Player Recruitment: Using clean sheets and goals (Man Utd)

Next up in this series is recruiting players using goals and clean sheets as a criteria. This maybe the most basic, but effective recruitment technique so far. We will look at goals scored for strikers, team goals scored for midfielders, team goals conceded for defenders and clean sheets for goal keepers.

The whole idea behind this is to follow the science. It has been researched that in the top leagues in Europe, if you score 10 more goals than last season you should see an increase of 2.3 wins. On the other hand, if you decrease the number of goals scored against you by 10 you will get 2.6 more wins.

As a result this should lead to a big improvement in your teams defence. If you are interested to learn more and see how this experiment fares, then read on.

The new Man Utd team

There were a number of changes, but it isn’t the biggest transfer window I have seen. The transfers all tend to be around the same positions, so centre of defence and the defensive midfield. Only two attacking players were purchased, and one of those is to be a back up.

The reinforcements have been very much welcomed, the defence last year was leaky. Also we have manged to get not one but three of the Juventus defence. They were the best in Europe last year, so fantastic to improve the defence.

Again we struggled to keep hold of Casemiro, but we received £110m for our troubles. He will be missed, but we bought Douglas Luiz from Villa, who I think is amazing.

Man Utd Results

So far the experiment is working in line to the same results we had last year. We are only half way from the season so there is still a lot of gelling to get on with. The tactic is still not completely familiar, but we are sitting in a champions league spot.

Being unbeaten at home speaks volumes, we are so hard to break down. The problem is up top, our strikers are just not putting the chances away. So we need to look at how we are producing chances and the strengths of our strikers.

Conclusion

So looking at the situation, our main problem are goals. We concede one a game like all the teams around us, but we do not score enough, and this is evident in the goal difference. So we have a number of things to help us solve this problem.

Solution one, we buy another striker who’s strengths lie in the way we create chances. This would mean that we do not need the change the tactic or the team, resulting in less upheaval.

Solution two, change the system of the Man Utd team to suit two strikers instead of one. You only play one striker up front if he is good enough to score a lot of goals. Two strikers who complement each other can work in a number of different systems.

Solution three, we look at making the striker a support striker, such as a DLP or a pressing forward and rely on the inside forwards to score a large share of the goals.

These are different solutions to deal with a weakness, and if we mitigate it then it improves the team somewhat.

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