I still think Wilder is comfortably our biggest problem.
We are consistently one of the worst footballing teams to watch, despite him having had some of the biggest budgets available to a Sheffield United manager. He was negative when he had money and better players, and somehow the football has become even worse as the squad has declined.
What actually is the game plan? Park the bus, launch it into the channels, roll your sleeves up and get stuck in? That seems to be about the extent of it. It’s park football being played by people earning vast sums of money, while the value and technical quality of the squad gets progressively worse.
I constantly hear “he needs a season”. He’s had fucking loads of time across his spells here. This isn’t some manager who arrived six weeks ago. We know exactly what his football looks like, and apart from that brilliant first spell, it has progressively become more negative, more basic and more shite.
Even with a depleted squad, we still have players like K. Phillips, Seriki, Riedewald and Bamford who should have enough quality for this level, yet he seems incapable of getting a functioning football team out of them. We regularly look unable to string five passes together. Everything is smashed long, chased into channels and built around second balls rather than actually controlling a game.
His recruitment philosophy compounds the problem. Familiar players, English players, players who work hard, “good lads”, players who will get stuck in. Effort matters, obviously, but where is the emphasis on technique, intelligence, creativity and players comfortable on the ball? We’ve ended up with a squad desperately short of technical quality because the entire philosophy seems built around graft first and football second.
And the familiarity our fanbase has with Wilder because he’s local and “gets the club” has become a massive blind spot. If another manager was serving up this football without the Sheffield United connection, I genuinely don’t think people would tolerate it.
He can steady a ship. Fine. But he cannot be the man responsible for building the next one.
The longer he stays, the further backwards I think we go. Keep accepting this as the blueprint and I honestly think he takes us to League One.
Any manager who plays and starts as many CDMs as Wilder should be a red flag. Fuck!
Edit:
One more thing, how many times do we sell a player and they instantly look better somewhere else?
Same player, same ability. The main difference is they’re playing under a different manager, in a different system, with a different style of football. Our fans have constantly blamed the players first and said they simply weren’t good enough. But when you look at where a lot of those players are now, plenty of them are playing Premier League football.
At some point it becomes pretty obvious the problem was somewhere else. It feels like a lot of them were playing with no plan, direction or too many restriction on, they leave and suddenly look like good footballers.
