I apologise in advance for the stream of consciousness/rant, but I have had a lot of thoughts bouncing around my head after watching the Neville interview. It will hopefully be cathartic to try and express them coherently, and if they are of any interest whatsoever to anybody else here, then that's a nice bonus.
Whilst I thought he generally came across very poorly and I am not filled with confidence by having him and his appointments in charge of running the club, I thought I'd start with the positives, or rather, the positive.
Credit to him for doing the interview and generally being more open and communicative with what he wants to do with the club. It's far more in a year than we've ever got from the Glazers in two decades, and it's worth saying that it's also more communication and engagement than most fans get from the owners of their club too. Whether that's actually a good thing or not is debateable. Whilst most would agree that communication is better than radio silence and bringing the fans along with you is important, I think most fans would rather the quiet competence of David Gill / Man City than communicative incompetence. Also, the fact that things got to the state where he felt the need to arrange a long-form interview to try and push back against the negative PR and poor results is probably quite telling in itself. Nevertheless, communicative incompetence is still better than radio silent/disintrested incompetence, so him even bothering to face some degree of public scrutiny for his actions is an improvement on the Glazers, and any further attempts to build bridges with the fan groups will be welcome.
Now for the things that annoyed me...
First, the obvious one that I'm sure has been covered a lot. The fact that he acted genuinely surprised when Neville suggested that his £40k cut to the Players Association could be made up by a sponsored dinner or a raffle is staggering. It's not exactly 4D chess to deploy the same fundraising approach that Man Utd have been doing for years for charitable events. Whether it honestly had never occurred to him or not, saying that he had not thought of a fundraising effort employed by every pub team in the country to do an event and raffle off some signed shirts is not a good look, as the kids would say.
Secondly, his waffle about 'real supporters' was cringeworthy, tone deaf and insulting. A billionaire tax exile who has increased ticket prices and made staff redundant having the gall to speak on what a 'proper supporter' is will never go down well with me. What makes a season ticket holder who goes to every game more of a 'proper supporter' than a guy across the world who gets up in the middle of the night to watch every game and spends a small fortune to make a pilgrimage to Old Trafford whenever he can afford it? It's also deeply cynical since his business model will almost certainly involve appealing to the overseas fans as they are the ones who will spend more in the megastore, do the tours etc. It came across as a cheap ploy to divide fans and obfuscate his ticket price increase by appealing to the 'proper supporters' not affected by the recent concessions hike.
I found his answers on the ticket price rises to be very unconvincing in general. At one point, he said that he didn't know the exact details of the price rises, at another he cited the specific number of impacted tickets to rebuke the bad PR they got for removing concessions. One moment he'd say that ticket prices will have to increase next season as it's a key way to increase United's income, the next he'd talk about how he wants to reward and recognise the contribution of 'proper supporters' as the Stretford End helps the team win, or something like that. It came across to me as the 'we're all in it together' nonsense we had with austerity, mixed with the divide and rule stuff I mentioned earlier. "Don't be angry at ticket prices, you are one of the 'proper supporters' - even if you are affected, you should be happy to pay more because you know you are doing your duty to help the team that we all care so deeply about, so say I, billionaire owner who tried to buy Chelsea a few months ago".
The concept he was floating to charge fans from overseas (or wealthy fans generally) more for tickets just seems unworkable and daft, too.
Next, something that really got under my skin was the claim he made about how you need your management team and decision makers in place in order to know who to cut, because you want to cut the unproductive people not the good people. This is personal, and may bother me more due to my political persuasion, but I hate this entire notion. I think at this point we're all familiar with 40 years of neoliberalism to know how this script goes. Somehow, the senior managers and their reviews always conclude that their high salaries and bonuses are essential, but we need to trim the fat from the precarious little people, who need to do more with less. It's firing and rehiring, doing more with less and outsourcing more so you don't have as many employees who want unreasonable things like a living wage or workers rights.
Not only do I disagree with it on a moral level, but I'm also highly sceptical that it is the best way to run a football club. Modern football seems to be as much about the intangibles and overall competence as any industry I can think of. The general morale of the training ground staff, caterers, admin team etc presumably has an impact on the morale of your team of 11 millionaires. Especially since modern footballers seem to be so coddled and divorced from reality, having a club that is staffed to provide a wrap around structure to make your squad of 20+ players from around the world feel as taken care of and available to perform is presumably more important than ever. I'm not saying we should throw a Rio carnivale for Casemiro each week or hire one of those sad Portuguese ladies to serenade Bruno Fernandes as he eats his pasta each day, but the idea of 'efficiency saving your way to a league title' seems like an oxymoron.
Then there's the headline grabbing claim - that United would run out of money before Christmas if they didn't implement Big Jim's cut backs and redundancies. At face value, this is absurd. If it was true, then it would raise serious questions of Jim's professional integrity, especially since United is a publicly traded company on the NYSE. The fact that it's something he just blurts out as a flippant comment at an interview rather than something he's raised and informed the shareholders and the NYSE in filings is staggering. If it was actually true or meant anything, then he would have a raft of issues from a compliance standpoint about failure to disclose, misrepresentation, director's duties and potentially even wrongful trading. He would have real questions to answer about spending millions to sack Dan Ashworth and Ten Hag and the money spent on transfers in the summer. If United was going to run out of money by Christmas, then they wouldn't have spent £250m on players (the largest single cost for a club) less than 12 months ago. In any event, you can see the claim is false just by looking at United's balance sheet. It seems something he thought of on the spot to try and justify cuts and redundancies that he likely always wanted to make, without thinking through the logic or the longer term effect of the statement.
Finally I got the general sense that he was more interested in saving his own face and justifying his own decisions rather than the long-term bigger picture of the club. He mentioned the surprising amount of pushback and negativity he's had since taking charge in a way that made it seem like it was affecting him. He justified keeping Ten Hag and cited Ten Hag being involved in summer transfers by saying 'look at the Dutch players we signed' when most reports said that Ten Hag didn't want Zirkzee and was furious with him when he arrived at training. He cited the wage bill of the players Amorim has had available to him to justify why he's not doing as badly as it seems when the same rationale could presumably be applied to Ten Hag at various points this season and last. He seemed much more comfortable talking about the cuts and the financial side than the playing side ("look how much we're paying for players who don't / can't play for us etc"). That would be fine, as he's clearly not the person making all of the football decisions, but when he sacked the director of football he hired to make football decisions because he (reportedly) disagreed with his managerial suggestions and his preference for using analytics, then that's more of a problem.
In the whole interview I thought he seemed to be incoherent and self-preserving rather than somebody with the drive and skills needed to turn around Man Utd. "Things are really bad so we need austerity, but don't blame the Glazers or ask them to pay to fix it, they were just too nice and gave the previous appointees too much freedom and money". "Our staff have had it too easy and had too many perks for too long and somebody needs to crack the whip, why are you asking me about the much more costly mistakes I have made since I've come in, I've admitted they were mistakes, now let's concentrate on those skiving admin staff". "Of course I don't know all of the details of the next round of ticket rises I'm planning, anyway here is a 20 slide Powerpoint presentation on why the previous ticket rise was actually not a big deal and the media are making a fuss out of nothing".
I hope I'm wrong and I hope that he installs people who know how to run a top class football club, but at the moment I have seen very little to make me like or trust him, and the interview really soured my opinion of him and made me fearful of him having the strategy and answers to improve Man Utd.
