Eva Olid's Call for Manchester United to Embrace Attacking Football

Eva Olid wants Manchester United to stop tiptoeing and start attacking.

On Friday night, under the London lights, the new manager steps into the Women’s Super League for the first time as United travel to London City Lionesses for the season opener (19:00 BST). It is her debut, her reset, and her message has been blunt.

Be brave. Go forward. Hurt teams.

The Spaniard arrives from Hearts, where her work turned heads and, in some eyes, rewrote expectations. Now she replaces Marc Skinner, who stepped down in the summer, and walks into a club where the noise around her is already loud.

A quiet transfer window, fewer big-name signings than many supporters demanded, and a league growing stronger at the top have all fuelled doubts about United’s ability to punch into the top three. The outside verdict has been swift: this squad might not be ready.

Olid has heard all of it. She is not flinching.

“It’s normal, no? It’s normal to have people doubting. I have felt the support a lot too,” she said, addressing those already writing United off. She leaned on her track record as the answer, not a promise. “People that followed me in the last years with Hearts know I made something impossible possible, so I believe in what we are going to do.

“It’s not something you get in weeks but I believe with a little time you get impossible things.”

That belief underpins everything she is trying to change. Pre-season has been patchy, performances uneven, but Olid has refused to soften her demands.

Her instructions to the players have been sharp and consistent: think forward, play on the front foot, embrace risk.

“My ambition is attacking football. I focus the gameplans on how we can hurt the teams. All teams have weaknesses we can exploit,” she said.

This is not a light tweak from last year’s model. It is a shift.

“This team will play the first match in the league and I want it to be as close [as possible] to what I want. The style of play is different to what we had last year,” she explained. The overhaul, though, has to be managed. You cannot rip everything up in one week and expect fluency on day one.

“You can imagine it’s not an easy task. What I did was put aside the principles of play that I thought was easier to change for the first match so we can compete.”

So the first outing under Olid may be a halfway house: the core of her ideas, stripped back just enough to make United functional on opening night, but still clearly stamped with her identity.

The club, crucially, has asked for exactly this kind of football. They did not hire a pragmatist. They hired a coach who wants the ball, wants risk, wants courage.

“The club wanted to play attractive football and be brave. We know that can have risks but the club support me in that. They signed me for that.”

The doubts will not vanish with one performance. But if United walk out in London and play with the aggression their manager demands, the conversation around their ceiling this season might start to change just as quickly as she intends their style to.