Here's the full article from the athletic.
Dear Joel, Bryan, Kevin, Avi, Darcie, Edward.
Perhaps you might not consider this an appropriate time to make acquaintances when, as you have discovered more times than you probably wish to remember, it never feels like we are too far away these days from the next occasion when the whole of football is rubbernecking in Manchester United’s direction.
But it has not been particularly easy to get your attention on the fleeting moments our paths have crossed and, with all the security you pay to get you in and out of Old Trafford, I wasn’t entirely confident what might happen if I was ever close enough to your car to tap on the windows.
Let me begin though, by offering an olive branch and acknowledging that maybe I was wrong with some of my assumptions when you came down Sir Matt Busby Way for the first time and there were protest banners letting you know what they thought of it.
It has been 14 years and perhaps this is the time to cut you a little slack, particularly in your case, Joel, when I can see now that I was mistaken in those early days to believe you would prefer to run everything via remote control from Florida.
A little thing, perhaps, but I heard from one of your colleagues recently that you keep a framed shirt at home from the fixture against Manchester City at Old Trafford in 2008 when the two clubs arranged a ceasefire to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Munich disaster.
I know, Joel, because I have seen you, that you and Avi like to fly over for as many matches as your schedule allows, and I have heard the story of your celebrations on that epic night in 2008 when the Champions League final in Moscow was settled on penalties.
Apparently you wanted to sit outside that night to take in the noise and colour rather than watching from behind the windows of an executive suite. Your colleagues still reminisce about the moment Edwin van der Sar kept out Nicolas Anelka for the game’s decisive moment and how, in the sort of euphoria that was once the norm for this club, you tumbled backwards and ended up on top of Ed Woodward in the next row.
It tells us that maybe you care more than we realised and that you do have the basis of an understanding of what it takes to invest emotionally, not just financially, in a football club. It tells us that perhaps it was unfair to assume your knowledge of football could fit on the back of a postage stamp.
Except, it doesn’t really make much difference, does it Joel?
Financially, of course, it has been an absolute triumph for your family if we tot up how much you have already drained from Old Trafford, the tax benefits of registering the club in the Cayman Islands and the jaw-dropping sums that will eventually come your way when you sign the business over to Saudi Arabia or whoever else makes you an offer you can’t refuse. On that front, you have won. However anyone tries to dress it up, the facts are irrefutable. You have won, big time.
Equally, let’s not kid ourselves that it is working out in any other way besides your collective ability to turn Old Trafford into your own giant fruit machine.
You see, there are certain things you ought to realise about Manchester United and what it is that makes this club so widely cherished. After all this time, it is not greatly encouraging that you still appear to need reminding of them here.
The first thing is that the club’s supporters do not automatically assume their team is going to play majestically all the time. They might have seen great things and, granted, they have experienced the kind of adventures that can breed a certain haughtiness. But there was always a realism, believe it or not, that there might be some difficult challenges once you, and everybody running the club, had lost the safety blanket of Sir Alex Ferguson’s management skills to snuggle against.
What they are not so willing to tolerate, however, is the kind of stagnation that has sent what was once a team of serial champions towards the relegation quicksands of a league when, in different times, United’s participation near the top was the closest thing to a guarantee the sport could ever provide.
What they cannot excuse is the lack of care — for that is what it is — that has left a famous stadium showing its age and badly in need of some TLC over these last few years.
Nor can they excuse the absence of joined-up thinking from the top of the club that helps to explain why the current side are grubbing round for points in the lower reaches of the league and why, six years after Ferguson’s retirement, it is already starting to feel like nostalgia to remember the times when Old Trafford was a monument to brilliant and progressive work.
What none of us outsiders know is how you feel to have the finger of blame pointing in your direction. This is, after all, your watch. They are your fingerprints. And it was you, ultimately, who placed a level of trust in a regime, with Woodward at its forefront, that on the evidence so far has not come close to justifying that faith. Do you feel anything? Is your intention to do something about it?
Or, should I know better and concede it is futile hoping you might provide an insight into your business strategies when, despite all your PR about maintaining an open dialogue, there has been only one interview since your first day in Manchester, and it was boxed off with MUTV (not a station, let’s face it, known for Paxman-esque interrogation) to create the illusion of a good-news story?
That was you, Joel, and no doubt you remember very well the rancour of those days.
