My private theory is Ten Hag quickly realized how shit Man Utd scouts/recruitment team is so he decided he will only agree to buy players he already knows (iirc it is true for all players except for Casemiro who was a panic buy plus everyone in the world knows who he is, it’s not like he requires tons of scouting, and Hojlund who seems to be the only actual exception). Problem is Ten Hag turned out not to be great at making recruitment choices neither.

Yeah they must have learned it from Brighton by this point