Was listening to the Gab and Jules podcast and they make a good point about ETH, mentioning that his player knowledge is probably limited due to him mostly working under a DOF. Never really thought about it like that.
Club Sale | It’s done!
- Thread starter JB08
- Start date
- Status
Ridiculous move....let the man enjoy his retirement. It's like the Star Wars movies not being able to move on from the Skywalker branding.
More PR bullshit, except this one is miscalculated
McDonnell in the Mirror saying Murtough is set to leave United.
Looks a decent list to me.
james cordon told ratcliffe about him and said we should go for him.
I still think it's gonna be Mitchell, he's the closest thing to being Ineos' "own guy" and I strongly doubt that Ratcliffe will just dance to Fergie's tune if their opinions don't align.
If you read the article it doesn't say SAF is making the appointment. Ratcliffe is basically keeping him in the same role he's had over the last year or so under Arnold where he will give advice and opinions on different matters.
The appointment of sporting director will be made by Ratcliffe, Brailsford and the new chief executive (Blanc)
Now imagine the founders (Malcolm) are dead and instead of two deeply involved sons you have six siblings with varying degrees of involvement.
The business makes tonnes of money but seems to waste a lot of it, the factory has old equipment that will need replacing at some point and they are making shit products so it all looks somewhat unsustainable.
Don't you think some of them would quite happily find someone that seems to know better than the brother who has landed them in that mess?
Exactly. Perfectly reasonable things to happen.
Honestly i don't know much about the names on the list. I meant the taking guidance from Fergie bit.
As long as the Glazers remain then so does the massive debt, this is not in the interests of the club, anything other than a full sale with removal of all debt is not a positive am afraid, Blanc will probably be tasked to overhaul and improve the commercial side so that the owners can resume taking dividends, I just don't believe any of this is ultimately designed to put the team first, only the owners, as history demonstrates.
The Glazers/Ratcliffe PR is working overtime - and it's clearly working. Some sections of the fanbase have been completely brainwashed to the point they don't even realise it. Without investment the Glazers were sinking and this is a fact. Raine/Glazers prioritised the full sale options on the table for 10-months for a reason. Strategic Alternatives was for a reason. If it wasn't for Ratcliffe being so desperate to win at any cost by dangling a minority offer so outlandishly generous we would have been sold in full by now. The Glazers and Ratcliffe now have to sell this minority offer to the fans before they make the announcement and they're doing a wonderful job of doing just that to the point where peoples views are bordering on sympathising of that wretched family. They're now dragging Fergie's name through the media to sell this nonsense deal.
I saw earlier that the 13-year olds are mad there's no Qatari takeover and I think that's an anti-truth as the younger generation of fans are the most optimistic of this Ratcliffe monstrosity of an outcome. The older fans (the ones who have experienced Utd pre-Glazer) know nothing will change and this deal is nothing more than a life boat for the parasites and will only make it more difficult to get a full sale later down the line that finally rids us of this ownership.
Glazers aren't good business people. They're not good commercial people. They're awful at that because if we were owned by competent, forward thinking owners with ambition we would be making way more in terms of annual revenues than we have up to now. Sponsoring the training ground the Aon Training Complex for £100m or whatever it was was the only good deal they've really done - everything else all the other teams already do. Parasitical, incompetent owners + stingy, good business vulture capitalist ideology sports department isn't the ideal that people are being led to believe it will be. The future isn't bright because "Glazers are ceding a small amount of control" or "first time in 18-years we'll have a proper football department." That's the PR they want you to regurgitate - you're doing their bidding for them by espousing that nonsense.
Glazers out means Glazers out. Looking for positives in this minority investment is a fallacy because it's a deal that suits the Glazers and when has anything been simultaneously good for that family and Utd? Never. By trotting out their PR tropes you're literally giving this deal the stamp of approval - they're watching.
I saw earlier that the 13-year olds are mad there's no Qatari takeover and I think that's an anti-truth as the younger generation of fans are the most optimistic of this Ratcliffe monstrosity of an outcome. The older fans (the ones who have experienced Utd pre-Glazer) know nothing will change and this deal is nothing more than a life boat for the parasites and will only make it more difficult to get a full sale later down the line that finally rids us of this ownership.
