Over the last month, Ralf Rangnick has been busy providing recommendations on how Manchester United could revamp its recruitment strategy.
His counsel has been mostly generic, recommending United to change their entire recruitment strategy based on the prospective manager’s playing style.
Rangnick explained via Sky Sports: “Here at Manchester United, this hasn’t been the case with every change of manager. New players came in, but it was not under that pre-condition of how do we want to play, and this is for sure something that needs to be changed in the future.”
So the specifics of new signings will be left to be based around incoming manager Erik ten Hag, who The Guardian report will be confirmed as a manager in the ‘coming days’.
Rangnick is not taking a backseat entirely, confirming he has named two players who he considers exceptions, who Manchester United should be targeting whoever is the manager.
The interim boss said: “There might be a couple of players – and I have already named those players to the board – that independent from formation, from style of football, and independent from a new manager, that could be of interest for a club like United.”
Rangnick has not named those two players publicly, and we will have to wait and see who those players might be. We can take a guess though, and estimate who one of them is, and that’s RB Leipzig attacker Christian Nkunku.
ESPN reported in February that Rangnick had recommended Christian Nkunku to United’s recruitment team, who was not previously on the club’s radar, bizarrely.
Nkunku has scored 30 goals for RB Leipzig and provided 18 assists, and the 24-year-old is a player who would improve any team in Europe, thanks to his versatility.
Rangnick also spoke this week about how Liverpool’s success had been partly down to the way they had recruited some of his old players – and it makes sense United should try to emulate that by landing Leipzig’s top goalscorer.