Louis van Gaal spent a month in his “paradise in Portugal” this summer, sifting through the fallout of his first season as Manchester United manager and plotting a course to the Premier League title in his second campaign, but there remained a nagging sense of one glaring shortcoming in his team: a galactico.
The Dutchman had already decided to dispense with Robin van Persie and Radamel Falcao, but he had left a list of targets for the club’s executive vice-chairman Ed Woodward, to pursue.
Four have arrived, with the majority of the squad’s problems solved, but Van Gaal has admitted that a 1-0 defeat at Chelsea in April, when Eden Hazard’s goal settled a game dominated by United, proved a distraction on his sun-lounger in Vale do Lobo and continued to gnaw away at him now, less than two weeks before the Premier League opener against Tottenham Hotspur. He said he needed a blue-chip player, a game-changer.
“Chelsea have Hazard,” Van Gaal said. “He can always make goals, he can always make an action and decide a goal. Chelsea also have Willian and Oscar. Manchester City have [Sergio] Agüero, it’s the same type. Barcelona has [Lionel] Messi, Neymar and [Luis] Suárez. We as Manchester United have to compete with these clubs, so we have to look also for that kind of players.
“You need creative players. You need that because you have to disorganise [teams that park] the bus and, next year, there might be more teams who are parking the bus, so we must look for more creativity.”
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