Ed Woodward | Groundhog Day Edition

AsonUnique

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Just because the window is still open, I'll wait to pass judgement. But gosh, the stench of incompetence is thick in the air. If we finish with only VDB signed, after the momentum we garnered at the end of last season, then I'm not sure there'll be any point in ever expecting us to get back to the top under this ownership. We'll just be a top 4 chasing club, serving only to pad their wallets. But like I said, I'll wait 3 weeks to judge...
I feel the same way on waiting. It's just tough because there aren't many links to players right now. Season is starting for us in a couple days. If we had Bruno earlier in the winter I guarantee we would have gotten more points.

I am ok if we miss out, especially a 120 million deal or a buyback but we need a backup of some sort. The other problem is how public most of our transfers are, VdB being the exception. It looks worse because we have been briefing on Sancho for months. I understand briefs but my goodness when we miss we our board look incompetent.

As many have said I am worried this starts the same cycle of not backing Ole him getting fired and we start over again.
 

monosierra

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Is he, though? We've spent incredible amounts of money on both transfers and wages and have very little success to show for it, especially compared to what you'd expect from a club of our stature, and a club with our expenditure.

Even if we look past the fact that we've overspent on handfuls of garbage players in the last seven years, the money received from consistently playing in the Champions League and just being a competitive and marketable club would have probably outweighed the extra expenditure required to get to that level, especially long term. Kids growing up today aren't looking at our club any more, like they used to 10-25 years ago. Compared to Liverpool, City, Real Madrid, Barca, PSG, Bayern and Dortmund we don't have as many star players, we're not as entertaining to watch, we're not winning the big trophies and we're not as fun to play as on FIFA, and the result of that is that less kids are growing up as United fans nowadays. Sure, we're still pulling in fortunes on sponsorship deals, but it's off the back of the work done during the Fergie era that caused throngs of kids, such as myself to fall in love with the club and the football that it played, and not because Woodward is such a savvy business man. That gravy train is going to slow down if we don't get our act together quickly. The fact that we lose out on a big chunk of the Adidas money if we don't qualify for Champions League shows how important performance is from a financial perspective, and if Woody's just going to sit there with is hands in his pockets while our closest rivals are in full-on Arms Race Mode we're basically throwing more money down the toilet without even having any new players to show for it.

At the end of the day, Woodward is doing a pretty average job of generating short term profits, but if he'd had the brains to hire better people to deal with player and manager recruitment we would probably have spent less on transfer fees and wages, while performing better as a team, which in turn would have allowed Ed to negotiate even better sponsorship deals because of our increased exposure and marketability. It's all hypothetical, of course, but does anyone honestly believe we're even close to maximizing our profitability under Ed? If the answer is no, he's not doing well for his employer.
Good point. I personally think our brand is not increasing in value or attraction. We have been spending enormous sums just to stay in the top 4 race. Could Woodward have spent more wisely (Like FSG and Pool) and actually won trophies - a far superior rate of return?
 

Offside

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We’ve got Ighalo and VDB in, Henderson and Smalling are like new signings. Josh King on loan deadline day for more depth.
 
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There's absolute no evidence what so ever of that being true :lol: :lol:
"Woodward said: “I don’t like the fact that, in the list of 25 players in the Ballon d’Or, we’ll have Robin (van Persie) and Wayne (Rooney).

“I don’t like the fact that there are consistently more players from Spain on that list.

