Steve Walsh was credited with their league success due to him identifying Mahrez and Kante. He later went to Everton and didn't do very well.
Manchester United name John Murtough as Football Director and Darren Fletcher as Technical Director
- Thread starter Tom Van Persie
- Start date
Yeah. Looks like a total mess. Ole has a "personal scout" and the whole thing looks like a political powerplay of a chaos.
Newsflash: Ole is the best manager we've had since SAF. Judging both by results and the progress in team quality.
Newsflash, he has yet to reach Mourinho's point tally or trophies. And the football we play is boring as feck.
Director of Culture
Tea/coffee maker?
Let's see what these clever football men can do in the summer then. I hope they know just how important this transfer window will be.
That is so wrong on so many levels I don't even know where to start.
Ole put the kettle onIt means he's the one to insist on not paying what the other club wants until deadline day where he caves in and overpay instead.
Typical caf.
We've been great since 2014 haven't we. He must have been doing something right.
He certainly is doing every right for him. Now he has even got a promotion too.
According to reports, the summer transfer plans were ratified in the winter. So Murtough has plenty of time to plan for 2022.
Murtough had nothing to do with our shambolic recruitment post Fergie from what I've read. There were reports that the likes of Murtough, Bout and Lawlor were frustrated with post Fergie managers not listening to them.
Mourinho used his own personal scouts from Portugal, and Van Gaal was signing players due to how they impressed his analysis team, when analysing the Dutch teams matches in the after-math. Rojo was one player that was signed in such a way.
Murtough's work has been very impressive by all accounts, and the most impressive example is the work he did to form the Women's team from scratch, a few years back. The team is now in a very short space of time, challenging for the title. He was given the responsibility and he delivered. We should now be patient and afford him the time to make his mark on the men's team
Mourinho used his own personal scouts from Portugal, and Van Gaal was signing players due to how they impressed his analysis team, when analysing the Dutch teams matches in the after-math. Rojo was one player that was signed in such a way.
Murtough's work has been very impressive by all accounts, and the most impressive example is the work he did to form the Women's team from scratch, a few years back. The team is now in a very short space of time, challenging for the title. He was given the responsibility and he delivered. We should now be patient and afford him the time to make his mark on the men's team
I am hoping that any contract negotiations for both current and prospective players will have to be okayed by Murtough as Judge our Director of Negotiations has to report to him and his track record in this recently has been frankly shocking. Personally I don't think we will see any noticeably quicker movement in the transfer market than usual as many of our targets will be playing in the Euros but expect to see improvements for Jan window if we are active.
I like it. When it comes to cost cutting, you can easily slash half and efficiency actually improve.
The problem was, when he started to consult the clubs recruitment team, the damage was done, hence Mourinho throwing his toys out of the pram.
Ed just went with what his team's suggestion. I don't believe, for instance, he's the one that came up with di Maria's, VDB's and Fred's name (players that the existing manager do not want) and decided the price to go for. I believe that's his team's suggestion. The same personnel he's been promoting from within.
So I don't really see how promoting from inside is a plus. Unless people like what they're seeing with our recruitments in the last 7 years or so. Which is pretty silly.
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Adult Disneyland Old Trafford Food and Beverage Director
You say this because you know anything about John Murtough, or you say this because you divined a byline at a press conference?
Who is Leo Getz in this setup?
This appointment and position required a strong influence over transfers and player contracts. I don't expect Mr Murtough to get that in his new role and its beggars belief that incompetent Matt Judge will still oversee negotiations.
I didn't realize this is our own Darren Fletcher. I have no idea who John Murtough is prior to his appointment. Seems like he has been with the club since 2013.
Why he hasn't used VdB is quite confusing, who by the way was playing as a AM and in a double pivot for Ajax in huge games in the UCL . VdB is a player who has fantastic spacial awareness and is superb at beating the press which is something we could really do with. And regards how the signing came about? Then I'm not gonna speculate and will instead point you to Solskjaer himself, who has made it clear that no signing will be made without his blessings.
Our recruitment in the past 7 years? Let's start from David Moyes. Moyes was appointed at a time when he was succeeding one of the all-time greats in Fergie. David Gill the then CEO also jumped ship after neglecting the academy for many years and leaving it in a very poor state. Woodward replaced him as the CEO and carried on with the manager model that saw Fergie bring great success to the club. So we had two new faces in key positions at a gigantic club, but both men had very little experience. We only had one fulltime scout (Jim Lawlor) which was a reduction from the two fulltime scouts we had under Fergie after his brother Martin Ferguson also retired along with him.
Moyes was then reported to have asked about data on potential incomings and the rest of the research that goes along with it, and he was told that all the information was in Jim Lawlor's head. So do you now understand the job Woodward and Moyes stepped into, was much harder than what was anticipated because after losing a legendary manager like Fergie we also had very little to fall back on. And the chap who's to blame for all this is none other than David Gill.
