War chest and spend feck all too.
How good was David Gill
- Thread starter Andy_Cole
- Start date
War chest and spend feck all too.
Was a tight bas*ar* wasn’t he. I remember Fergie and his team had to produce a dossier of why we should spend so munch money on DDG.
Once Fergie and Gill left, the PR people took over big time.
He came round to their way of doing business. After publicly denouncing debt as the "road to ruin" he took a nice fat salary and all that was forgotten. Having said that, there have been far worse chairman. Had Gill stayed, we might not have seen the profligate spending and waste that started with LVG and continued. Could he have steered the Glazers off the course they were taking? Maybe but I think that's why he went when he did.
Sir Alex was our director of football and the best manager to ever live.
David Gill's main job was to grow us commercially and we grew more under Woodward despite far less on field success.
Probably pretty rubbish other than being humble enough to know that Sir Alex knew more than him which is probably why Sir Alex speaks so highly of him.
David Gill's main job was to grow us commercially and we grew more under Woodward despite far less on field success.
Probably pretty rubbish other than being humble enough to know that Sir Alex knew more than him which is probably why Sir Alex speaks so highly of him.
What has Gill done structurally to improve the club or allow it to work without ludicrous spendings? Because we know that he left a subpar operation behind him and that our managers were allowed to spend money on the club structure, Moyes and Van gaal being the most obvious with millions spent on improving the scouting, data analysis and tweaking the training center.
I think that people are incredibly lenient when it comes to Gill, the one big thing that he oversaw was the medical center which is known to be too small to manage the youth and professional teams, the club send players out for medical treatments. Maybe I'm unfair but I don't know what he has done for the club as a CEO and we know that he left an empty shell.
We don't and that's the trouble.
Gill worked well with SAF, but with Woodward as his deputy (and him being JP Morgans 'inside man') Gill knew it wasn't going to last long. Woodward wanted the 'top spot', some rumours have it that Ed was promised it by the Glazers from the 'get go' and that was how JP Morgan came to agree to the leverage deal for United.... you can have the money but you also have to take Ed, to make sure we get it back!!
It wouldn't surprise me if it comes out in the future that is was Gill's decision to leave (fall on his sword) to make way for Woodward that prompted SAF to step down as well, Fergie knowing full well that he wouldn't be able to get the same co-operation and acquiescence from Woodward as he had with David Gill..... but who knows?
He was the best at his job.
Why? What has he done that made him the best?
Agreed that we don't know a great deal about the ins and outs of what Gill, Woodward, etc. effect but we can use some logic and deductive reasoning. I believe that Gill gets rated because he was carried by Fergie's greatness. We had a ton of poor recruitment windows with Gill, which is where the negativity around transfer sagas comes from. We had no clear succession plan in place for Fergie, nor did he leave behind a club that was keeping up with the modern game. Woodward gets pelters for the structure at the club but the guy he inherited the mess from gets absolved by a lot of fans for some reason.
Imagine Woodward had a window of losing Ronaldo but bringing in Valencia, Owen and Obertan...my word!
Oh also I think Fergie retired for the reason he publicly stated and why would he lie and use his sister in law's death as a fake excuse.
Keeping Fergie happy. They share the successes imo.
That is my whole point, I don't know, you would have to ask him... my point was not that Fergie's reasons were not genuine, but also in the back of his mind he probably wasn't particularly looking forward to having to work with and around Ed Woodward once David Gill left.
But his job wasn't to keep Fergie happy. His job was to build and maintain a viable and productive structure that could live without SAF or himself. And was SAF that difficult that a director needed to focus on making him happy?
I really don't see how the man that left the club in the state it was in 2013 can be seen as the best at anything. No football structure, no scouting, a severally declining youth system, a deputy that wasn't ready and the appointment of Moyes.
I feel like there is a lot of projection of opinions on others just because people don't like the Glazers.
I agree with your opinion, btw, that someone who's in control of a club and leaves it a mess obviously didn't do a great job, at least not in the area of forward planning and organization (even if Ferguson managed to keep winning stuff). Same for Woodward. In that sense, it's not too surprising that Woodward succeeded Gill (they seem similar in that regard), but surprising how Arnold succeeded Woodward, as the massive restructuring he's overseeing is clearly at very different from what was Woodward's approach. You'd think Arnold discussed that with Woodward previously. I can then speculate that these discussions contributed to Woodward handing the reigns to Arnold, but who knows, of course.
The money coming into football with all the oil owners and big money tv revenue was the real reason for our growth commercially.
Woodward did feck all but devalue our brand on and off the pitch.
Well yeah, if you look at it this way, then it's not great. But for me, he took over the role at a time when we were going through a decline and a major transitioning phase. He oversaw the creation of a new dynasty. He didn't modernize the club but lets face it, that wasn't really his job, and would have most likely required more than a single person to completely overhaul the structure. But at a time when we were hamstrung by the debt the Glazers put on us, and had to scour the market looking for value, he did very well.
