He hasn't just done mediocre analysis on Sky though, has he. He has been a very successful player, a coach with England and briefly a manager so at least understands the challenge. Also, judging him for failing at Valencia where he didn't speak the language and took over a club on its 3rd/4th manager of the season is pretty unfair.
He has also been involved in numerous investments in property, hotels, city centre redevelopment in Manchester, Hotel Football and of course Salford City. Those things at least suggest he has a head for the business aspect of the DOF role while also being the right sort to understand conversations around Training Ground plans etc.
We are looking for a person who can help navigate the club back to the top level in the 'United' way. A random DOF is not going to help with the identity crisis the club seems to be going through.
1) Being a successful player means nothing. A lot of successful players (including himself) try to become a manager and spectacularly fail. A DoF job is even a more dissimilar job to a player, so his experience is even less relevant. Being a coach under Hodgson, while England got crashed against Iceland, yeah, I am convinced that he is the right person for the job. And finally, why he needs to get a card blanche for his Valencia feck up? A lot of managers don't know the language and do well. Pocchetino for example came to England without speaking English. Ranieri originally at Chelsea. And so on... And if the language was such a big barrier, maybe he should have know it on the first place and don't take the job. Not saying that he won't ever make a good manager/DoF, just that at the moment he is unqualified, and he learnt the hard way that speaking shit on TV doesn't help you in the real job.
2) You are not qualified to become CEO of Google cause you had a successful IT business on your local city. Being a co-owner of Salford City doesn't help his cause to become a United DoF, similarly. We are in a far bigger scale.
3) Not sure that there is a United way, bar be shit for 3 decades and then find a great manager for 2-3 decades. We want to be back in top. When we are there, we can pretend that we did it on 'the United way' for PR and brand value, but top is top.
Giggs and especially Butt are ahead of him to having proven something. In fact, I wouldn't mind having Butt in a more senior position, considering that he has been doing it on the hard way, and doing quite well at it.