We’ve signed loads of players through the years that we weren’t linked with though. Ones that the sources you like didn’t know about. So in any case giving Woodward credit is making it easy for him because while deciding to not buy a certain player may be correct, he did not deliver what we need. It’s not him spotting the players but he’s in charge so why is the biggest club in the world not finding a single centre half that would improve us. On top of that you said his job is to determine the financial sense. So we can agree that he’s been an absolute catastrophic failure from that side of things too. We have wasted more money than any club in the world under his watch, so he’s naturally having to reign it in because he dug us a grave overseeing an absurd policy under Moyes and van gaal.
Man Utd set to appoint Director of Football (when hell freezes over)
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We’ve signed loads of players through the years that we weren’t linked with though. Ones that the sources you like didn’t know about. So in any case giving Woodward credit is making it easy for him because while deciding to not buy a certain player may be correct, he did not deliver what we need. It’s not him spotting the players but he’s in charge so why is the biggest club in the world not finding a single centre half that would improve us. On top of that you said his job is to determine the financial sense. So we can agree that he’s been an absolute catastrophic failure from that side of things too. We have wasted more money than any club in the world under his watch, so he’s naturally having to reign it in because he dug us a grave overseeing an absurd policy under Moyes and van gaal.
Agreed.
Are you seriously suggesting that Ed would tell Jose, "you are not getting your preferred targets, but Player X, Y and Z can be got. Do you want these?" And Jose replied, "no!"
Jose knew we needed CBs (it was repeatedly suggested during the Summer that this was the priority for Jose) and unless he went mad, he would not have said "no" to other CBs suggested by Ed.
No manager (Wenger, accepted), would say, "Mr CEO, I know you are offering to buy me more players, but I don't want them."
Next, you'll be suggesting that Woodward asked Jose if he wants Ronaldo and Messi and Jose said, "no".
It would. Shame we/José sold him to Ajax
It’s a possibility. The more likely scenario is that options were limited due to cost and player availablity. There wasn’t a central defender that moved all summer that would have been what the club required. As I’ve already outlined, preposterous deals for the likes of Boateng, Mina and Maguire were quite rightly let go.
What happened in the summer was simple imo. The club would have preferred to sign guys like Skrinnar or Koulibaly. The latter's boss said they rejected a huge bid for him. Then Mourinho wanted guys like Boateng and Alderweireld who had huge price tags, or guys like Mina, bit old but club didn't think we're better than what they had. So CB signing became a bust.
His only two faults has been to not sign a CB and not sack Mourinho. Agree with him not going after Boateng etc, but the non offer for Toby looks a poor decision in hindsight, particularly since our most senior defender is Smalling.
He dithers a lot over sacking Managers though, which the other top clubs don't. Gave LvG an extended six months and now Jose.
He dithers a lot over sacking Managers though, which the other top clubs don't. Gave LvG an extended six months and now Jose.
IMO his biggest fault was giving Mourinho an unwarranted contract extension. He's paying the price for that till date.
Pretty much this - I wanted Alderweireld but I think Woodward was right not to sanction the deal. When you consider his age and the money spurs wanted it wouldn't have been good business.
Can't you just imagine how some of these fixers/agents/outside clubs view Woody? Some version of Bambi with a beardy shadow, chest-out-to-here swagger, on patrol in the lion enclosure. Can't you just imagine the licking of lips, the rubbing of palms? "Yess... here here comes again ... straight faces on. Ohh... Mr Woodward..."
This. It was a joke he got an extension when he did.
I don't think he made any mistakes in the summer, I don't think he's made a mistake not sacking Mourinho and I don't think he made a mistake with the contract extension.
First, I want Mourinho out, I don't think he's the man to take us forward. For me that has been clear since February. Coincidentally that's around the time we extended his contract.
It makes no sense sacking Mourinho now if he doesn't have a plan and I don't think he does. As it is, Mourinho is our best bet of making top four. Where I think he would be making a mistake is if he doesn't have a clear idea what he's going to do with Mourinho next summer.
On the contract issue, it's easy to talk about things in hindsight. At the time he signed an extension, although we were not playing well we were in second had we had been all season.
