We have had 4 managers and amidst all the failures, the one constant has been him! Its about time he gets accountability for his decisions. By all accounts, he has large influence in our signings.
His faults start from the disastrous window when Moyes had been onboarded to cluelessly moving from one manager type (LVG) to another (Mourinho) and not having a plan to put a squad to enable success for these managers.
Weirdly for a person whose domain is finance, he has prematurely declared that we can do things in the market that none of the others can, without factoring in that all clubs are seeing rise in revenues which would lead to inflation and higher transfer fees. Our transfer strategy has been set on wrong assumptions and before Ole the emphasis was to buy our way out of trouble for which we neither had the money power nor our state of squad was such that it could be papered over by 1-2 big signings.
On top of this, his 'negotiating' strategy has to be one of the worst ever. From needing to pay more for Fellaini than what he was available for, this season itself, his master negotiations have led to Bruno signing six months later, while leading to an overall saving of zilch.
In my view the worst decision he can take if we don't get top 4 is to fire Ole, as he has been the only one till now to have a sensible view of squad building. The best decision? Fire himself.
What are these "all accounts"? I think it's fair to blame him for the Moyes window, but that comes down to his inexperience at the time, and Moyes' cluelessness. But let's be real for a moment here, and take a look at our managerial hires (which is a far more fair criticism of Woodward). None of the managers we've hired post Fergie have been good enough, and their careers after leaving here have been testament to that. Even Ole, who has been the best of a bad bunch so far, he failed in the PL, and only found managerial success in Norwegian league. Now the big difference has been that Ole actually has modern football ideas, and that alone makes him a significant improvement on his predecessors. The other thing that I'll give Ole credit for is that he is well liked by players, and he brought harmony back to the locker room after the toxic disaster with Mourinho.
That being said, Ole is 100% responsible for the signings that have taken place under him. We insanely overpaid for an above average English CB with serious deficiencies, and a young English fullback with severe limitations on the ball. This is something most of us knew before signing those players, and they didn't magically develop their shortcomings as players. We knew that we were getting decent players who would improve our squad, but we were also aware that we're massively overpaying for them. And that is the cost of doing business with PL clubs these days, as they'll charge obscene transfer fees for overhyped British players. Additionally, the players that our post-Fergie managers have signed aligned with the type of players they've signed or played in the past, so there's absolutely zero evidence to suggest that it was Woodward's doing. As for negotations, I'll give you Fellaini, but the Bruno signing was something that we had reservations on in the summer, and I would say that it came from Ole's point of view, not Woodward's.