Jonas Boldt 
Man Utd set to appoint Director of Football (when hell freezes over)
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3 managers in a row who have all played terrible football, not many with the amount of money available.
I agree Woodward isn’t proactive either but that just adds fuel to the fire he is a bit inept at this. Always seems to be lagging behind when making a decision.
Who hired Moyes LVG and Mourinho and now Ole? Who worked with them to get the transfer done and is responsible for our team makeup now?
If it is not Ed to blame for all these incompetences, then is it you that is to blame?
Chelsea Liverpool Spurs and man city seem to do well with their appointment. What’s your point?
Mate you’re not speaking sense. We changed as many managers as Chelsea since SAF and Chelsea had more success to show for. I don’t think it’s the rate of changing but the appointment and backing of managers.
Are you Woodward?
I think what showed naivety of Woodward was giving Mourinho a big fat contract last season.
That when the results were going okayish and nothing great and you know the previous mess he has created in his 3rd seasons elsewhere.
That when the results were going okayish and nothing great and you know the previous mess he has created in his 3rd seasons elsewhere.
and come summer, you can only sign an overpriced midfielder and a teenager with less than 10 first team appearances for Porto.
Mourinho broke up with Chelsea over not signing Stones but Ed expected Mourinho to gladly accept his veto of a CB signing?
Nothing Mourinho did was a surprise to anyone remotely familiar with the game, but it seems that Ed still didnt see it coming. How is that not a clear evidence of incompetence, if not outright stupidity.
One centre back signing too would not have made us champions neither adding Willian or perisic would have made us champions as well. We needed right midfield and playmaker additions this summer with right winger who is not on a decline.
and how many of those did we get?
But ignoring who was signed or was not signed, more important was the predictable reaction of Mourinho.
It was same thing with LvG, the whole footballing world knows what you get with LvG, and his tenure with Bayern was still recent enough
If Mourinho would have been successful with his £360m worth of signing...i think they would have trusted him more.
Aside from Zlatan, the rest of them haven't really worked out.
Would've been madness for the board to give him another 100m if he failed at the rest of signings.
Biggest mistake they made was giving him a new contract
Moyes is all on Fergie. LVG...yeah you can say in hindsight was a shit signing. But Jose was the current PL winning manager when we signed him, I remember almost everyone being delighted with the appointment. It didn't work out and we should have sacked Jose a lot earlier, we move on and try someone else till it works out, because there's no manager out there including the cafs dream appointments who you can 100% guarantee to succeed
Where you saying this when they where hiring Hodgson,Brenda and KKK? When we hired Jose from Chelsea he was the PL's defending manager, I personally felt he was a better appointment than Pep as he already had an advantage of PL experience. But I was wrong, so was Woody and lots of United fans. City, admittedly have been very lucky with their managerial appointments so far, but then have unlimited funds to buy whoever. The way I see it,If it doesn't work out we try again,and again till it does.
Who is your dream manager amongst the current pool of candidates? Poch, Zidane,Howe, Giggs? You're 100% certain he can't fail right?
You really do love painting a positive/victim image of Mourinho in any possible scenario.
And Woodward should not be the guy setting the budget. The board should be the one doing that, and a DoF should talk to the board, tell them how much money he wants, why he needs that much money, and the board should either give him the money or not. If a DoF needs to ask Woodward for permission to sign any player then Woodward is more or less the DoF of the club. Which I think is a terrible idea.
If I got 3 candidates wrong I will accept my failings and step down. We are too big a club for people like you , me or Ed to trial and error until we get it right.
I’m sorry, but I think the people that hired Hodgson daglish and maybe Brenda has already stepped down. I don’t think they are the same group that hired klopp. You can see that in their transfer dealings now compared to when it was before. Again your point doesn’t support Ed at all.
At no club does that happen. The board hire CEOs and CFO so they dont have to do that
To be fair, 'Thinking' the people who hired them are now gone based off of transfers isn't really an argument
To anyone arguing Ed should leave the club because he has failed in an role he is looking to offload from his workload to someone more suitable while he retains his role in an area in which he has excelled to the benefit of United: Come again? The guy IS saying he will no longer carry out that task. But why shoot a winning horse because it can't lay eggs?