Perhaps you also recall – because many people don’t – the clear impression left by David Gill, the club’s then chief executive, that he was initially opposed to your takeover. Gill, awkward as this might seem now, took the view that “debt is the road to ruin” and, to this day, is reminded of that infamous quote among the protest banners.
As for Ferguson, maybe you remember that he, too, didn’t seem too keen initially about putting his name to your empire. He did, of course, become your biggest ally and, if I can lighten the mood for a moment, I can still chuckle about his sulphurous reaction when Stuart Mathieson, of the Manchester Evening News, had the temerity to name-check the fans’ breakaway team known as FC United of Manchester.
Enough of the nostalgia, though, when there is so much to discuss about the modern United and the gathering evidence — if you are aware of the quote — that Liverpool are clambering back on their perch and that it is the team from Anfield, as well as Manchester City, producing football of butterfly beauty. The kind of football, you may recall, that was the hallmark of the great United teams.
Were you aware that the crowd of 71,203 for the recent game against Arsenal was United’s lowest for a Premier League encounter in the post-Ferguson years? Or that the Europa League tie against Astana a fortnight earlier produced the smallest crowd — 50,783 — for any fixture at Old Trafford since 2012? Still a decent turnout, you might think, but 7,000-odd fewer than any other time United have played at home in that competition.
If this strikes you as a negative tone, maybe that is because this is the first time in 20 years of covering United that the club feels more synonymous with a leaky stadium roof and a disenchanted fanbase than everything it used to represent in happier days.
They were the days, even if it was subconscious sometimes, when match-goers at Old Trafford found themselves quickening their pace on the walk to the ground. I can vouch for that personally. Every single game — here’s the thing – felt like a showpiece occasion.
True, there were times when the club made bad signings and the team put in disappointing performances. Ferguson was not immune. Even on the difficult days though, there was something mesmerising about the sight of United chasing a game.
It was the era when David Beckham, Paul Scholes and Roy Keane, then Wayne Rooney and so many others, wore the club’s colours with distinction. It was the time Ryan Giggs, the boy who played football like a man, became the man who played football like a boy. And it was against this backdrop, in 2003, that I watched a skinny 18-year-old with gelled hair, braces on his teeth and a pimply forehead terrorise the defenders of Bolton Wanderers in what George Best described as “undoubtedly the most exciting debut I have ever seen.”
Cristiano Ronaldo, you might remember, made it clear he was going to take a malicious sense of pleasure from menacing opposition defences. When he did the same to Bolton again a couple of seasons later their manager, Sam Allardyce, was asked if his players might have been left with psychological scars. “Scars?” he replied. “We’re going to need a fecking plastic surgeon after that.”
And now? Perhaps the place to start is to ask why it is that Paul Pogba, the player you gave away for nothing in 2012 then bought back for £89 million four years later, wanted out again over the summer.
Maybe, Joel, you are feeling rather pleased with yourself after the Europa League tie against Partizan Belgrade, bearing in mind the match-winner, Anthony Martial, is said to be your favourite player. Indeed, the word behind the scenes is that you regard Martial as “the club’s Pele” and that may have been one of the reasons why the former manager, Jose Mourinho, who was not such a fan, was prevented from moving him out.
But it is 10 years since Ronaldo decided there were better adventures to be had elsewhere and I have to break the news that it is not just Mourinho who has misgivings about whether Martial — a good, occasionally excellent, forward but not one to bet your mortgage on — is the player to help United remember who they are, and what they are supposed to stand for.
It is a touchy subject, I presume, when the men you hire to find the right personnel have squandered untold sums on Alexis Sanchez, Radamel Falcao and Angel Di Maria among a list of vanity projects and transfer-market fails that is far too long to dissect here.
How did they get it so wrong?
Or, to put it another way, how did you get it so wrong?
The real mystery is what you, the Glazers, get out of it, other than the obvious, when you and your security detail must have picked up the vibe that the people who spend fortunes following the team are straying dangerously close to mutiny once again.
Someone, you see, has to ask these questions when so many of the club’s former players, with their freebies and their perks and their reluctance to burn bridges, plainly find it preferable to skirt around the subject.
I will not anticipate a reply, but it is time you thought about providing a few answers, unless you want to risk more of the opprobrium you faced in those early years. It wasn’t pretty, was it? But, can anyone say those people got it wrong?
