Geoff Konopka - United guest of Honour - also convicted paedophile

Anything els gonna happen…. Always on the bad side of news.
 
As a lifelong united fan, im sorry but this news really hits me hard. Really feel for all those young girls and victims that have suffered. Such a sick feeling in my gut now and I find it difficult to trust the club now.
 
Absolutely disgusting from the club. I'm not usually one for those who slag the club off but how this can happen is unbelievable. Surely heads have to roll and the club needs to make amends for this?
 
I just don't have the emotional energy to be constantly outraged by everything.
 
When will it stop?

It just shouldn´t be THIS hard to run a club.
 
Nero said:
I just don't have the emotional energy to be constantly outraged by everything.
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agreed. if you’re going to employ that many rapists and abusers, it’s only natural that the odd nonce is going to slip through the net.
 
Hi All... So my wife is a Manchester Utd fan... She basically said last night that all clubs have these skeletons... I agreed with her to an extent.
It does seem to a degree that Utd have been cursed with some bad apples over the years and it doesn't help being arguably 'commercially' the biggest club in the world so every Tom Dick and Harry will jump on the band wagon because everything is about the clicks these days.

Can it get worse? I'm starting to think Sir Alex or some lot made some deal with the devil and now the time has come to pay dues... What else could all it be?
I use to laughed at utd but now I'm just so sad for you guys as the vast majority does not deserve this.
 
neon_badger said:
The club really is this badly run, I can recall working on an event at OT, it was a book launch for David Icke, it seemed nobody reconised the name when the event was being booked in, we pointed out that perhaps this was not somebody the club would want to be associated with and were met with indifference, it was only at the last minute that the event got cancelled.
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That's wild but it doesn't surprise me. I suppose the policy is "heh doesn't ring a bell, must be fine" and no one googling it. And 95% of the time it's of no great importance, probably. Someone else mentioned how curated some of the content associated to the club is (with regards to the former women's team, how it makes ownership look, etc), it's not uncommon dissonance in big corpos but :lol:
 
decorativeed said:
I know the people responsible for the museum thing (which is no more than a 50 word panel on a wall about managers) and during their research, a well-regarded expert in local football who's written several books about it told them there had been some kind of falling out. The other historians they deal with don't mention it either. There's no mention on the Internet of anything to do with his convictions up until today's story. In fact, if you do a Websearch for his name prior to 2022, you'll find nothing.

Everything that the museum does has to go through several levels of branding and management all the way up to Richard Arnold. And none of them flagged anything. Worth noting that the club curator at the time had been there since the early 90s and was not aware.

The bigger story here is actually that the museum staff had to fight branding to include any mention at all of the old MUFC Ladies side in the museum, as they only wanted to mention the current Womens team. The implication being that to acknowledge the Ladies was to admit that the Glazers had closed them down.
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Interesting if true, but not surprising at all.
For the better or worst, criminal records are not a public thing, so it would’ve been difficult for people at the club to know he’d been convicted. You don’t run criminal background checks on everyone. You usually do it only for security related jobs or jobs with access to sensitive information.
In terms of PR, you go have a look on what you can find publicly, maybe go ask people who worked with the guest, but that’s it. You don’t go to great lengths for a minor event at the club’s museum.
 
NinjaZombie said:
Absolutely disgusting from the club. I'm not usually one for those who slag the club off but how this can happen is unbelievable. Surely heads have to roll and the club needs to make amends for this?
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No chance. These guys are teflon. They'll be doing everything that they can to make sure that Antony continues to play and they'll just carry on as normal.
 
Complete mess of a situation but it’s definitely not a coincidence this comes out now when it was 18 months ago. Someone been storing this for the right moment to hit the club hardest.
 
Zed is not dead said:
Interesting if true, but not surprising at all.
For the better or worst, criminal records are not a public thing, so it would’ve been difficult for people at the club to know he’d been convicted. You don’t run criminal background checks on everyone. You usually do it only for security related jobs or jobs with access to sensitive information.
In terms of PR, you go have a look on what you can find publicly, maybe go ask people who worked with the guest, but that’s it. You don’t go to great lengths for a minor event at the club’s museum.
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Difficult? it costs like £20 to do a check, loads of companies do it routinely for new hires. It's already been established he was on the FAs register anyway which seems like such a basic check for a sporting institution.
 
Smores said:
Difficult? it costs like £20 to do a check, loads of companies do it routinely for new hires. It's already been established he was on the FAs register anyway which seems like such a basic check for a sporting institution.
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Even if you want to cheap out - Google is all that would be required.
 
What's next: inviting Roman Polanski to film a documentary about our women youth teams?
 
NinjaZombie said:
Absolutely disgusting from the club. I'm not usually one for those who slag the club off but how this can happen is unbelievable. Surely heads have to roll and the club needs to make amends for this?
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Needs new owners and a complete clear-out. Reset it all.
 
neon_badger said:
The club really is this badly run, I can recall working on an event at OT, it was a book launch for David Icke, it seemed nobody reconised the name when the event was being booked in, we pointed out that perhaps this was not somebody the club would want to be associated with and were met with indifference, it was only at the last minute that the event got cancelled.
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I saw him on that book tour at Hillsborough a friend bought two tickets, you did right cancelling I fell asleep half way through. Raised a few interesting points about his view of the world then descended into very long ramblings. Was essentially him and a PowerPoint show for around 4 hours without a break
 
IWat said:
Even if you want to cheap out - Google is all that would be required.
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Well according to the poster I quoted, there was nothing made public.
But as I said, you don’t routinely do a criminal record check on all your third parties. You do it for someone you’re hiring, but it’s not usual unless its for a security related job or access to sensitive information.
You usually wouldn’t ask for a criminal record excerpt for a charity event. And as far as know, only the person concerned by the criminal record can make the request to get their criminal record and have no legal obligation to share it with anyone else.

