I think people, me included, were just big fans of Kagawa after seeing what he had done at BVB. When he arrived at United he was also, by far, the sexiest signing we had secured in a while; an attacking player with great dribbling, amazing vision, pretty good finishing, etc. This all at a time when Silva and Hazard and Oscar and Mata (Chelsea was hoarding CAMs) were running shit. We finally had gotten ourselves, by all accounts, one of the best CAMs in Europe... So it was really exciting.

The problem with Kagawa is that he was the player Fergie got to replace Rooney (allegedly). Shinji was supposed to sit behind RvP and run the show... But then three big things happened. The first one, and the most debatable one, is that maybe United might have been too big for him, he said we offered him the #7 shirt and he turned it down because 26 meant more to him or whatever, which is totally understandable, but idk for some reason that always made me think this was a guy who didn't want to be on the spotlight... After all he doesn't wear number 26 for Japan, it seemed that on this bigger stage the legendary number 7 was too much? Maybe I just read too much into it.

The other two, less debatable, problems for Shinji was that, IMO, he struggled with the physicality of the league which was odd, I remember watching him get pushed off the ball sometimes and thinking covering the ball and getting a foul used to be his bread and butter, now he just looks like a second or two too slow every time. He also had some brilliant moments tho, let's not forget, just not as regularly as you would need to at a club like United, and I know ppl say this is due to his "lack of opportunity" but that's a stupid excuse we need to stop using for every player we like. If you are killing it during training you'll get time on the pitch, Shinji was obviously not that impressive in training, period. I remember a video of a training session during a summer tour in Asia where they let ppl in and remember Shinji missing a couple of sitters... I was like oh whatever this doesn't mean shit, I wanted him to do well so badly, but who knows maybe that was a recurring thing.

The other issue was that Fergie left. No new manager is gonna have more hierarchy than Rooney, that's a fact. The moment Fergie retired we got "stuck" with the Rooney paradox. Yes he's an important player to the club, but every new manager has pledge such an outstanding level of allegiance to him that he's become literally undropable... I'm not a huge Rooney fan, duh, but bring as objective as possible I think we have an issue with him... It's gonna take a ballsy manager to start weaning him off the starting 11. Hearing LvG talking about how we "need to find him another position" like he has to fucking play even when there's better options available, makes me cringe every time... I find it very worrisome. He's like "too big to fail" or something, it's not healthy imo.