- 20 hours ago
Man Utd injury crisis CAUSED by Ratcliffe: Impossible for him to be more wrong!
Robin Bairner
- Updated: 15 Mar 2025 11:55 GMT
- 6 min read
News
Sir Jim Ratcliffe and his team are the root cause of Manchester United’s injury problems, with the minority owner told that it is “impossible to be more inaccurate” over comments he has made about the development of football in recent years.
Ratcliffe held a controversial interview with BBC Sport earlier this week in which he slammed several members of the playing staff and criticised their sizeable wages.
READ MORE: Latest Man Utd transfer news
But he also made a telling comment over the state of the game that Jose Mourinho’s former assistant boss at Man Utd, Rui Faria, says is completely off the mark.
Ratcliffe said in relation to Sir Dave Brailsford: “At the end of the day football is elite athletes but more of an emphasis on athlete data. Football today is a sprinting sport and it wasn't a sprinting sport 20 years ago which is why you get so many hamstring injuries and things like that today. It' a more intense sport than when Bobby Charlton and George Best were playing.”
Ratcliffe comments rubbished
Faria hit out at this analysis and says that this thinking is one of the reasons that Man Utd have struggled so much with injury issues of late.
"It is impossible to be more inaccurate about performance than to regard a footballer as an 'athlete' managed by data. Football constantly changes, but it always involved sprinting. Perhaps in the past this sprinting had more 'brain' and less 'legs',” Faria told The Transfers Podcast.
“These days supposed 'experts' take more and more control of the process demonstrating less and less understanding of context. Injuries are not the products of more sprinting but of the quality and quantity of work!
“This reductionist vision of elite performance exposes how athlete data' fails to optimise player performance. Instead, they fall injured like leaves in autumn!”
Man Utd have 10 players either injured or doubtful before their Premier League clash with Leicester on Sunday – a figure that is not matched by any other club in the division.
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