If there was no publicly available information before, and no one raised this particular point to the club, they wouldn’t have felt the need to conduct a criminal background check for such a minor event.
But yeah the club fecked up, they should’ve at least reached out to the women who played when he was a coach
 
IWat said:
Even if you want to cheap out - Google is all that would be required.
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If @decorativeed is right, Google wouldn't have told you much before this week.

To state the obvious, this guy and the Ladies team weren't based at OT or the Cliff or at Carrington. Whereas we have people around the men's team and the academy still at the club from that era who museum can run things past - we won't have many around who knew much about the women's team.

It's history is unfamiliar to the museum staff and the traditional United writers and record keepers. Unfortunately we didn't dig deeper, but without any warning flags coming up, I can understand them not expecting to need to. I'm sure we will do next time
 
Smores said:
Difficult? it costs like £20 to do a check, loads of companies do it routinely for new hires. It's already been established he was on the FAs register anyway which seems like such a basic check for a sporting institution.
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You make the mistake of thinking that the footballing part of the business is involved in the media side of the business. The various branches and departments at United work as though they are competing against each other rather than being part of the same organisation. The fact that the club is called United is one of the most ironic things I've come across.

Also, as I say, I know people involved in this and literally all they were doing when researching was looking for managerial stats. There was zero information about Konopka on the internet prior to 2022, a search for him only brought up a doctor by the same name, so the only way they would have had of knowing about his conviction is if somebody remembered it from the time. The only info they had that was printed was in some old photocopies of MUFC Ladies programmes from the 90s, so it obviously didn't flag up his conviction.

Once those stats were up in the museum, the people who run media presumably chose to invite him to the game.
 
IWat said:
Even if you want to cheap out - Google is all that would be required.
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Try it yourself with a custom date range in your search. Absolutely nothing to be found.

Also, in the course of your work, when dealing with a new client or getting an email from someone you don't know, do you do as I do and presume they are not a sex offender or do you have a quick google to make sure?
 
How long have they sat on this “story?”

these parasites just want to stick the knife in whenever it’s convenient.

He was never employed at United, he was an unpaid volunteer for a glorified Sunday league team who were allowed to use the United name for some daft reason
 
Zed is not dead said:
...
But yeah the club fecked up, they should’ve at least reached out to the women who played when he was a coach
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Again, easier said than done, given the lax record keeping for non-professionals who played for MUFC ladies, the fact the higher-ups at the club want to distance themselves from/erase the very existance of the old women's team and that 20-plus year gap between them playing and the club inviting Konopka.
 
decorativeed said:
Again, easier said than done, given the lax record keeping for non-professionals who played for MUFC ladies, the fact the higher-ups at the club want to distance themselves from/erase the very existance of the old women's team and that 20-plus year gap between them playing and the club inviting Konopka.
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yeah, exactly. I don’t think people understand what the Manchester United Ladies was in the 80s and 90s

it was a pub team with a famous shirt and no one at Manchester United FC had any oversight over it
 
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Heads should roll for this. It’s just absolute negligence and stupidity from our side.
 
DuruttiColumn said:
Bit of an overreaction, nobody knew who the hell this bloke was, a couple of days ago
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Think it’s probably more to do with the context. The club is being battered from all sides at the moment, something like this isn’t needed. We don’t know who he was but I do expect those involved at the club to do so.
 
siw2007 said:
Heads should roll for this. It’s just absolute negligence and stupidity from our side.
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If it makes you feel better, every member of curatorial staff has left the museum since 2022 due to the toxic management culture there.

Edit: Also the ridiculously low pay.
 
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decorativeed said:
Again, easier said than done, given the lax record keeping for non-professionals who played for MUFC ladies, the fact the higher-ups at the club want to distance themselves from/erase the very existance of the old women's team and that 20-plus year gap between them playing and the club inviting Konopka.
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I actually agree mate.
The only thing that can be said against to the club is that they didn’t even talk to some his former players, at the very least in an attempt to get some nice quotes during his hommage.

But I agree with everything else you said. In a big corpo that’s the kind of thing that would’ve been delegated to an intern if we’re being honest.
And as you rightfully said, you don’t necessarily assume everyone is some sort of criminal needing some criminal background check so I have a hard time seeing where the club went wrong.
It’s unfortunate and it’s really something spinning out of control due to the media
 
decorativeed said:
You make the mistake of thinking that the footballing part of the business is involved in the media side of the business. The various branches and departments at United work as though they are competing against each other rather than being part of the same organisation. The fact that the club is called United is one of the most ironic things I've come across.

Also, as I say, I know people involved in this and literally all they were doing when researching was looking for managerial stats. There was zero information about Konopka on the internet prior to 2022, a search for him only brought up a doctor by the same name, so the only way they would have had of knowing about his conviction is if somebody remembered it from the time. The only info they had that was printed was in some old photocopies of MUFC Ladies programmes from the 90s, so it obviously didn't flag up his conviction.

Once those stats were up in the museum, the people who run media presumably chose to invite him to the game.
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Yeah I can imagine that but if our events management team (or whatever the department is called)/don't have a governance step to do basic checks on those they're inviting as guest of honour then it's a poor reflection.

I'm sure they'll do that from now and as you say really isn't anything to do with the football club side. Apart from demonstrating we aren't the most mature and well run organisation.
 
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