And you forgot the COO, people seem to have little idea about how things are organized. And the concept of giving money is ridiculous, you would think that we are talking about a kid asking for allowance money. We are talking about a professional structure.
Didn't he get found out as a bit dodgy in the der speigel leaks?Jonas Boldt
As much as I dislike Woodward and think he is incompetent in all but commercial deals. Mourinho did have interest from PSG at that time so we were in a difficult situation. Having extended his contract though, Woodward had to invest more for Mourinho last Summer. Perfect storm of feck ups!
He has excelled in getting good commercial deals for the club by loading the club up with overpaid and overrated prima donnas. A good DoF will take the club in a different direction, one which goes against the direction Woodward is taking the club to.
Its not about painting a positive image for Mourinho. Mourinho has always been Mourinho - the good, the bad and the ugly.You really do love painting a positive/victim image of Mourinho in any possible scenario.
You really do love painting a positive/victim image of Mourinho in any possible scenario.
Will be surprised he isn't Ducan Castles. I really think that's the Ducan's redcafe account.
So Jose is completely against hiring DoF or anyone who works on transfers.
Wants old players for every position and pissed as club didn't want to sign 29-30 year olds after signing Sanchez and Matic for big money.
Well in the end, it was all good.
Can't blame him for Moyes. While he did ultimately sign off on it, it was organised by Fergie and Gill. There's not a new guy coming into the job anywhere who is going to turn around and refuse to sign off on that. Can you imagine the ramifications on him if he'd torpedoed that deal and then the guy he did sign didn't work out?
LVG and Mourinho are on him. Both are understandable so it's not like they were absolutely massive feck-ups (like Moyes was), but ultimately both were mistakes. As was renewing Mourinho's contract last season.
The next 6 months is the period which will truly showcase whether Ed is incompetent or whether he is a competent guy who was trying to stick to the history of the club by letting the manager have more control. At least until they started making stupid decisions like trying to sell our best players and he had to step in. If he doesn't sign a DoF now (or similar position who will start to control the football side of things) and signs another manager that doesn't work out, that will be the time to absolutely blame him and want the power-hungry and/or incompetent prick out of the club. But if he does sign a (decent) DoF and then steps back a bit and we start showing better long-term planning, then it's time to accept that he does want what is best for the club and has learnt from the mistakes that were made in the past. Anyone who says that it's 100% one or the other of those options are just letting emotions get the better of them.
When have we not had overpaid ego players? Are you suggesting that the likes of Ibrahimovic, Di Maria and Pogba were all flops? I know Di Maria was but the other two, do you think that we should never have gotten them? Do you think we should keep Pogba? Have we never during previous CEO tenures managed to pay big money for a player and have him overpaid and flop? Isn't that normal for United, like any major club, to have a few that don't work out? Are you suggesting the only purchases we made were egos? Herrera, Lindelof, Bailly, Dalot, Fred, Martial, Schneiderlin, Darmian, Romero, Rojo, Blind - are they also prima donnas you speak of?
A DoF will indeed purchase players that will suit a certain direction, yes. But any DoF that is going to purposefully avoid any kind of ego player or big name signing is going to damage the club in an entirely different way. We should buy the best players for the style of play, and a manager that can ensure egos don't get out of control. The DoF also plays a part in that ego management.
Even in the glory days we regularly paid huge money for big name players. This isn't something we should avoid doing just because it hasn't worked out on one or two occasions. Woodward wasn't buying them 100% for commercial reasons, or we wouldn't have ended up with half of the players we bought. He's not good at the football side of things, this I personally agree with, but to say he has only gone for the marketable players and avoided everyone else that could be purchased for what he thought was the benefit of the team is ignorant.