Glazers aren't good business people. They're not good commercial people. They're awful at that because if we were owned by competent, forward thinking owners with ambition we would be making way more in terms of annual revenues than we have up to now. Sponsoring the training ground the Aon Training Complex for £100m or whatever it was was the only good deal they've really done - everything else all the other teams already do. Parasitical, incompetent owners + stingy, good business vulture capitalist ideology sports department isn't the ideal that people are being led to believe it will be. The future isn't bright because "Glazers are ceding a small amount of control" or "first time in 18-years we'll have a proper football department." That's the PR they want you to regurgitate - you're doing their bidding for them by espousing that nonsense.
Glazers out means Glazers out. Looking for positives in this minority investment is a fallacy because it's a deal that suits the Glazers and when has anything been simultaneously good for that family and Utd? Never. By trotting out their PR tropes you're literally giving this deal the stamp of approval - they're watching.
To be fair it’s not, not if the glazers hold the purse strings and still have final say over sporting matters I don’t see very much actually changing. We’ve had loads of good advice and opportunities to sign players and managers that would have been brilliant for us (if we’d also created an environment where they could succeed but that didn’t matter to them) I am pessimistic about this too. We needed a brand new fresh start. I think this is just more limping down the road, lick of paint job that keeps the glazers here to grab another few hundred mill before they eventually sell for even more than Qatar were offering. This is just another glazer Hail Mary signing. Hopefully they do sell up. They have no class or charisma and their name is rightfully dirt in football after what they’ve done to us. It’s time for us to move onto something completely different but why would they?
Very.
(But it has to be bollocks, surely. If Jim's people want to have a bottle of fine wine with Fergie, and talk about football, I hope they have a good time. But if they plan on making the old man some kind of meaningful "consultant", they're insane. He's 81 and has recently lost his wife, a woman he was married to for nearly sixty years.)
We all have the choice of looking at this turn of events as possibly a positive step in terms of performances on the pitch or a possibly more of the same Glazer malaise where performances are subordinated to Glazer wealth accumulation. The choice is between hope -- and there's nothing wrong with hope -- and acknowledging reality. Like everyone else here, I have no idea which it will actually be. But what I do know is that there is nothing in this deal that allows us anything more than baseless hope -- and it would be baseless -- that the buy-in of a new investor in the club whom to my knowledge has not demonstrated prowess as a football club owner will translate into improved performances on pitch. But none of us, myself included, can be absolutely sure that things will not get better on the pitch any time soon. Maybe they will more quickly that we could possibly imagine and that we'll be in for a proper PL title challenge as soon as three seasons from now.
For a bit of context, or maybe comparison, there are plenty of clubs of in other sports that at one point were a perennial contender for titles but fell on hard times for many decades. In English football, Wolves and Leeds come to mind. In baseball, the Boston Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs. In American football, the Cleveland Browns and the Washington Redskins-now-Commanders (daft name that). In the NBA, the New York Knicks. For those of us who pray to a god or gods, let us pray that Manchester United are not fated to become the next Red Sox Cubs who had to wait nearly a century for their next championship. But looking at the state of the club now and the qualifications of the new minority shareholder, there is no reason to believe that we'll be able to do anything more than a scrape a top four spot any time soon.
This applies to basically any scenario though - of course we have no idea or real foresight here but, at the very least, we might get people who have done the job they are employed in previously.
You can just see it in 12 months from now, the familiar chorus, " Glazers out now, full sale only"....
Somehow Palpatine has returned.
Why do we insist on making the same mistakes over and over again? I swear, Nothing ever changes.. he’ll be on the phone to Woodward next, let’s see what he would’ve done…
(Hypothetically) it should get better with a new ( experienced in football) CEO , particularly if their first main act prior to coming into post is to advise on the same SD. Agree that SAF should be kept away from major decision-making though: he's obviously advised other managers in the past in ways which were more or less helpful, but his reputation revolves around decisions he took as a manager, not for decisions he took regarding successors or how the club should proceed around transfers/restructuring - from the Moyes appointment to the little else we know about advising when managers should be retained, no evidence of particular perspicuous judgement there. ...
My reading of the tea leaves in what we know that has been publicly verified.
1. Jim Ratcliffe wants an element of control for his 1.3b.
2. The 25% stake came from Glazers kids, either two / three of them that want out and sold or equal dilution of shares. Even the largest shareholder, Joel, would only have 13% of total shares and 19% of the voting shares, if he was not diluted at all. Sir Jim would have almost double the voting power. If all Glazers were equally diluted, then he’d be in even a stronger position.
3. Any capital invested in the stadium, transfers etc by Sir Jim would give him further control. Let’s say, for example, that Sir Jim put another 1.3b for Old Trafford renovation. All shareholders would be further diluted. Maybe not exactly by 25% to 50%, but somewhere around 40%. That puts him in the drivers seat. Does he completely control the board? No. But it’s close given how fragmented the owners of the other voting shares are.