“We as a club should be aspiring to have the best players playing for us. We’ve had that in the past. We’re in for players if the manager wants to be.
.........
Asked if United would lose a player like Cristiano Ronaldo to Real in the future, he added: “We won’t lose on price.”


https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.ma...oodward-insists-manchester-united-6251411.amp

Right. It's not Woodward famously said these things. It is just managers and not him also that was interested in bagging galacticos......:lol::lol:
 

::sonny::

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Strange to say, but in this moment is important to not spend big money, because in 6 months you could get players with 50% discount with a probably incoming new lookdown during this winter
 

Revan

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Strange to say, but in this moment is important to not spend big money, because in 6 months you could get players with 50% discount with a probably incoming new lookdown during this winter
Obvious as that. There is a reason why no club (except Chelsea who had a transfer ban and got 140m or so for Hazard) are spending big money.
 

amolbhatia50k

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Strange to say, but in this moment is important to not spend big money, because in 6 months you could get players with 50% discount with a probably incoming new lookdown during this winter
50% discount is a bit much. Do you really think Sancho will go for 50 million in Jan/next summer. Just don't see it happening. You could save 15 odd million but then again other clubs could also go for him pushing the price up or lowering our chances. I'm not convinced by the drastic impact of Covid on prices. Would Havertz normally cost 150 million? I don't think so.
 

gorky_utd

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Strange to say, but in this moment is important to not spend big money, because in 6 months you could get players with 50% discount with a probably incoming new lookdown during this winter
Then why waste the whole summer pretending to purchase a 100m player? Surely the club could have easily bought cheaper alternatives like Perisic, Telles etc and sold some deadwoods to improve the overall quality of the squad. I think your point would have been valid if the club decided against 100m purchase but strengthen other areas. The season is starting this weekend and so far nothing has been done apart from vdb.
 

TrustInJanuzaj

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This summer now has disaster written all over it and what a massive shame it will be. I know people are likening this to 2018 but to me it’s entirely different. At that stage I wanted Mourinho gone, he had sunk money into a pit with nothing to show for it and we still played horrible football. Now I just feel we are so close, I feel with even 2 more great signings we can compete for the title. As it is there is still reason to be excited by the season but the club will have taken all of our momentum away.
 

Dr. StrangeHate

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Then why waste the whole summer pretending to purchase a 100m player? Surely the club could have easily bought cheaper alternatives like Perisic, Telles etc and sold some deadwoods to improve the overall quality of the squad. I think your point would have been valid if the club decided against 100m purchase but strengthen other areas. The season is starting this weekend and so far nothing has been done apart from vdb.
There is still time before the window closes. We don't need any new players to beat Crystal palace or Brighton so the season start is relatively straightforward.
Being cautious in this economy is the right move.
 

Sparky_Hughes

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You've mentioned in previous posts that you are a business owner yourself, right?

If you owned United and had zero emotional attachment, how would you operate?

Would you not squeeze every bit of discount on the transfer and agent fees? Negotiate personal terms that are in line with long term budget? Delay costs to the absolute latest?

I also don't like it but my rational side completely sees the logic and agrees with it.

If we don't get our targets, I assume they were out of financial reach and made no sense considering our budget limitations (we do have such, contrary to popular belief). And I don't think settling for "second-best" targets and buying players just for the sake of buying players, will do the club any good.
Whilst I agree to a.point, it can be a false economy, i wouldnt scrimp and bargain for every last penny at the cost of providing the best service or product I can. If you make your core product/service the absolute best it can be profits will follow.
 

Bilbo

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There is still time before the window closes
I really can't understand why so many people are struggling with this concept. This new collective outburst is really quite bizarre. Is it some sort of Covid related outpouring of pent up aggression and frustration or something?
 

harms

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Good thing you mentioned those three clubs. Have a look at this..

It’s literally insane that the club is able to remain competitive with those kind of numbers. We all kinda know the situation, but when you see the visualization...
 

Keefy18

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Yeah, like you. You have feck all evidence for your standpoint.

Let's have a look at the cold, hard facts. Zero PL titles under Woodward, Zero CL titles under Woodward. We won the PL the season before he came in. Now we're nowhere near. 5 managers later, might I add.

They're the facts.
Again, Woodward doesn't control the football side of things.

It's incredible really how many supporters don't understand the structure of our club.
 

Gandalf Greyhame

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I feel we're getting carried away and blaming Ed for all the wrong things, right now. There are a lot of sticks to beat him with, let's make sure we use the correct ones.

