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Money may not be able to cure all ills, but when you are paid more than almost any other footballer on the planet, it should be enough to earn you a degree of commitment and perseverance.
But Alexis Sánchez realized one day at Manchester United that he could have made a mistake. He entered a club that was not to his liking and instead of fighting to change it from within, he fell apart.
“I accepted the opportunity to go to United, it seemed tempting and it was a good thing for me, I liked this club a lot when I was a child. In the end I signed but did not ask for information about what was happening within the club,” Sánchez said on Instagram el Friday.
“Sometimes there are things that you don’t realize until you get there, and I remember the first training session I had, I realized a lot of things.
“After the session I came home and said to my family and my agent ‘Can’t you break the contract to go back to Arsenal?’ They laughed, I told them that there is something that does not suit them, that it does not seem good.
“But I already signed, I was already there. After the first months I still had the same feeling, we were not united as a team at that time.”
Sánchez’s monologue on Instagram is designed to explain where everything went wrong at United, but the responsibility lies within. He could not integrate with the team and could not act. It was a huge waste of money, and while United managed to get their staggering salaries off the books this summer, they will continue to cost Sanchez’s signing for years to come, in terms of how their perspective has changed. United burned their fingers on this deal.
Much of this is a pass from Sánchez. He talks about being “hurt” by the criticism he received from reporters and that he took a lot of responsibility, but what did he expect when he was the highest paid player in the club? He was also clearly affected by having been knocked down by José Mourinho and did not accept the management of men from the Portuguese, which was another cross against Sánchez’s will to fit in.
But perhaps not everything he says in his defense of his time at Old Trafford should be labeled Sanchez trying to regain some of his reputation. Clearly, there is still a decent enough player in the Chilean. He is just 31 years old and produced four goals and nine assists for Inter Milan in 32 appearances this season. He played nearly 1,400 more minutes at United and only managed five goals and nine assists.
We now know that some of Sánchez’s complaints about the environment in Carrington could have some truth. Ole Gunnar Solskjaer was making similar, more coded comments when their honeymoon period came to an abrupt end in the final weeks of the 2018/19 season.
By then the writing was already on the wall for Sánchez, but Solskjaer also criticized the attitude of some of his teammates. He did not hold back in his criticism after the 4-0 loss at Everton on Easter Sunday. That may have been the moment when Solskjaer’s fears about what he inherited came true. It was a fractured squad, without motivation or desire. Not what a former United great like Solskjaer expects.
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Since then, the Norwegian has placed great faith in achieving the right harmony within his squad. Those players he considered a bad influence were discarded and he traded the experience for youthful exuberance. Solskjaer was happy to be left a short forward for six months if it meant selling Romelu Lukaku in his first summer transfer window.
In a relatively short period of time there has been a transformation in the workforce. It seems more cohesive as a unit. Players can still come and miss, but none will have the ready-made excuses that Sánchez had.
The former Barcelona and Arsenal striker has to take most of the blame for the way his time at the club turned into a disaster, but Solskjaer has transformed the culture that Sánchez felt emboldened enough to complain about. .
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