Whatever turmoil, you think the club has gone though in the last 6 months, it would have been twice as bad if there was constant speculation about Mourinho's contract. At that time, it was an easy and imo, the sensible decision to make.
On the summer, I've said many times why I back Ed Woodward over how he went about the summer.
Imo, the mistake Ed Woodward made was done even before we hired Mourinho. I never wanted Mourinho but that's an argument for another day. We should have had a DoF before Mourinho set foot at this club. The board/DoF should have made Mourinho fully aware of the kind of players the club would be targeting before he signed that contract. Ed should have made it pretty clear to Mourinho that spending £40m+ on 29+ year olds was a non-starter before Mourinho came.
I guess he indulged Mourinho with Matic and imo that's proven to be a mistake. That probably have Mourinho licence to request signing like Alderweireld and Boateng even though they would have cost a fortune.
Imo, Ed is getting a lot of underserved flak from both sides of the Mouriniho argument. I think his running of the club has been decent in the last 12 months .
First, I want Mourinho out, I don't think he's the man to take us forward. For me that has been clear since February. Coincidentally that's around the time we extended his contract.
It makes no sense sacking Mourinho now if he doesn't have a plan and I don't think he does. As it is, Mourinho is our best bet of making top four. Where I think he would be making a mistake is if he doesn't have a clear idea what he's going to do with Mourinho next summer.
On the contract issue, it's easy to talk about things in hindsight. At the time he signed an extension, although we were not playing well we were in second had we had been all season.
Whatever turmoil, you think the club has gone though in the last 6 months, it would have been twice as bad if there was constant speculation about Mourinho's contract. At that time, it was an easy and imo, the sensible decision to make.
On the summer, I've said many times why I back Ed Woodward over how he went about the summer.
Imo, the mistake Ed Woodward made was done even before we hired Mourinho. I never wanted Mourinho but that's an argument for another day. We should have had a DoF before Mourinho set foot at this club. The board/DoF should have made Mourinho fully aware of the kind of players the club would be targeting before he signed that contract. Ed should have made it pretty clear to Mourinho that spending £40m+ on 29+ year olds was a non-starter before Mourinho came.
I guess he indulged Mourinho with Matic and imo that's proven to be a mistake. That probably have Mourinho licence to request signing like Alderweireld and Boateng even though they would have cost a fortune.
Imo, Ed is getting a lot of underserved flak from both sides of the Mouriniho argument. I think his running of the club has been decent in the last 12 months .
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I actually liked Blind to be fair. If he had more physicality, he would have been a great central defender.It would. Shame we/José sold him to Ajax
I'll get told of for this because there is a Lindelof love in amongst our fanbase but Blind put better Centre Half performances in for us than Lindelof has up to date.
I don't think anyone would argue with that. Lindelof's good performances can be counted on one hand. Hopefully he is improving though.
I think this is a very fair summary. Great post.
I agree!
Still, it's been nice to see Lindelof's upturn in form recently. Credit where credit is due.
just sayin'..
All sorts of great things Woodward has done, but nothing here about him doing anything to improve the players on the team.
Also, why would there be a limit on the money spent on 29+ yos?
Why is the concern the 'business' and not how well the team plays? Plus, Utd is obviously seriously short of leaders on the field, amazing that people can't see that.
Because we'll probably end up having to replace him within 2 seasons. Just look at Matic cost £40mil and he already looks done.
And?
2 years of having a solid defense would be preferable to what we have now, this year and next year's team would be better (didn't realize that defenders were done at the age of 31 btw). There would be a senior defender to bring the younger players along, in 2 years the younger defenders might be more ready to step up.
Improving the team is a year in and year out job.
The Martial situation made any reasonable deal for Alderweireld impossible, I reckon.
What does this have to do with Ed? Blind wanted to leave cause he didn't get playing time.
We've barely got two season out of Matic and people are already calling for replacements. I don't care how much you value football, no one runs a business like that.
Spending huge amounts on players with little shelf life on a constant basis is not the way to run a football club.
'People' are calling for the replacement for every player except DDG, so I don't think that means anything.
Spending huge amounts on senior players is a way to jump start a team who has fallen out of the top ranks.