Really?
His utter failure to put a robust succession plan in place is evidence enough. Unless of course he tried to do so but was thwarted by the Glazers.
How was it not his job, it was a crucial part of his job, it's one of the most important qualities that companies want in a CEO? What do you think a CEO is supposed to do? And his job was not to scour any market or look for value that was the job of scouts and SAF. His job was to lead the corporate side of the club and make sure that every aspect of the club were as robust as possible.
He was terrible based on not knowing his limitations but this is factually untrue.
This is coming from the biggest Woodward hater you will find.
Making sure we are successful, winning trophies and becoming a dominant force. And most of the criticism is purely hindsight anyways. There wasn't a real need to do any sort of overhaul at the time and no one in their right mind would have expected Woodward to consistently get every major decision wrong. Had we appointed Pep or Klopp, we would've been fine. The modernization would have come naturally and alongside the new manager, both working towards a single vision.
What are the roles of a CEO? You described the role of a head coach not the role of the club's CEO. And of course these criticism are in hindsight, I will never understand this point, hindsight is key when you are judging past actions and their suitability what do you think should be used to judge Gill's work?
And clearly there was a need for an overhaul in 2013 which was caused by the fact that the club didn't evolve gradually as it should have and as any well run company does. You don't want to ever need an overhaul, it may be needed but that's not ideal.
From the outside, leaving at the same time as Fergie was very selfish. Almost undoes any previous good work in my eyes.
feck knows
No it is the joint responsibility between the CEO and head coach. Beyond on pitch success he was also in charge of growing the club commercially which is fairly easy.
This is beyond hindsight because you are expecting him to have the foresight to see things going so badly because of one man. It's like blaming Fergie for not addressing the midfield, and leaving his successor scrambling around Europe before ending up with Fellaini.
Well that's one element of his time at the club but he was here for a good while and oversaw probably the most succesful period in the clubs history. You can't reduce his entire tenure down to what happened right at the end.
Like I said, as fans, we've no idea really. Especially with having Fergie in place all that time.
It's not joint, the CEO and head coach aren't on the same level, the responsibilities of a CEO are largely organizational and are supposed to be sustainable beyond his on tenure. What you are suggesting is baffling, you either don't understand the role of a CEO or for some reason try to absolve Gill from his responsibilities for the club.
And you see the bold part, that's why Gill did a terrible job, he built/maintained a structure that relied on a single person and it takes no foresight to know that it's wrong and was a massive weakness. The club was an obvious empty shell.
He didn’t say anything when he returned from Aus, nor was the Disneyland comment anything he released.
You’re making out he was doing these things publicly when in reality he said one behind closed doors, in a private meeting, the other one he simply got on a flight
Kept a steady ship financially. That is all. SAF made him a legend that he does not deserve.
Sorry but you are starting to sound more and more like Woodward.
Because I don't think that Gill has done anything to be considered the best and you have no argument to support a frankly ridiculous claim? And Woodward was every bit as bad as Gill, he has nowhere to hide because he was the number two, it's not as if he could claim that he discovered the issues on his first day as the CEO.
Actually, I made it quite clear from the start that his job was to keep Fergie happy. You then went on an argument about being a CEO because that's what you wanted to talk about. He was never a Glazer man so who knows how much he could have done. What we do know is that he worked well with Fergie during a very frugal period.
It's really hard in football to judge who is good or bad at their jobs when it comes to anything that isn't directly on the pitch, for people on the outside. So players and the manager are pretty much the only ones any of us can make a judgment on (IMO). Is Woodward useless? Probably, he oversaw a decade of failure. Would Woodward have looked good if he simply managed to hire Pep/Klopp instead of Moyes/Van Gaal/Mourinho/Ole? Probably yeah. His biggest problem from the outside was hiring the wrong people to do the key footballing tasks IMO. So he could easily luck his way into hiring the right one and it all works out ok. Literally no way for us to know if what they do is good or bad.
And it wasn't his job, he wasn't SAF's personal cheerleader. He was Manchester United's CEO/vice Chairman.
He missed out on a lot of our top targets. Can’t remember any changes due to him either. But as we were successful I like him.
According to Fergie we were never interested in Sneijder. We definitely missed out on Benzema though, there's a story out there that Fergie was tapping him up in the tunnel after we played Lyon.
This
I'm pretty sure Gill decided to go before SAF.
SAF was actually wanting to retire in 2012. He only stayed on because we had a horrible season in the CL and lost the league to City. His sister in law passed away and that pretty much confirmed his retirement for the following year.
Well one could argue that there were signs of decline before then, particularly regarding player recruitment, and that Gill’s lack of future proofing caused his and SAF’s successors unnecessary problems.
What isn’t open to debate is that those successors, or at least the ever-present among them, had plenty of time to fix the issues created by Gill’s negligence yet utterly failed to do so despite having been given nearly nine years.