"I don't expect us to go away to teams and lose," he said. "I expect us to be consistent like we were last year.
"It's inevitable that you'll lose games in the Premier League. You're not going to go the whole season unbeaten and it's very rare that happens.
"Losing one, two or three games is acceptable, but no more. I wouldn't expect United to lose eight, nine and 10 games. If we do that, we'll have underperformed.
"We need to make sure we're in amongst it. The problem we've had in previous seasons was that we were too far behind and we need to make sure that we don't fall more than a couple of points behind the leaders."