United being United it was brushed under the carpet, but did they really have a good transfer window?
Whilst they were a bit overrated (and overpriced) Matic and Lukaku were at the very minimum sensible transfers. Lukaku is a proven goalscorer, and without Ibrahimovic their next best option was to rely on Rashford so his signing made sense. Plus their centre midfield was weak in parts so signing Matic (a guy Mourinho knows) again, somewhat made sense.
But just as everyone said about Liverpool, United have a load of gaps in quality that just haven't been addressed. Outside of an increasingly ageing Valencia, they have no reliable fullbacks (that includes Rojo). They have no wingers who can produce high quality football regularly. Outside of Pogba, they are almost completely bereft of creativity in midfield. That's including Mata and Mkhitaryan for some odd reason. Whilst I think Jones is a very easy target of unfair criticism, and harshly underrated by many, he's still definitely not good enough for a Mourinho side. Look at the great Mourinho sides and you'll see great defensive pairings. Terry and Carvalho. Lucio and Samuel. Ramos and Pepe. Jones is not that standard.
I think their initial battering of super shitty teams gave the media licence to ignore the facts, but the truth is that they are still nowhere as good as they should be on paper.
Think about comparing their players to ours. Obviously we'd be biased and say ours are all better and suit Pep more. They'd say theirs are better because they're more Mourinho players. But if a manager who was neither Pep or Mourinho had the selection of Manchester's players to build a team you'd be hard stretched to find any United players selected. Probably just De Gea (who's shot stopping is arguably as good as anybody's tbf).
As a City fan I'm happy that our team is on another level to theirs. But as someone who doesn't like inaccurate spreading of news I think I think it's silly that nobody is questioning the fact that their players are a bit shit.
What's funny is that I think Mourinho knows that. Compare this United team to his Inter team, both his Chelsea sides and his Madrid side and it looks bad. At all those teams he could set up ultra negatively when necessary because he'd have top attacking players like Drogba, Robben, Lampard, Ibrahimovic/Eto'o, Sneijder, Milito, Ozil, Benzema, Di Maria, Ronaldo, Hazard, Willian, Oscar, Costa and probably many others to bail him out. At United he hasn't even got one player like that.
tl;dr - United's shitty players and questionable transfer window is their biggest problem. Not even an ultra-pragmatist like Mourinho can squeeze results out of them.
