and the new manager with incoming coaching set up..
The biggest change since Sir Alex left unquestionably
Richard Arnold cleaning house | Making 'significant changes' to Social Media strategy etc.
- Thread starter L1nk
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and the new manager with incoming coaching set up..
The biggest change since Sir Alex left unquestionably
What do you mean by "this"? And are you suggesting that someone should be sanctioned for the appointment of an interim manager?
Yeah, I'm guessing the posters who missed the background changes have at least picked up on the new manager and coaching team. Maybe.
Yeah, I'm guessing the posters who missed the background changes have at least picked up on the new manager and coaching team. Maybe.
I’m not convinced they’ve noticed. They would sooner post things like ‘why would he come to us’ and other such enlightening remarks.
It’s genuinely incredibly exciting but it feels like every time I come on here there’s a mass of folk decrying how pointless it all is because Ed Woodward didn’t sign Nicolas Gaitan.
Can't read this guy's name without thinking about that ever so creepy guy on GMTV. Would explain the lack of any expertise on footy!
This -> this newest restructuring. It’s about the board. It looks like John will only be in charge of player recruitment from now on.
Do we know who is the strongest supporter in the board for the appointment of Ralf?
Murtough is in charge of everything but we are bringing more "subalterns", one of the recently rumoured role was head of recruitment for which Paul Mitchell was linked. And Murtough is supposed to be the strongest supporter of Rangnick.
Yeah that shirt auction garbage on Saturday was probably the final straw for him, then they follow that up with stuff about Erik's current team just to really show how little they understand things
Yeah that definitely needs binning off at the end of this season
If he wants to clean house properly, he'll clean himself out of the house.
I think we should get some perspective. There's hardly a mountain of evidence to support his huge success with the academy and the women's team. United last won an FA youth cup 2 years before he joined and are only back in a final in 2022. Meanwhile our youth and reserve teams have hardly been blazing a trail in the meantime. They regularly get thumped by City, Chelsea and Liverpool.
Meanwhile the women's team had a great start and received a lot of kudos only to find themselves mired in controversy after their head coach left citing lack of investment and unhappiness about the support structure surrounding the women's team. Again, kudos for starting it but are we not getting a little carried away with his success?
Meanwhile his experience is at the only club that has claims over United to be the most incompetent club in the premier league. We also "poached' Steve Brown from them back when Moyesie came. As others have said there's a difference between experience and a track record of excellence. He began working with the Premier League as Head of Performance in 2012 and joined us in 2013 so I'm not sure how much credit he can claim for that.
I'm not saying he's definitely going to be terrible but the jury is still out. Over the years we've been linked with Monchi, Paul Mitchell and Luis Campos for the Director of Football role. Not saying any of those would have been perfect but they all have a catalogues of transfer hits where they have brought in players for little money and they've turned out to be superstars. Who's on Murtough's CV?? Since being DOF, he has brought in Ronaldo, Varane and Sancho in what must be a contender for most stupid window in United's history with each being problematic/underwhelming for various reasons and meanwhile he's let another window go by without signing a midfielder.
Why? This makes no sense
Honestly who cares about the social media team? It’s truly arranging the deck chairs on the titanic.
Indeed. And wasn’t the commercial growth mainly the responsibility of Arnold in any case? If he’s been finding it harder to flog an increasingly unattractive product he’ll be the one to recognise that change is needed to make us more competitive. Which, by the look of it, he is.
Paul Mitchell first job as a DOF has been at Monaco and he brought no one that became or will become a superstar.
Thank you for this wonderful post
Finally we have someone in charge who’s able to take in the big picture and make correspondingly big decisions. All power to him.
It’s a shame that people on here fail to recognise it, and would rather have pointless Murtough v Ralf arguments or bitch about Fletcher.
Re. the latter: I have no idea whether he’s doing a good job or not. What now seems apparent is that in the event he isn’t, the new regime won’t hesitate to move him on.
If he could just clean the house of the Glazers please, otherwise all he is doing is rearranging the furniture.
Mitchell has run recruitment for Southampton, Spurs and the Red Bull clubs. Whether DOF was his title is slightly beside the point. He got credit for identifying among others Sadio Mane, Heung Min Son, Dusan Tadic, Nkunku, Delle Alli and Toby Alderweireld for relative peanuts.
Another pet hate. Just shitting all over everything.