3. I believe the acquisition of these shares may include control clauses and follow-on investment clauses as well as share purchase options once certain valuations are reached. By the time he’s through, Sir Jim will have over 50% of the voting shares
Is this good? Maybe, if INEOS does a better job on managing the club, then yes. And the the bar is pretty fecking low.
For your US sports analogies, I’d say Red Sox and Cubs are a bit different than our situation. Neither one could have been considered dynasties before their “fall”. Both happened before baseball was integrated. Neither had the highest revenues in the league. The Red Sox were consistently good, the Cubs pretty much awful. Red Sox had appearances in several World Series but failed to win. Cubs never made it to the World Series. Browns we’re good pre modern NFL, but then pretty awful consistently. Redskins were never a dynasty, but they were good. Probably the best analogy would be the Boston Celtics who were dominant from the 50’s until the 80s, but fell on really hard times after and have only one championship since 1986. The Yankees were pretty much a dynasty and the class of MLB until 1981, then had a 15 year dry spell, then another dynasty-like period. Also, they have the highest revenues. Hopefully we’ll bounce back like them.
Well that is a hugely misleading title
So basically, he'll hear him out and listen to what he has to say on matters relating to football and the ethos of Man Utd, or something such, and these journos ran with it and began to wildly speculate on the DoF position.
So... they have no clue and are just guessing.
Going from Ed Woodward/Richard Arnold to Jean-Claude Blanc is like going from
to
to
So much for the "trust the plan" posters who tried to assure us over the years that Murtough secretly knew what he was doing
Nice to see the ol’ PR conspiracy theory is still alive and strong
A bit worrying that the names being listed for DOF seem to be getting worse as time goes on. Hopefully these are just names starting to be leaked from the feeling out process. I would hope that we go with one of Mitchell or Edwards. They're just safer options than the others, which could work out, but seem like an unnecessary risk right now.
Dougie can feck off. Fergie should have no say in he direction of the club, he's been out of the game for more than a decade and it was his master plan that gave us Moyes.
Except it wasnt. Pep, Klopp, Ancelotti and Mourinho have all came out and said they were spoken to. Moyes was a choice. Not THE choice. Knowing what you know about this club, do you honestly think they could have managed to get one of those to replace Ferguson? We couldnt even sign Leighton fecking Baines in the summer of 2013, let alone Pep Guadiola.
What do the words "But it has to be bollocks, surely" suggest to you?
That the person uttering them does not believe "it" is "bollocks"?
No reports/news -> why are there no news, they are doing nothing, nothing changes etc etc
Some news/reports -> PR bs PR bs PR bs
classic caf
Some news/reports -> PR bs PR bs PR bs
classic caf
Is there any official evidence that Ferguson CHOSE Moyes or did he just say “I guess he’s as good as anybody”?
I mean I feel this SAF blame for managers laughable, is there anybody not a human shield for the glazers?
Incidentally, it actually doesn’t matter what SAF advises on in any capacity (including managers. His job stopped in May 2013. Anything since then has been decided by the Glazers, not Ferguson, so people need to just stop “blaming Ferguson” for anything since he won us the league.
He could advise the glazers to make a inanimate carbon rod the manager , it doesn’t mean they have to do it.
Hopefully, Brexit Jim will preserve Fergie's brain in a vat and ensure its reanimated with tuna brine, the old fashioned way, lest His counsel be needed in future.
Yes I agree what’s that old geezer who’s won 48 trophies know about football
blanc’s cv is quite impressive apparently also spearheaded juve’s new stadium project back in the day as well
He might find that doing a couple of afternoons at old Trafford might give him some new found zest giving his recent wife’s death, when you’ve been married for so long to the love and rock of your life, sometimes it’s really hard for the one left to find meaningful purpose but letting Sir Alex advise as a consultant with McClaren clearly being his insight into the squad harmony as well is not the worst idea providing we don’t ask too much of him ?
He got blamed by many United fans for the club hiring Ole or how about the conspiracy theories that he forced Ronaldo on the club then it all came out when Woodward left that Fergie had actually been kept in the dark by Woodward and didn't have much of a say.
He's the greatest manager football has seen. It would be absolute madness to not ask for his thoughts on football matters. It doesn't mean he makes decisions, as I said it's clear that any decisions on the football side moving forward will be made by Ratcliffe and his team.
- Status