Flux🥂

🚨 Roy Keane doesn’t hold back on the Glazers and the state of Manchester United: “People say I’ve made a career out of criticisms. Fine. Call me miserable, call me bitter. I couldn’t care less. I’m not going to sit on television and tell supporters everything is wonderful when the club is falling apart. And I’m sick of people pretending this started with the last manager. A manager comes in promising standards. Two years later he’s gone. Another arrives with a new plan. He’s gone too. And we spend months arguing about formations while the same problems survive every appointment. Meanwhile, the people who have overseen this mess are still there. When I played for United, you were expected to win. The manager had authority. The dressing room knew the standards. Everybody understood what the club was trying to do. Now tell me, what exactly is Manchester United trying to do? Don’t give me a bloody presentation about a three-year plan. Tell me what happens on the pitch. Tell me why players arrive looking like they’ve got everything to prove and leave looking like they’ve forgotten why they came. Tell me why every new manager seems to inherit the same problems with different names on the shirts. People say, ‘But Roy, they’ve spent money.’ Of course they’ve spent money. That’s what makes it worse. Spend hundreds of millions without a plan and you build nothing. And let’s talk about the Glazers. This club was saddled with debt because of how they bought it. Years of interest payments, dividends, all of it. Money that could have helped the club went into servicing that arrangement. And I’m supposed to clap because Manchester United can still announce another commercial partnership? It’s disgraceful. Yes, INEOS now run the football side. They have their own decisions to answer for, believe me. But the Glazers haven’t disappeared. They still hold the controlling stake. You can’t oversee years of decline and pretend it has nothing to do with you. Look at this Fermin Lopez story. United are reportedly asking about him. Fine. But put yourself in the boy’s position. He’s at Barcelona. He wants to play the biggest matches and win the biggest trophies. Somebody tells him Manchester United are interested. What’s the sales pitch? ‘Come here, son. Beautiful history. Great supporters. And if things go wrong, we’ll sack the manager and start the whole thing again.’ You’d be embarrassed saying it out loud. I’m not saying Fermin has rejected United. I don’t know what he’s thinking. That’s the point. Manchester United should be a club where the football argument makes itself. Instead, supporters see a top player linked and their first reaction is, ‘Why would he come?’ Think about how far you’ve fallen when your own fans struggle to answer that question. And I feel sorry for the kids. A father tells his son about Ferguson, Robson, Cantona, Scholes and Rooney. About what that badge demanded. Then the boy watches another season of excuses and another manager blamed for old problems. What do you tell him? Be patient for another 10 years? Supporters have spent their money, travelled everywhere and watched the people at the top escape accountability. I’m not telling anybody to abuse people. But protests, organised pressure, demanding proper accountability? Absolutely. Because if the supporters don’t keep asking difficult questions, who will? And sometimes I wonder whether the people running this club have become so comfortable with the revenue coming in that finishing nowhere near the top no longer frightens them enough. That should terrify every United supporter. Manchester United wasn’t built so that people could own a valuable business and occasionally remember there’s a football match on Saturday. It’s a football club. Start treating it like one. And if you can’t, get out of the way and let somebody who actually understands what it means take responsibility.”

🚨 Rio Ferdinand on why Ruud van Nistelrooy was one of the most ruthless finishers United ever had: “Watching those old clips of Ruud van Nistelrooy, and I think younger fans need to understand something. That man was a serious problem. When you watch the highlights, you see the ball going into the net. What you don’t see is what happened to the defender 5 seconds before the ball arrived. That’s where Ruud did most of his work. I remember training against him at United. You’d be watching the ball, keeping your position, thinking you had everything under control. Then somebody would put a cross into the box. You’d turn around and Ruud was standing in front of you. I’d be thinking, how have you got there? : )) And the worst part was that he didn’t need a second chance. If the ball reached him in the right position, you were usually in trouble. There was one session when he scored against us and I told him, ‘Ruud, you can’t keep disappearing behind defenders like that.’ He looked at me and said, ‘Rio, you’re supposed to know where I am.’ I said, ‘I did know where you were. That’s the problem.’ He laughed. But that’s exactly what made him different. Some strikers want to fight you for 90 minutes. They want to run channels, take you on, get involved in everything. Ruud could spend a few minutes barely touching the ball, and you’d start thinking he wasn’t causing you any problems. Then you made one mistake. One. And he’d score. I played against some fantastic forwards in my career, and I can tell you that defending somebody like Ruud requires a different kind of concentration. You couldn’t relax because he wasn’t dribbling at you. You couldn’t assume he was out of the game because he hadn’t touched the ball for a while. Sometimes the less you noticed him, the more worried you should have been. And people say, ‘Well, he was playing for Manchester United. Of course he got chances.’ Yes, he got chances. But there is a difference between receiving chances and making defenders feel that every chance is going to become a goal. Ruud gave you that feeling. I remember Cristiano when he first came to United. He wanted to beat people, wanted to show his skills, wanted to do things that made everybody stand up, and he did that excellently. Ruud was almost the opposite. That’s the balance. He wanted the ball in the penalty area, and he wanted to score. You could see two completely different approaches to attacking football in the same training session. And I think that was good for Cristiano. Because Cristiano already had the ability to do extraordinary things. What he developed over time was that ruthless instinct to finish an attack. I’m not saying Ruud taught him everything. Cristiano worked incredibly hard to become the player he became. But when you’re 18 and you’re watching somebody score goals like Ruud every day, you learn things without even realising you’re learning them. People compare Ruud with Rooney, Van Persie, Cristiano and all the great forwards United have had. For me, they’re different conversations. Wayne could run a football match. Cristiano could destroy you in so many ways. Van Persie could produce finishes that made no sense when you watched them back. Ruud? Ruud was the man you didn’t want receiving the ball twelve yards from your goal. I don’t care how well you’d defended for the previous 80 minutes. If he got one clean opportunity, you could be walking back to the halfway line. And that’s why I always laugh when somebody says he was just a goalscorer. Just a goalscorer? For a defender, that’s quite a big problem to have.”