We keep hearing of structure changes and moving to modern techniques like data
Really hope it makes a difference but understandably nobody is holding their breath
At least we have football people making football decisions for the first time since 2013
Really hope it makes a difference but understandably nobody is holding their breath
At least we have football people making football decisions for the first time since 2013
It's not beside the point because he wasn't in a similar role to Murtough's up until joining Monaco. And no one should be credited for identifying well known players. As a head of recruitment Mitchell seems competent but people are overhyping his work and sometimes attributing him entire teams work when he wasn't even the most senior decision maker, for example at Southampton it was Les Reed. Also these players haven't been signed for peanuts.
Overstructured now?
Arnold is the one I wanted to hear of. Hearing he's pushing for change is a positive. Without his involvement it would be business as usual like Woodward never left. The people already here are an extension of the last regime after all. Get more football minds into the structure. Who knows, we might even one day finally stop shooting ourselves in the foot with baffling contract extensions.
I was using Mitchell to illustrate a wider point and it's that these guys who are typically linked with DOF jobs, Mitchell included, generally have a list of signings that they've made which support their credentials e,g. Monchi and Dani Alves is the classic example. You've nitpicked that the players I've noted weren't peanuts but ignored that I said relative. Son even at €30mn is peanuts relatively speaking.
Who has Murtough bought that even compares to Mitchell, who I don't necessarily disagree might be a bit overhyped? His two biggest jobs have been Everton and United and he doesn't have a recruitment track record at United so how does he get this job on merit?
By the way, I hope he is good but I just don't get why people have so much faith in a guy who has been a central figure in a catastrophically incompetent regime for almost ten years.
Murtough hasn't been a central figure under Woodward. This has all been going on for only a couple of seasons, and will continue to evolve (as it should).
https://m.republicworld.com/sports-...h-background-profile-of-man-utds-new-dof.html
Murtough isn't a recruitment guy, he is a data analyst and has specialized in build data and player development infrastructures which is why he was appointed head of the PL development after his stint at Everton. You are mischaractirizing the job of DOF and for some reason thinking that it's only about recruitment.
DOF's have different backgrounds, some are more familiar with the coaching side, others the recruitment/scouting side, others the man management, others management of structures and nowadays some are on the data analysis side of things.
And DOFs generally come from within, they are rarely linked to jobs, you generally have no idea about who they are outside of ex-players getting the job with barely any experience.
We may give benefit of the doubt to Murtough as he has been just handed fully the responsibilities on recruitment in this recent restructuring. However this summer will be a huge test. He has been appointed as DoF since March 2021. Although he might not be fully responsible for last Summer window transfer and this Winter one, he definitely was a part of the decision making, and the results were not pretty:
Sancho - £80M fee, 35K / week salary, show glimpse of talent but most of the time diminish with his other under-performing teammates
Varane - £45M fee, 20K / week salary, Injury prone and even when he was on field, performance and leadership were not convincing
Ronaldo - £15M fee, 50K / week salary, controversial on his performance, and more so on the decision whether we should bring him back .
Dan James - Sold for £25M fee - quite a good deal by itself
Lingard - RR clearly willing to let him go in winter window but blocked , most likely by Murtough. Turned out to be an un-motivated player who provided not much help but more drama around him.
Sancho - £80M fee, 35K / week salary, show glimpse of talent but most of the time diminish with his other under-performing teammates
Varane - £45M fee, 20K / week salary, Injury prone and even when he was on field, performance and leadership were not convincing
Ronaldo - £15M fee, 50K / week salary, controversial on his performance, and more so on the decision whether we should bring him back .
Dan James - Sold for £25M fee - quite a good deal by itself
Lingard - RR clearly willing to let him go in winter window but blocked , most likely by Murtough. Turned out to be an un-motivated player who provided not much help but more drama around him.
Those salaries are a steal
The biggest problem is that people to this day don't understand the difference between a board/manager structure, and a DoF/head coach structure. And it's funny to read people wanting to apportion blame to the head of football development at United, which is a role that oversees the development beneath the first team. And the same roles do exist at other clubs. Spurs, Arsenal etc (to just name two clubs) have also had people as the head of development beneath the first team. And their remit is to oversee the development of their departments. So for example at Spurs, John McDermott was the head of development beneath the first team, and Pochettino controlled and directed the football side at first team level. Currently at United we have Justin Cochrane who is the head of player and coaching development and we shouldn't blame him for the mistakes at first team level.
The head line below is pretty self explanatory as far as the role of a DoF is concerned.
