Man United's biggest blunder is the harm done to Moyes by his novice sidekick
By MARTIN SAMUEL
PUBLISHED: 23:14, 3 September 2013
It was around 10.50pm on Monday when Everton finally accepted a bid of £27.5million for Marouane Fellaini. About five minutes later than their chairman, Bill Kenwright, predicted. All day, Everton had braced themselves for the inevitable, particularly after Fellaini had told manager Roberto Martinez, face to face, that he wanted to leave. Even so, it was tight, particularly after one final aberration in the paperwork.
A year ago, similar last-day pandemonium at other clubs had inspired a waspish remark by former Manchester United captain Gary Neville. ‘What the transfer deadline gives you is a clear indication of the badly run football clubs,’ he tweeted. How very true.
Manchester United are not badly run in a commercial sense. In fact, they are the envy of the rest of the Premier League, if not Europe. Yet the football has been badly run this summer. Not since the film The Wicker Man has a chap by the name of Edward Woodward looked so out of his depth; except this was no act.
Woodward, the new Manchester United chief executive, has had his own excruciating baptism of fire. He ended up paying £27.5m on September 2 for a player who would have cost £23.5m on July 31, and might have got the goals United have so plainly needed in their last two matches.
Everton are the first to admit that no canny game of brinkmanship had been played. Fellaini had a buy-out clause that expired on August 1 and had United met the price before that date, there was nothing to do but sell.
Once that moment passed, however, a premium for late business would have to be paid. Now Everton could say no, unless Manchester United met their valuation, reasonable or not. It was this that Woodward failed to comprehend.
A star in the world of commerce, he had a problem with the basic economics of supply and demand. United continued bidding £23.5m and at one stage are believed to have also offered to waive Everton’s outstanding payment on Darron Gibson, a sum in the region of £200,000, as if this would sweeten the pill.
Woodward’s background is the marketplace, but there is a big difference between hammering out a deal with Aeroflot and bringing Everton to the table. Aeroflot want to deal; Everton do not. Leighton Baines angled to join Manchester United, too. The transfer did not happen. Sensing that Baines had deeper feelings for his current club than Fellaini — and that Martinez saw him as more important to the team — Everton stood firm.
So while United scrambled around at, literally, the 11th hour, deals elsewhere went west. They tried to play hard ball over Ander Herrera from Athletic Bilbao and were rejected, while Fabio Coentrao of Real Madrid thought he was going to Old Trafford on loan only for the move to fall apart at the last. Arsenal had been cast as the mugs of the summer, but Manchester United contrived to snatch that defeat from the jaws of mediocrity.
Until Monday it had merely been an unimpressive performance from United yet, somehow, in buying Fellaini at a £4m surplus amid chaos, they looked even worse. It should, and could, have been done months ago. Inescapably, there is the feeling that with David Gill and Sir Alex Ferguson in charge, it would have been.
Ferguson had some hair-raising final hours in the transfer market, it must be said, but few were of his own making. The desire of Daniel Levy, the Tottenham Hotspur chairman, to squeeze every last drop from Dimitar Berbatov’s transfer in 2008 made it tight, but Michael Carrick’s move from the same club two years earlier is a better indication of the United way.
The first offer was announced on June 10 and loudly rejected, but the transfer was still completed by July 28. Even Robin van Persie’s complex extraction from Arsenal last year took place more than two weeks before the window closed.
Gill was not by nature a wheeler-dealer — he was an accountant — but he would have known enough to get Fellaini through the door before August 1 and not to insult Everton with under-valued, parcelled-up offers for Fellaini and Baines, either. United are swift to act, usually. Hours after the title was lost to Manchester City in 2012, Ferguson asked Harry Redknapp of Tottenham to name his price for Luka Modric.
The wider issue is the damage done to Moyes by his novice sidekick. Here was a manager succeeding Ferguson and in need of a transfer market statement. Instead, Woodward allowed him to be publicly rejected by Thiago Alcantara and Cesc Fabregas, then made matters worse by self-importantly heading off from the pre-season tour of Australia to conduct urgent transfer business, only for the club to announce signings involving Bulova, Apollo and Pepsico — unfortunately not a trio of tricky Brazilians but the manufacturers of watches, tyres, soft drinks and snacks.
This is the world in which Woodward is most comfortable. His ability to generate funds has been described as little short of astonishing. Sadly, an ally who knows his way around the world of Taiwanese tyre manufacture — Federal Corporation are another of United’s new signings — is not what Moyes needs right now.
Manchester United’s ever-expanding list of commercial collaborators may be proof of a well-run business but Moyes must hope his latest partner is as quick a learner when it comes to marshalling a football club.
If the team doesn’t function, in time, it becomes as hard to attract the Bulovas as the Herreras.
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