, Adebayor, Clichy, Sagna, Toure, Nasri to Man City, even Chamberlain to Liverpool had success straight away, as well as all the other top quality players going to elite European clubs.
The best players have a choice.
They go to top clubs, play alongside top players and win the top trophies.
Or they stay at an unambitious club, who sell their best players and go nowhere.
What else are they supposed to do?
The guy had 1 good season at United. You are only kidding yourself if you think anyone at United considers him a legend or would place him amongst the recent greats (fondly remember him). Having a few good moments isn’t something that qualifies you to be a club great.
I loosely used the term fondly remember, but to illustrate my point - I fondly remember Wrighty, Bergkamp, Henry, Jens as club greats. Not people like Wiltord or Reyes who had their moments, but would easily be forgotten grand scheme of things.
We are talking about a once in a decade player who has failed to build a legacy anywhere he has gone largely due of his personality.
I’ll leave the discussion here and let you gentlemen carry on.
Before RvP left, we had only sold Nasri, Clichy and Adebayor to City who were just beginning to win things. We took one of Chelsea best defenders for Cole. Anyway, that’s not the point we are arguing.
He could have left quietly. Gone to any club in the world for all it matters. But he decided to publicly belittle the club, put his teammates down and continues to make up stories to this date to make himself come across as the innocent party.
No matter how you paint it, the reality is, he ran down his contract, forced the club’s hand to sell him to one of our mosthated rivals and then tried to blame the club. Therein lies the problem.
The problem is that we never bought any top class players, we only sold them.
He could see, like all of us, that we needed investment and there wasn’t any.
It’s the same since he left, we’re watching all our rivals overtake us while we drift along in mid table.
Like I said. I don’t think anyone would have begrudged him a move at the time as it was clear we were uncompetitive at the top. For the same reasons I refuse to blame Nasri, Sagna, Clichy and the likes for leaving when they left.
This guy was club captain, grew up here, was the talisman, but he had no second thoughts about dragging the club through the mud to secure his desired move to a fierce rival.
The reality is the club ran down his contract as they didn’t offer him what he asked for. It’s the club’s and nobody else’s fault not to sell him with one or two years left on the contract.
He correctly told us that his and the club’s ambitions and expectations didn’t match.