Dear Joel, Bryan, Kevin, Avi, Darcie, Edward.
Perhaps you might not consider this an appropriate time to make acquaintances when, as you have discovered more times than you probably wish to remember, it never feels like we are too far away these days from the next occasion when the whole of football is rubbernecking in Manchester United’s direction.
But it has not been particularly easy to get your attention on the fleeting moments our paths have crossed and, with all the security you pay to get you in and out of Old Trafford, I wasn’t entirely confident what might happen if I was ever close enough to your car to tap on the windows.
Let me begin though, by offering an olive branch and acknowledging that maybe I was wrong with some of my assumptions when you came down Sir Matt Busby Way for the first time and there were protest banners letting you know what they thought of it.
It has been 14 years and perhaps this is the time to cut you a little slack, particularly in your case, Joel, when I can see now that I was mistaken in those early days to believe you would prefer to run everything via remote control from Florida.
A little thing, perhaps, but I heard from one of your colleagues recently that you keep a framed shirt at home from the fixture against Manchester City at Old Trafford in 2008 when the two clubs arranged a ceasefire to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Munich disaster.
I know, Joel, because I have seen you, that you and Avi like to fly over for as many matches as your schedule allows, and I have heard the story of your celebrations on that epic night in 2008 when the Champions League final in Moscow was settled on penalties.
Apparently you wanted to sit outside that night to take in the noise and colour rather than watching from behind the windows of an executive suite. Your colleagues still reminisce about the moment Edwin van der Sar kept out Nicolas Anelka for the game’s decisive moment and how, in the sort of euphoria that was once the norm for this club, you tumbled backwards and ended up on top of Ed Woodward in the next row.
It tells us that maybe you care more than we realised and that you do have the basis of an understanding of what it takes to invest emotionally, not just financially, in a football club. It tells us that perhaps it was unfair to assume your knowledge of football could fit on the back of a postage stamp.
Except, it doesn’t really make much difference, does it Joel?
Financially, of course, it has been an absolute triumph for your family if we tot up how much you have already drained from Old Trafford, the tax benefits of registering the club in the Cayman Islands and the jaw-dropping sums that will eventually come your way when you sign the business over to Saudi Arabia or whoever else makes you an offer you can’t refuse. On that front, you have won. However anyone tries to dress it up, the facts are irrefutable. You have won, big time.
Equally, let’s not kid ourselves that it is working out in any other way besides your collective ability to turn Old Trafford into your own giant fruit machine.
You see, there are certain things you ought to realise about Manchester United and what it is that makes this club so widely cherished. After all this time, it is not greatly encouraging that you still appear to need reminding of them here.
The first thing is that the club’s supporters do not automatically assume their team is going to play majestically all the time. They might have seen great things and, granted, they have experienced the kind of adventures that can breed a certain haughtiness. But there was always a realism, believe it or not, that there might be some difficult challenges once you, and everybody running the club, had lost the safety blanket of Sir Alex Ferguson’s management skills to snuggle against.
What they are not so willing to tolerate, however, is the kind of stagnation that has sent what was once a team of serial champions towards the relegation quicksands of a league when, in different times, United’s participation near the top was the closest thing to a guarantee the sport could ever provide.
What they cannot excuse is the lack of care — for that is what it is — that has left a famous stadium showing its age and badly in need of some TLC over these last few years.
Nor can they excuse the absence of joined-up thinking from the top of the club that helps to explain why the current side are grubbing round for points in the lower reaches of the league and why, six years after Ferguson’s retirement, it is already starting to feel like nostalgia to remember the times when Old Trafford was a monument to brilliant and progressive work.
What none of us outsiders know is how you feel to have the finger of blame pointing in your direction. This is, after all, your watch. They are your fingerprints. And it was you, ultimately, who placed a level of trust in a regime, with Woodward at its forefront, that on the evidence so far has not come close to justifying that faith. Do you feel anything? Is your intention to do something about it?
Or, should I know better and concede it is futile hoping you might provide an insight into your business strategies when, despite all your PR about maintaining an open dialogue, there has been only one interview since your first day in Manchester, and it was boxed off with MUTV (not a station, let’s face it, known for Paxman-esque interrogation) to create the illusion of a good-news story?
That was you, Joel, and no doubt you remember very well the rancour of those days.
