They are in no way similar.
Excluding loans, We sold/released at least 14 first team players from when GvB joined till he left and only signed 6. So he had a much smaller squad to work with.
We had just played the most games in any season in modern time, combined with the shortest preseason to accommodate the World Cup. By the time we had played 12 league games we had played 10 Champions League qualifiers/group games. We were 2 games a week from day 1 of the season till we sacked GvB.
In the lead up to his sacking we had the following all out injured for periods some long term. Helander, Goldson, Souttar, Davies, Yilmaz, Davis, Lawrence, Jack, Arfield, Matondo, Sakala, Morelos.
Due to the fixture congestion we actually played a cup game with a back four of
Devine, Jack, King, Yilmaz, started Ure up front and brought on McCann, Lovelace, Nsio and Stevens.
King started the last 9 matches of GvB’s tenure, mainly partnering a makeshift centre half come midfielder loanee James Sands.
GvB never got a penny of the money for qualifying for the Champions League, but by qualifying it effectively cost him his job. Take out the CL group games as no Manager in recent time had got us to that level and his record isn’t too shabby. Domestically only lost 4 out of 47 (which matched Posticoglu’s first 47) Beale lost 7 out of 38 and Clement is already at 4 out of 36.