Sounds like people (quote, unquote) would rather remain in 8th place and save their pennies for a rainy day.
Against the might of Willem. Just sayin...
Only people calling for replacement of anyone are the Jose fan boys who are obsessed with calling everyone trash to make Jose look good. Everyone else generally believes this team can be doing much better with these players. Matic for me was good for half of last season, if Jose knew what the hell he was doing he'd have benched him long ago. For $40m that is a not a good investment and you can't be blinkered enough not to see that. For all the shit Jose has given this team, for how much he has lowered expectations, for how well he's successfully convinced fans to believing all our players are crap, I 100% this team is very capable of a title challenge.
This team mount a title challenge? In what season? In what league?
Man City has scored 33 goals so far this year, and given up 4. In 11 games. They're in 1st place.
Chelsea has scored 27 goals and given up 8. They're in 2nd place.
Liverpool in 3rd? Scored 21 and given up 5 (after spending big on their defense).
We're in 7th, having scored 19 and given up 18 goals so far this year.
Benching Matic isn't going to make us score that much more and give up that much less. I watched Bournemouth (!) go through our midfield like a hot knife thru butter yesterday.
We so obviously needed more investment in the squad last Summer it is a joke! Gross misconduct by Ed to not invest.
We'd made good progress last season with a few glaring squad weaknesses. The lack of investment last Summer has exposed these weaknesses and probably undermined the morale of the squad. Especially combined with the public disagreement between Jose and Ed.
The tale of 2 teams in the same city.
Pep bought fullbacks, didn't appear good enough, so he bought 2 more for £50 million each, we all laughed at the extravagance. But , someone else is laughing, the Sheikh sees the team at the top again.
Teflon Ed denied the managers opinion that the defence needed upgrading, as the young players he bought were taking time to adjust to EPL, and Jones is crocked as is Rojo.
Who's laughing now as we leak goals , dislike JH as you can, but he has got Shaw up to speed, worked on Martial to work harder, and finally dropped Valencia.
Ed continues to oversee expenditure and releases with a weighting related to the balance sheet and social media clicks, with rivals committing themselves to spending in the face of Citeh, we fade into the background wiht the CEO hesitating to spend.
If it's because the backed the extravagance of LVG and that suited his love of so called big names, who knows. But doesn't seem he has the gonads to compete with Citeh and others, all the chest puffing that he can do things others only dream of, what a puffed up wanker.
Pep bought fullbacks, didn't appear good enough, so he bought 2 more for £50 million each, we all laughed at the extravagance. But , someone else is laughing, the Sheikh sees the team at the top again.
Teflon Ed denied the managers opinion that the defence needed upgrading, as the young players he bought were taking time to adjust to EPL, and Jones is crocked as is Rojo.
Who's laughing now as we leak goals , dislike JH as you can, but he has got Shaw up to speed, worked on Martial to work harder, and finally dropped Valencia.
Ed continues to oversee expenditure and releases with a weighting related to the balance sheet and social media clicks, with rivals committing themselves to spending in the face of Citeh, we fade into the background wiht the CEO hesitating to spend.
If it's because the backed the extravagance of LVG and that suited his love of so called big names, who knows. But doesn't seem he has the gonads to compete with Citeh and others, all the chest puffing that he can do things others only dream of, what a puffed up wanker.
To be fair, he was very good away to Bayern Munich, too. A game in which Ajax were the better team.
Didn't say to win it, give it a proper go like Liverpool and Chelsea seem to be doing instead of being out of the race by October and making stupid excuses week in week out
The hankering for Blind on here is baffling. Everyone forgot he existed, then as soon as we let him rightfully go, it's the biggest mistake ever.
Indeed. There are none available though.
Just look at Liverpool's defense with the addition of 1 world class CB.
I never forgot about his existence, personally. In fact, during his time here under José, i was always adamant that he should've been one of our starting CBs.
I know this is not the thread for it, but I think that’s a bit harsh on Blind.
IMO he has the quality to be a useful squad player for us.
Didn't Jose get the extension around Christmas last season when we were playing decent football and were looking like shoe ins for 2nd? Hindsight is great but I doubt anyone could have predicted our shite 2018 form.
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