Being unwilling to spend 120m on Sancho is not by itself the problem (we should be able to if the Glazers weren't leeching off the club, but that's another story) because we did spend big on Bruno and Covid's uncertaintly may not allow buying clubs to agree with the valuation of selling clubs. Where we should hold Ed responsible is how he had all the information needed to assess whether or not Sancho's transfer would be possible, but didn't take the call early ro move on to other RW targets once it seemed clear that Dortmund weren't going to budge.

Missing out on Regulion is not the issue. By all accounts both the player and Real wanted a buy-back and a pre-emption clause, and we aren't a stepping stone club. It's a matter of principle - we were right to refuse Haaland and are right to refuse Regulion right now. What is Ed's monumental feck up is not having an alternate target in mind for LB if we knew that was a priority. It is sheer incompetence to not be able to judge Regulion's availability, assess where we draw the line and move on to other targets to swiftly conclude business.

A proper footballing setup at a club of our magnitude should have the ability and nous to understand and judge what would be needed to make a transfer happen, and to decide quickly if we as a club are satisfied with said requirements. The setup should also have the decisiveness to move on to alternate targets quickly in order to meet the manager's demands to the extent the club's principles and budgets allow it. With the amount of transfer outlay we have seen under the Glazers, it would still have been possible to have a strong, competitive team - if the funds were used wisely. But we had limited money and we've mostly pissed it away in the wind, in very predictable ways every single summer. That is where Ed is to blame - with his inconsistent, dithering, conflicted, contradictory, naive, incompetent and snail-like performance in terms of recruitment and squad management.

We are a comic tragedy because we could have been title contenders even with what the Glazers let the club spend, but we aren't even CL regulars because our decision makers are shockingly inept. We aren't going to challenge for any major title under this current setup - they're simply incapable of implementing any semblence of a plan.
 

Keefy18

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"Woodward said: “I don’t like the fact that, in the list of 25 players in the Ballon d’Or, we’ll have Robin (van Persie) and Wayne (Rooney).

“I don’t like the fact that there are consistently more players from Spain on that list.

“We as a club should be aspiring to have the best players playing for us. We’ve had that in the past. We’re in for players if the manager wants to be.
.........
Asked if United would lose a player like Cristiano Ronaldo to Real in the future, he added: “We won’t lose on price.”


https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.ma...oodward-insists-manchester-united-6251411.amp

Right. It's not Woodward famously said these things. It is just managers and not him also that was interested in bagging galacticos......:lol::lol:
You do realize this is literally months after he took on his new role of CEO? Have you bothered to read his more recent interview with UWS fanzine?

Here's some quotes for you

"I want everyone to know that everyone at the club, not least me, is aware we are not where we need to be right now, relative to the standards we set ourselves.
Recruitment isn't everything, but it's pretty close. You have to get that right and we haven't done that consistently enough in the past. I want to try and explain how we have evolved it. We have changed the recruitment structure so that it doesn't look anything like it did a few years ago. We have invested a lot. We're confident that we have a disciplined process that works. That's partly evidenced by what happened in the summer, but we need to judge over a period of time.

We've added scouts, increasing from 12 to 60, including academy scouts for greater breadth and depth. That allows us to act quicker when someone emerges. We've also put a big investment into our own software system. It's a bespoke system, not off the shelf. We looked at the size of our data and video analyst teams. We've realised that we needed to invest there and we've increased that by three or four times. We've also taken the chief scout role and evolved that, adding other people who can watch live games and recommend players.

The decisions related to recruitment are all taken by football experts. My involvement is signing off the money. The manager has a veto on a player - we would never sign a player the manager wouldn't want because he wouldn't play him. But we also feel the recruitment department, the football experts, should have a veto too.

