Penny-Pinching: A Ridiculous Argument

[Eckers99]

We've gone into the season with a piss-weak midfield and needed to invest before Herrera went, doubly so when he left. Same goes for RW. Whether that was Ole's decision or the owners', we'll never know. Personally, I find it implausible that the manager was satisfied with the choices at his disposal. Either way, it's already hampering us.

 

[RedPhil1957]

This post is talking about 2005-10. Years that SAF was in charge and we were still winning. Sounds like people wanted us to spend just for the sake of spending. When Moyes took over we still had a very good team. In fact, we won the league easily the year before. So did you want us to invest heavily from 2005-2010 to prepare for 2013? Come on now. We can blame the Glazers for a lot of things, but this isn't one of them. Moyes messed up the team. It had nothing to do with a lack of investment because we were always looking to improve the team. And when CR7 left the worst thing that we could have done was try to replace him. You can't replace CR7. Instead we got Valencia and changed our style. We became more of a team rather than relying on an indivdual and the goal scoring followed. HOwever, since the Moyes era, what we started to do differently was chase global stars. That has never worked for us. We were at our most successful when we bought established stars from the EPL clubs below us, and bought young up and comers from lower leagues like in Portugal and Holland. We have now started to go back to that way because our "galactico" approach hasn't been working. I don't like our results right now, but we are finally heading back in the right direction again...

Exactly! Not easy to know in advance but United was just too big for Moyes to handle. From things I was told he refused to listen to any advice, turned down transfer targets from before his appointment and other bad decisions like chasing Fabregas and his ex-players from Everton to the exclusion of all other targets. All because of his determination to do things 'his way.' He got the sack when he did not just because of poor results but everyone in the club realised he just could not hack it.

 

[mark_a]

It is this sort of black or white thinking that is mental to me.

For all we know we knocked ten million off the asking price. There was a massive furore about Zaha’s clause that could have slowed things down. Woodwood could have been as quiet as a mouse; it could have been Palace leaking the information.

we don’t actually know what happened.

It is like the people saying “why wasn’t Mourinho backed in his third year”. Well hang on a minute, he got a 55 million quid player (who he didn’t play), he’d just signed a player on the highest wage bill in the Prem and many of his targets were old and might have hindered our wage bill. There’s a nuance to all of this that people are completely ignoring.

We don't know what happened, we rarely do. It annoys me that so much stuff that was only ever press conjecture becomes widely accepted as fact. All those "United missed out on X" stories, where there was only ever gossip/conjecture that we were "in for" X anyway!

I appreciate the nuance and I'm not a black & white thinker, that statement was made in a particular context. I'm the first to say we know nothing of what goes on in these deals, I also realise that United are a "go to" club for players/agents to throw in to add £££s to their price "United are in for me.." etc..

My point was that whatever price was initially quoted for AWB is what we ended up paying, which raises questions about Woody & our business, right? Particularly as it seems like we missed out on a 3rd (or even 4th) signing? Clearly we don't know everything (or even anything in some cases)* plus it only came out much after the fact that part of our agreement to sign Cantona was to say we'd paid more than we did. That wasn't known at the time.

Could be our PR people might need to keep things tighter, or squash things entirely? Could be that it is other teams or agents that leak things, nothing they can do about that. But you'd maybe look at City and how they manage to deal with various doping, FFP stuff from a PR perspective. Also Liverpool, their recent hacking of City's scouting system has totally gone away! I mean, I am saying that our people need to be loads more on it that other teams because of how much the press is far more interested in us than anyone else.

But yeah, Woody, its a drip, drip of things that just make you wonder about him and his football business savvy (no-one questions his ability to get official crisp partners etc..)