Works for Real Madrid and Chelsea. And secondly for the umpteenth time, Moyes was the 'chosen one'. Unless you think his first duty as a CEO should have been to overrule Fergie.[/QUOTE]
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It’s strange to say ‘Moyes is all (all!) on Fergie’ when Woodward alone was responsible for the decision. If Woodward had no mind of his own on the subject, didn’t aquire other consultation on the question, didn’t question in his mind wether Fergie would necessarily know best who should replace him, didn’t as partnof this find out in beforehand wether Moyes would accompany himself with exclusively Everton crew and wether this would be a good idea for Man Utd ... if all this, then he certainly was out of his depth having the position he was in. Of course, that wouldn’t be too damning if he later shows he is a quick learner and got it right later. What I think is fairly obvious though, is that he has made a lot of decisions that in isolation can be viewed as sensible enough, but seen as a whole shows a deep lack of understanding of how to run a football club in England and Europe successfully, and particular a club such as Man Utd.
The idea that having a business man from USA just running through a number of different managers to see who are successful is a good way to run a club ...
Honestly if it was my first day on the job and Fergie came along and insisted I pick a manager of his choice, with SAF being the greatest manager of all time with huge knowledge of other managers, I'd have said "okay" too. It's not like Moyes was some stranger to us all, he was long considered to be a good manager for Everton at the time and, hindsight ignored, we thought they were punching well above their weight under Moyes. It wasn't seen as stupid by the vast majority, he was always a contender, and the person who had the most experience in such things at the club made the choice and I doubt Gill would have declined Moyes if he were in Woodward's shoes either. In the end, I honestly do think it was 90% on SAF, and I believe that it was right that 90% of the choice was on SAF. It didn't pan out, but we'll never know how Moyes would have been if he was given three seasons. I don't know. I'm not saying Moyes was the right choice at all, I'm just saying I don't think one season will ever be enough to know how Moyes would have really done given time, and that if he were given three years if he would have managed to get us playing better, and further up the table. The modern world doesn't allow for such things, though, and here we are, because of the right person making what was probably the wrong choice, but we will never know if anyone else would have done better.
Woodward pretty much started his job the sametime as Moyes. Moyes was done before him. How could he make a decision if he had no authority?
I completely neglected that point in my post, good call. Didn't consider it.
It’s a very good point. If Woodward actually steps down from running the football side of things, he will be right, and the people calling for him to step down from football decisions will be right. It’s a big if, though, because if he hires Jamie Carragher or Jamie Oliver as a DoF and uses his veto on budget decisions to say no to all CB requests over £35m for instance, he will not really have stepped down much. So we’ll have to see and hope. I’m sure hoping he steps well and truly ... let’s call it ‘aside’.
And on the horse ... horse steak is very tasty, particularly with eggs.
Reliability quotient anyone?
Fair enough, but I think it's also fair to say we'll never truly know if this kind of thing happens (ie, saying no to all CBs and so forth). If the DoF is set up and functions as a DoF should, which any sensible DoF would insist upon (or else they'd just leave quickly), then we should expect them to decide how the funds are spent. The real question would be how many funds are given.
Imagine the uproar and outrage if the first thing we knew about Woody before even knew who he was was that he overruled Fergies managerial choice. Gary Neville would have burned down Twitter and Sky
Did I have my chronological memory fecked up? May well be! I thought Woodward officially appointed Moyes, but it could have been Gill.
Looking back into it, Woodward was at the club since 2005, and executive vice chairmn I think since about 2008. In 2013, Gill was outgoing as cEO and Woodward already on the board and pointed out as the new CEO. Ehich makes it fairly obvious that Woodward would be well involved in the process of appointing and assessing candidates, and the decision process ending with Moyes. He would listen to Gill and Gill would listen to him, and both would listen to Fergusons advice, while Ferguson would certainly neither be responsible for the assessment process not the appointment itself, but his opinion would of course weigh heavily. In retrospect, I think it’s fair to say it was a bad process, and Gill, The Glazers and Woodward must share responsibilty for that. If it was all Fergies opinion and they just said ‘you decide’, it’s on their heads combined.
What certainly isn’t true is that Woodward came into the process after the decision was made and just had to make the best of it. That’s completely improbable based on the facts of the situation.
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