Luke Shaw has called on Manchester United to bring in more players before the transfer window closes.
Donny Van De Beek, who scored United’s goal in their 3-1 loss to Crystal Palace on Saturday, remains the club’s only summer signing.
United started their Premier League season a week late following their Europa League involvement and were caught cold in a disappointing display.
Shaw told TV2 in comments reported by the Manchester Evening News: “We have a very good group but, personally, I think we need more players to strengthen the squad.
“It can give us a boost. When you look around at how other teams are strengthening their teams, then we must also do it to keep up with the others.”
United’s positive end to last season, securing Champions League football, boosted optimism of a possible title challenge this time around but they will need to perform a lot better than they did against Palace.
Shaw cited a truncated pre-season as one factor behind the slow start.
The left-back said: “Personally, from my point of view, the pre-season that we’ve had altogether is not the correct way it should have been. We’ve had a week all together.
“My first day back training, I could have probably counted on one hand the number of people who were training. Look at teams who have been together a while, training, playing games. I think Palace have played quite a few more games than us and it showed. We lacked that fitness and confidence.
“We haven’t been able to prepare in the way that we wanted and that’s not an excuse, because we have the quality of players to be able to win games like this, but we weren’t up to it and we’ve been punished. It’s the start of a new season, we should have been fresh.”
United face Luton in the Carabao Cup on Tuesday before resuming their Premier League campaign with a trip to Brighton next Saturday.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here