The system wasn't set up in the right way. Twelve scouts reporting to one chief scout was more set up to say no — too many exceptions to the process were made historically while this was being fixed. We also have to hold our hands up and say that recruitment wasn't at its best in recent years. We feel that we now know who our best scouts are. The idea is to recruit in a closed environment, rather than listening to the press or getting distracted by conflicting agents' claims. We try and make cold decisions based on information.

I've got no interest in holding onto power. I like to delegate as much as I can. I'm not making day-to-day football decisions and there's not a huge amount for me to give up. I don't get involved in recruitment like people think I do. There's a myth that I look at YouTube and choose players. I don't. Having an eye for players is an art. I have no interest in doing that. I just want to have a disciplined process because if you are spending a lot of money on a player you have to make sure you get more right than wrong.

Where I get involved is that I have to sign off the money, yet when you have target one, two or three from your process I feel fine going after the number one target and, if it's not to be him, then number two or three. I learn every day; it's an unbelievable club, the biggest in the world. The scrutiny in the last 12-14 months is a reminder of that.

As for regrets, of course I have some. I can't say some. I also regret the communication early on around the commercial success. They were statements in earnings calls about the financial strength of the club. People have listened to that and decided we don't care about the football side. I want people to feel comforted that this is not the case.

One [regret] is how that quote [performances not effecting commercial side] came across — what I meant was that sponsorship are long-term deals. They don't go up and down based on playing performance."

What's wrong with putting sound bites out that show we want the best players? Are you suggesting we shouldn't have the best players?

So let me get this straight, he's wrong for wanting the best players and if we don't get the best players.. he's also wrong? Sound logic right there pal... absolute genius you truly are!
 

DomesticTadpole

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Don't know why we are all so worried about missing out on Sancho, when Woodward has made it perfectly clear in the past that United have an absolutely world-beating scouting system at their fingertips.

Rest assured, we will have people in every corner of the globe feeding player information back to the superbrains at Carrington. Indeed, just like last summer, we will surely have a shortlist of 800+ players for that right wing position - Ed told us this is how we work. I look forward to seeing who the top class alternatives are...
Then we also have another bloke at OT telling the scouts that a players dad is too fat, that players like Bruno give the ball away too much etc.
 

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Whilst I agree to a.point, it can be a false economy, i wouldnt scrimp and bargain for every last penny at the cost of providing the best service or product I can. If you make your core product/service the absolute best it can be profits will follow.
I don't think there is significant evidence to prove that buying early leads to better product. If anything, Bruno coming in late in January serves as proof for the opposite.
 

Coleyoscar

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There is still time before the window closes. We don't need any new players to beat Crystal palace or Brighton so the season start is relatively straightforward.
Being cautious in this economy is the right move.
In my opinion what we are witnessing is not strategic caution but a failure of ambition. It stretches credibility that the executives who have consistently made wrong choices for United have suddenly become strategic geniuses.
 

Heardy

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Good thing you mentioned those three clubs. Have a look at this..

This tells you exactly what is wrong with the running of the club. We are a cash cow for the ownership that are making bank.

They’ve made a hell of a return on their investment and sadly the commercial nous of Woodward takes priority over sustained success on the field.

Don’t even get me started on how we’ve neglected old Trafford because of this either whilst Arsenal, City, Spurs have Invested hugely.
 

Crustanoid

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TBH, it’s not even a conversation that the Glazers are fecking the club further and further into the ground. The conversation needs to be how we go about rectifying it. Getting rid of Woodward and replacing him with someone who has a clue about the football related needs of a football club would be a start. He has been shambolic and ignorant this summer. Perhaps more than even his own catastrophic standards. The irony is that we (well Ole) got ourselves in a great position at the end of the last season, which should have been built on to close the gap on the two worst ever teams to let surpass us by gross chronic negligence of football prowess-something the Glazers and Ed simply don’t give a flying feck about.
 

Annihilate Now!

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I say it all the time, but there are few people anywhere who can be so incompetent at at least half of their job and yet still have the job security he has.

