For me this sums up the concept of the club right now. We've just bottled a 2 goal lead and for some reason they find it worthy to celebrate a fringe player (who has contributed absolutely nothing in 18 months) reaching a 'milestone'.
There's this 'global head of social media' guy on Linkedin. All he ever does is post about how great our socials are. "Look at this Ronaldo announcement video, we broke all records." "Look how we went from 0 to 10 million Tiktok followers in no time." "Look at all these interactions we get every day." It's constant. No care in the world that the actual football is fecking shite. No sense of humility, or realising it might be best to pipe down a bit until results improve.
All that matters to these people is brand awareness. Likes, comments, retweets, shares etc. Drive that traffic towards the club store so suckers can buy this month's latest 'limited edition collection'. As long as engagement keeps increasing they go to bed with a smile on their faces.
In fairness to the fella you're talking about he's celebrating what his employer, Manchester United, has told him to.
I agree with you completely: What matters to the people running the club is brand awareness. They want Man Utd to become something people want to associate with for its own sake. We mock the millions of interactions. However, for them, that's what lets them sell advertising: If you team up with us X million people will see your logo. It doesn't matter if you're seeing it by a hate click. You're seeing it. I imagine more people have seen the Team Viewer logo in the past six months than ever before. That's what we sell to commercial partners.
I don't blame that guy. He's doing his job. He's probably very good at it. What it makes me regret is that Man Utd are not as interested in hiring the best people for the job on the football side.
When Man City wanted to become the best what did they do? They looked at Barcelona, who were at that point the best team, and they said: We will get their CEO, their Sporting director and their coach. 2 out of the 3 they got pretty much straightaway. The last one took them some years but eventually Pep went to Wastelands. That's how a serious business operates. Man Utd is not a serious business. Its serious in some areas e.g., off the pitch. However, when it comes to on the pitch? Look at John Murtough. He may turn out to be amazing, I hope he does. But he's never been a Sporting Director before. Just like Ed Woodward, he's going to be learning on the job. That's something that would never happen at City. It would never happen in most successful businesses.
The thing that surprises me most is that people say 'Man Utd is run like a business.' Its really not. If Google needed a new Director of Development they wouldn't go and pick someone with no IT background. Google understands that would make no sense because its an IT company. Even when Google is branching off into new things, like renewable energy, it makes sure, in its core business, the people all have the right backgrounds. Man Utd is like the other side of the coin: We pick people in key football roles who do not have the required level of football experience. I cannot think of any successful company in the world that does this. How many banks do you know who pick people for their key roles who don't have any banking experience? Or pharmaceutical companies who pick people for key roles who have no medical experience? It just doesn't happen.
If Man Utd's aim was to be a successful business, rather than a piggybank for the owners, that would be a good first start to getting us back on track.
as if they're actually celebrating that