And as far as contacts go, Matt Judge was the director of contract negotiations in a board/manager structure with the manager having the luxury of having his own personal scouts. Players like Varane, Sancho, Ronaldo were signed under the same structure (I also had no issues with those signings). Because Solskjaer (the manager) didn't report to John Murtough but rather he was reporting straight to Ed Woodward according to David Ornstein/Laurie Whitwell. So there was no DoF structure at that time and one shouldn't be confused by someone being given a title when the manager model was still in existence. But those changes IMO were driven by Richard Arnold, who was preparing to take the reigns as the CEO, and wanted to be guided on the football side of the club by having the buffer of a DoF between himself and the head coach, which is a sensible move imo.
The role of the DoF is a simple role and should be evaluated over several years. And the experience one needs to be a DoF is to be able to run multiple football departments on the football side of the the club according to Dan Ashworth. And one shouldn't compare the way the RedBull clubs operate as something we should also do because we're Manchester United and not a stepping stone club that buys young players to then sell for profit a few years later.
The head line below is pretty self explanatory as far as the role of a DoF is concerned.
And as far as contacts go, Matt Judge was the director of contract negotiations in a board/manager structure with the manager having the luxury of having his own personal scouts. Players like Varane, Sancho, Ronaldo were signed under the same structure (I also had no issues with those signings). Because Solskjaer (the manager) didn't report to John Murtough but rather he was reporting straight to Ed Woodward according to David Ornstein/Laurie Whitwell. So there was no DoF structure at that time and one shouldn't be confused by someone being given a title when the manager model was still in existence. But those changes IMO were driven by Richard Arnold, who was preparing to take the reigns as the CEO, and wanted to be guided on the football side of the club by having the buffer of a DoF between himself and the head coach, which is a sensible move imo.
The role of the DoF is a simple role and should be evaluated over several years. And the experience one needs to be a DoF is to be able to run multiple football departments on the football side of the the club according to Dan Ashworth. And one shouldn't compare the way the RedBull clubs operate as something we should also do because we're Manchester United and not a stepping stone club that buys young players to then sell for profit a few years later.
All these changes are great and definitely needed. He better make sure he gets rid of all the trouble makers and implements all the new staff/set up well though, because in my experience in big organisations stirring the pot can cause a lot of backlash, especially if that department is being criticised and/or upper management is deemed to be making changes without a good understanding of what's going on. Let's hope most staff want the big change.
That's entirely fair. Murtough will be a success only if the club actually comes close to punching above its own weight during his reign. He gets a ton of good will purely because he's not Woodward and standards set by him were so low that it's almost impossible to not improve.
That however seems to me incredibly harsh. You really consider this to be worse than any of the Mourinho/Moyes windows or 18/19 with massively overpaid Wan-Bissaka and Maguire who barely improved the team by any standards?
So Ed Woodward was a completely incompetent twat as we all suspected and was responsible for every area of the club falling miles behind our rivals.
All the way from the 1st team to the media room we're a shambles.
10 years of heartache and turmoil watching the mess get worse and that fool was being paid millions by the yank leaches to run our club into the ground.
All the way from the 1st team to the media room we're a shambles.
10 years of heartache and turmoil watching the mess get worse and that fool was being paid millions by the yank leaches to run our club into the ground.
My personal take is the domestic violence allegations against Butt killed his career at United. It was going well for him until then.
Not an instant fix but am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt he isn't a total idiot like Woodward. The truth at the moment is nobody knows. We don't know what is what until the structure review is complete. There was already a bit too much ITKing on what he is going to do, how he will run the club and things that can't even be deduced until he has been at the job for a solid sample size. People ran with the notion that he wasn't going to be a part of the football side based on one loose tweet in January. It would help to not run with promises that were never actually made. CEO involvement isnt automatically bad or good just because our last one was an idiot. Personally don't mind as he might actually have learnt from his predecessor's mistakes.
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Some jobs you need qualifications. Like I am doing a degree in Statistics now. I can't be a senior statistician without one the degree itself and secondly the previous experience in a statistics role. I imagine being a technical director is the same and Darren Fletcher has no experience.
I agree here. At least we're not doing that small time thing clubs do by having banter about other clubs.
Saw Zenit posting videos of them celebrating a trophy win with captions of "Hey Manchester United, this is what a trophy looks like."
Really good read and very informative.
In your opinion, what is the nature of this latest restructuring? The report says that Murtough is taking full control of recruitment and they will hire a new football director.Does the new hire report to Murtough? Or, the new hire is a parallel to Murtough and report to Arnold?