I think it was more a case of Casemiro wanting a new challenge and the club respecting his wishes. Both Modric and Kroos are significantly older than him and are still playing, I’m sure he could’ve continued for a few more years as well if he had wanted to.

He’s not the only player under-performing though. Sancho, Casemiro, Varane and Mount are all having a difficult time. Eriksen did decent last season but is on a single goal and assist so far, he still seems to be performing at a good level but it’s not translating into goals/ assists because no one is scoring. Both Ronaldo and Cavani fell off in their second seasons in the past. Rashford is always oscillating between hot and cold patches. Apart from Bruno, none of the players seem to be performing at a good enough level consistently. Others that do perform like Aaron Wan bissaka and Luke Shaw seem to be quite injury prone. This is a huge sample size of players that are under-performing and I don’t think it’s fair to attribute the failures of the club to the players anymore.

Exactly! He still has a more privileged life than your average bloke but his ultra competitive nature is what got him to that privileged position in the first place and I’m sure he beats himself up a lot over how the last year has panned out for him despite being among the highest earners of premier league.

I feel like either we’re seeing two completely different threads or you’re just straight up lying because all the top comments I’m seeing are “Saudi Arabia music” and “Casa/ Varane are washed”.

I mean I do get most of my information about non-city clubs solely from reddit so maybe I’m just misinformed but there’s literally an article right now on r/soccer saying how Casa and Varane might be on their way out and most of the top comments are saying how United made a bad call investing in older players. I also remember a lot of previous instances of people saying how real always knows the right time to sell it’s ageing talents (it was in context of Casemiro’s performances). That is pretty much what prompted me to make this post because it’s not like it was a couple of hottakes that got downvoted to oblivion, it seems to be the majority opinion.