He's a moron, with the planning skills and foresight of a goldfish.
 

snowkarl

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It’s literally insane that the club is able to remain competitive with those kind of numbers. We all kinda know the situation, but when you see the visualization...
I guess that entirely depends on how liberal you are when defining 'competitive'
 

reddevilchennai

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Just now imagined if Ed Woodward was the CEO when Fergie was the manager, the two would have had a major fall out for sure. With the way Ed had been dealing with transfers, I'm sure Fergie would have kicked his ass out of Old Trafford.
 

Preggy99

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First of all we have spent less than zero as a club over the past 5 years. The Glazers have taken 89 million out of the club just in transfer business (ins and outs) We have officially spent the least NET out of all the current clubs in the Prem! That to me is shocking enough, but then add that to the players we have been in talks with and lost out on, this equates to total incompetence on the part of Woodward and his team. Complete inability to attract players and get deals over the line, we have needed a CB, LB and RW for a long time, we have got nobody. Today we lose out to Thiago, Bale and Reguilón to the Bin Dippers and Spurs!! I know Thiago is another CM and we have Donny now, Bale on loan would have been a great option after missing out on Sancho and Reguilón is a class LB that stays fit. This shambles needs to stop, we should have 3-4 players in now and sold 3-4 as well. Joke of situation, Glazers out, Woodward out.
 
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Samid

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We've left ourselves handicapped yet again compared to our rivals. Well done Ed.
 

Strelok

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This summer now has disaster written all over it and what a massive shame it will be. I know people are likening this to 2018 but to me it’s entirely different. At that stage I wanted Mourinho gone, he had sunk money into a pit with nothing to show for it and we still played horrible football. Now I just feel we are so close, I feel with even 2 more great signings we can compete for the title. As it is there is still reason to be excited by the season but the club will have taken all of our momentum away.
Agreed.
 

Rozay

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Is Woodward meant to buy players from his own pocket or something?
 

Skeezix

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Is it too early for the customary "Manchester United looking for a Sporting Director/ Director of Football" articles to pop-up in the English papers? Or do we have to wait for the transfer window closing without Sancho in the no.7 shirt?
 

KiD MoYeS

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Attention needs to turn to the Glazers. This guy is a nobody, he only does his masters bidding.
 

Rooney1987

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Attention needs to turn to the Glazers. This guy is a nobody, he only does his masters bidding.
Iv no doubt the Sancho deal cash situation is the Glazers fault. However Ed should be held accountable he should work with Ole for cheaper alternatives rather then Sancho. Wasting all this time with one player and leaving the squad weaker is his fault. It’s literally his job.
 

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Iv no doubt the Sancho deal cash situation is the Glazers fault. However Ed should be held accountable he should work with Ole for cheaper alternatives rather then Sancho. Wasting all this time with one player and leaving the squad weaker is his fault. It’s literally his job.
I can't for the life of me think Ole a) only wants to be Sancho and that's it - he won't accept any other right wingers and b) Only wants to buy a right winger and that's it.... so unless we're completely broke (which would be a whole other issue) then Ed clearly has to be held accountable.
 

Highfather_24

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This summer we needed 3-4 signings on the back of a really good season, in order to keep up with the rest of the teams(who have invested in their squad), and because we have glaring weaknesses in our squad.

At the minimum we needed a RW, a midfielder and a left back. A top class DM and CB were lesser priorities, as we have numbers there.

So far we have just signed VDB(the midfielder). We have not signed a RW(which we dont have), or a LB(we just have Shaw). CBs and DMs are not being signed because we are choosing to trust our players we already have(Matic, Fred, Lindelof, Bailly, Tuanzebe etc).

However we are lite in full backs. We just have AWB, Shaw and Williams. Thats it. We need atleast one more full back.

And we just have 3 reliable forwards(Rashford, Martial and Greenwood). We need atleast one more.

I say if we dont get Sancho this summer, Woodward should be sacked. Just signing VDB and a mediocre RW would be disastrous window.