Manchester United are going to have to change striker transfer plans after what staff member said

There is no player on the market who could help Manchester United. That was the message from the scouting department in January 2022.

That month, Liverpool signed Luis Diaz and Dejan Kulusevski joined Tottenham. Manchester City agreed a deal for Julian Alvarez.

Ralf Rangnick was chairing his penultimate pre-match press conference when he laid bare the incompetence of the club's recruitment. Rangnick ceased to be a United employee three weeks later and a senior player noticed he had started "dropping bombs". Truth bombs.

Rangnick urged United to recruit a forward on deadline day in the winter transfer window as Mason Greenwood would be unavailable indefinitely. Diaz and Alvarez had already moved yet Rangnick claimed the recruitment department had drawn a blank. Kulusevski moved on deadline day.

United's scouting network has undergone drastic change since. Jim Lawlor and Marcel Bout left that year and several scouts have gone amid Sir Jim Ratcliffe's cost-cutting bloodbath.

Discarding blinkered scouts is one of the few measures Ratcliffe has got right. Piotr Sadowski, who left in September, was promoted from an academy scout to international scout for emerging talent and first team in 2021.

Sadowski's Linkedin profile states that he scouted players in Germany, Poland, Czech Republic, Greece, Ukraine, Austria, Slovakia, Serbia and Croatia between 2021-24. United did not recruit any players from those territories during that time.

"It has been great to assess and recommend world class players," Sadowski enthused upon his departure. "Some of them have been signed by the club and they currently represent the MUFC first team squad." Unsurprisingly, he did not mention any by name. And not just because there are no world-class