Moyes as much as we can all criticise the job he did at the club, did one good thing, which was to get the ball rolling when it came to adding a bunker style data centre at Carrington which was similar to the one he used at Finch Farm when he was Everton manager, which brought our club a significant upgrade which would be improved upon year by year. So what we saw in the summer market in 2013, was a club who had lost its driver (Fergie) and was being steered by two chaps (Woodward & Moyes) who didn't know the way.
Moyes then brought in John Murtough in 2014 who was working as the Premier League's head of elite development at the time to fix the issues at the club. The issues were significant because our scouting network was completey out of date and almost non existent when compared to other clubs. This was the mess both Woodward and Moyes inherited from David Gill, who as the CEO just rode on Fergie's coat tails.
Van Gaal then came in and and it was reported he was shocked at how 'unbalanced and broken' the squad was. The academy restructuring was taking place at the time with Murtough, Lawlor and the rest working to bring us up to date in that regard when compared to our rivals, who we had fallen years behind. But the issue was that we carried on with our approach of giving the manager total control in the transfer market and we brought in more dud signings due to trusting the manager to lead the footballing department. Schweinsteiger, Blind, Depay, Rojo, etc were signed without the say so of the scouts. Rojo was signed due to him impressing Van Gaal's analytics team after the Dutch were defeated in the world cup semi-final v Argentina, according to Van Gaal himself. Di Maria and Falcao were also signed due to Van Gaal name dropping one and citing the other players goal scoring record as to why he should be signed. But when he was sacked, he left a parting gift in the form of Marcel Bout who was the opposition scout during LVGs tenure and was later appointed as the head of global scouting in October 2016 where he assigns the scouts on their mission(s) around the globe and they report back to him.
Mourinho then replaced LVG and was backed heavily but his signings left a lot to be desired. It was also reported by highly reputable journos that he was using his own personal scouts to sign players and we ended up with several average players who should never have been signed for the money it took to bring them to the club. But the penny finally dropped with Woodward and he finally took notice of the clubs recruitment department which had grown exponentially since Fergie retired and it was the likes of Bout, Lawlor and Murtough who put paid to Mourinho's autonomy in the transfer market, hence Mourinho throwing his toys out of the pram.
So how can you blame our recruitment department when the manager is leading the football department and is signing players due to trusting scouts who are independent from the club he's working for?
Most big clubs recruit from with in the organisation because it's the sensible thing to do. If you have a network of scouts who are among the best in their field, then all you need is someone to give them direction which Marcel Bout is doing since he was appointed as the head of global scouting in October 2016. So when the club say, it's a 'evolution not a revolution' then look back to when Fergie retired and we only had one fulltime scout to what it's grown to over the years. So when you question the last 7 years, you're missing the ever evolving structure that has been created in those years and the key people that have been brought to the club to create it.
Since we already have Butt and Cox, we should look to hire David Seaman
If we wanted Murtough to be independent then judge would have been moved to a more financial role or simply sacked. The guy is terrible in his job and we own him nothing
I am afraid that what we did was simply filling roles fans wanted to fill just so they get off Woodward/judge back. That explains why these prestigious roles were filled by a guy Moyes brought in and a guy with 50 hours coaching in him.
Very good post.
I don't see problem with promoting from within, it's not Murtough's fault that we have done poorly in last 7 years and he wasn't even involved in the recruitment for first team. It's because of the work he has done, he is getting promoted and that's how it should be.
People go on and on about Michael Edwards, he was promoted from within too, he was with the performance analysis team (or some other team) and because of his impressive work, he got promoted to DoF.
Maybe Director of Training Cone Assembly ?
Good point about Edwards, and if he was appointed as the DoF at our club at the time Liverpool did, there'd be a huge melt down.
And just to add to my previous post, the role of the DoF doesn't mean every signing will be a hit, but rather it should provide us stability/continuity where everyone at the club is pulling in the same direction. And that's something that we haven't had since Fergie was at the helm. And if everyone isn't pulling in the same direction, then what we've seen in the last 7 years becomes a real possibility.
And regarding Ed Woodward, he's made mistakes in trusting managers post Fergie in the transfer market for a few years longer than he should've done. But apart from that he's provided funds via the owners which gave the managers huge funds to shape the squad in their image. But for anyone to say Woodward was signing players on his own whim is completely false. He took over from David Gill who left a mess behind especially at academy level and to his credit, he's the one who took on the responsibility to restructure everything at youth level to building the scouting department which started by him bringing people to the club who did just that. So we went from a out of date structure with a almost none existent scouting department with only one fulltime scout to the biggest scouting department in Europe with a new data science department (3 years in the works) which is/was headed by John Murtough and it will bring us upto date with Man City, Liverpool and Leicester who already have one.
I swear it’s a promotion. You’re a director now!
I think the summer will be the barometer. I expect Chelsea and City to be the main spenders and we will be third. we should still be able to attract and buy a couple, maybe three decent players. Lets see who they identify and how quick the deals are done.
Its probably the glazers penny pinching. Do you think they would let Deadwood restructure all the backroom staff without an input on what it will cost first. All they have done is given the same backroom staff fancy titles. No new faces have come in to do the jobs.