Schweinsteiger ‘not player he was at Bayern’: Van Gaal

Bayern chief executive officer Karl-Heinz Rummenigge hit back at Van Gaal earlier this week and called for patience with Schweinsteiger’s form.

What’s it got him?

United may not be too happy to find themselves thrown into UEFA’s second tier competition after their elimination from the Champions League on Tuesday night, but there is a big prize awaiting all three English teams if they can win the Europa League final in Basel, Switzerland next May. He’s obviously a top manager but United should wait to see how the team respond over the next few months to going out of the Champions League before trying to talk him into a contract extension. They’d point to a lengthy injury list that keeps robbing Van Gaal of key players.

Schweinsteiger was taken off with twenty minutes to go in Wolfsburg.

“At the moment I can not defend myself because we are out of the Champions League”, said van Gaal, whose team now drop into the Europa League.

According to Low, the 31-year-old former Bayern Munich midfielder still needs time to get used to a different style of play, and a different league having spent all of his career up until the summer in the Bundesliga.

So, United has failed to advance from what initially seemed to be one of the least hard groups of them all. The goals they conceded from the set-pieces, forget about tactics and the systems, that was just about doing your job.

“I am not agreeing with any opinion that this was an easy group”, Van Gaal said, even if the United of old would have had no problem getting through.

“When you play Thursday and Sunday, it can affect the mentality and the psychology of the players”.

“I have changed him and I don’t change players for nothing, (it’s because) I think I can do better with other players, but we are all human beings and also Bastian Schweinsteiger is a human being”, Van Gaal said after the game.