🚨 Cristiano Ronaldo on the dressing room that shaped his career: 🗣️ Reporter: “What do you remember about Ruud van Nistelrooy?” 🗣️ Cristiano: “When I arrived at United, I was a boy who loved having the ball. I wanted to dribble, I wanted to entertain people, and sometimes I thought beating 3 defenders was better than beating one and scoring. Then I met Ruud. I remember watching him in training and thinking, how can somebody make scoring look so simple? He wasn’t interested in doing six things before shooting. Sometimes he would touch the ball once and the goalkeeper was already picking it out of the net. There was a session when I tried to beat a defender again after I already had space to square the ball or shoot. I lost the ball. Ruud looked at me and said, ‘Cristiano, what is that?’ I told him, ‘I wanted to get closer.’ He said, ‘You were close enough.’ That stayed with me. Because when you’re young, you think the difficult thing is always the impressive thing. But Ruud could make one movement inside the penalty area, receive the ball and score. And you realise there is another kind of genius in football. I was very fortunate with the dressing room I entered. You had players who had already won everything, players who weren’t afraid to tell you when you were doing something wrong, and a manager who wasn’t interested in how talented you thought you were, but still protected you. I could have gone somewhere else at 18 and perhaps become a good player. But I don’t know whether I would have become the same Cristiano. At United, you learned very quickly that talent was only the beginning. And over the years, United have had some extraordinary finishers. Ruud was one. Robin van Persie was another. I didn’t play with Robin, but I watched him. His technique when striking the ball was beautiful. Sometimes the pass wasn’t even perfect, but the finish made it look perfect. These players had something special. They didn’t need many invitations to score. When I returned to United, I understood even more how much those early years had given me. You start recognising things you didn’t fully appreciate when you were young. I wanted the younger players to understand that wearing that shirt is an opportunity, but also a responsibility. The standards I experienced with Sir Alex helped make my career. And I will always be grateful for that.” 🗣️ Reporter: “You’ve mentioned Van Nistelrooy and Van Persie, but you haven’t mentioned Wayne Rooney. You played alongside him for years.” 🗣️ Cristiano: “Because then you are asking me a completely different question. You asked me about finishers. If you say Ruud, the first thing I think about is goals. If you say Robin, I think about that left foot, the volleys. But Wayne? Wayne could do everything. I remember games when I would be playing further forward and suddenly Wayne was defending near our penalty area. 2 minutes later, he was making a run beside me. Sometimes I would look at him and think, what position are you actually playing today? He could pass like a midfielder, shoot like a striker, carry the ball, tackle, press, create chances. You could ask him to play on the right, as a 6, even at right-back, and after 10 mins, you’d think he’d played there his whole life. That’s why I didn’t mention Wayne. Not because he wasn’t a great finisher. He was. But if I put him in a conversation only about finishing, I feel I’m leaving out most of what made him special. With Ruud, you remember the finish. With Wayne, sometimes you have to watch the entire match to understand what he did for you. I know because I was one of the players who benefited from it. People talk about what United gave me, and they’re right. But part of what United gave me was the opportunity to learn football beside the quality players they had. I arrived there wanting to show everybody what I could do with a football. I left understanding how much more there was to the game.”