Perhaps you also recall – because many people don’t – the clear impression left by David Gill, the club’s then chief executive, that he was initially opposed to your takeover. Gill, awkward as this might seem now, took the view that “debt is the road to ruin” and, to this day, is reminded of that infamous quote among the protest banners.
As for Ferguson, maybe you remember that he, too, didn’t seem too keen initially about putting his name to your empire. He did, of course, become your biggest ally and, if I can lighten the mood for a moment, I can still chuckle about his sulphurous reaction when Stuart Mathieson, of the Manchester Evening News, had the temerity to name-check the fans’ breakaway team known as FC United of Manchester.
Enough of the nostalgia, though, when there is so much to discuss about the modern United and the gathering evidence — if you are aware of the quote — that Liverpool are clambering back on their perch and that it is the team from Anfield, as well as Manchester City, producing football of butterfly beauty. The kind of football, you may recall, that was the hallmark of the great United teams.
Were you aware that the crowd of 71,203 for the recent game against Arsenal was United’s lowest for a Premier League encounter in the post-Ferguson years? Or that the Europa League tie against Astana a fortnight earlier produced the smallest crowd — 50,783 — for any fixture at Old Trafford since 2012? Still a decent turnout, you might think, but 7,000-odd fewer than any other time United have played at home in that competition.
If this strikes you as a negative tone, maybe that is because this is the first time in 20 years of covering United that the club feels more synonymous with a leaky stadium roof and a disenchanted fanbase than everything it used to represent in happier days.
They were the days, even if it was subconscious sometimes, when match-goers at Old Trafford found themselves quickening their pace on the walk to the ground. I can vouch for that personally. Every single game — here’s the thing – felt like a showpiece occasion.
True, there were times when the club made bad signings and the team put in disappointing performances. Ferguson was not immune. Even on the difficult days though, there was something mesmerising about the sight of United chasing a game.
It was the era when David Beckham, Paul Scholes and Roy Keane, then Wayne Rooney and so many others, wore the club’s colours with distinction. It was the time Ryan Giggs, the boy who played football like a man, became the man who played football like a boy. And it was against this backdrop, in 2003, that I watched a skinny 18-year-old with gelled hair, braces on his teeth and a pimply forehead terrorise the defenders of Bolton Wanderers in what George Best described as “undoubtedly the most exciting debut I have ever seen.”
Cristiano Ronaldo, you might remember, made it clear he was going to take a malicious sense of pleasure from menacing opposition defences. When he did the same to Bolton again a couple of seasons later their manager, Sam Allardyce, was asked if his players might have been left with psychological scars. “Scars?” he replied. “We’re going to need a fecking plastic surgeon after that.”
And now? Perhaps the place to start is to ask why it is that Paul Pogba, the player you gave away for nothing in 2012 then bought back for £89 million four years later, wanted out again over the summer.
Maybe, Joel, you are feeling rather pleased with yourself after the Europa League tie against Partizan Belgrade, bearing in mind the match-winner, Anthony Martial, is said to be your favourite player. Indeed, the word behind the scenes is that you regard Martial as “the club’s Pele” and that may have been one of the reasons why the former manager, Jose Mourinho, who was not such a fan, was prevented from moving him out.
But it is 10 years since Ronaldo decided there were better adventures to be had elsewhere and I have to break the news that it is not just Mourinho who has misgivings about whether Martial — a good, occasionally excellent, forward but not one to bet your mortgage on — is the player to help United remember who they are, and what they are supposed to stand for.
It is a touchy subject, I presume, when the men you hire to find the right personnel have squandered untold sums on Alexis Sanchez, Radamel Falcao and Angel Di Maria among a list of vanity projects and transfer-market fails that is far too long to dissect here.
How did they get it so wrong?
Or, to put it another way, how did you get it so wrong?
The real mystery is what you, the Glazers, get out of it, other than the obvious, when you and your security detail must have picked up the vibe that the people who spend fortunes following the team are straying dangerously close to mutiny once again.
Someone, you see, has to ask these questions when so many of the club’s former players, with their freebies and their perks and their reluctance to burn bridges, plainly find it preferable to skirt around the subject.
I will not anticipate a reply, but it is time you thought about providing a few answers, unless you want to risk more of the opprobrium you faced in those early years. It wasn’t pretty, was it? But, can anyone say those people got it wrong?
