United’s Worst Decisions of the Last 12 Years

Besides giving Woodward the DoF role...
Sacking LVG was a terrible decision imo, boring football but we were winning games including against strong opposition. He would have steered the team in the right direction and in due course, another, more excitiing, manager could have stepped in. The subsequent decision of sacking him in favour of Mourinho makes no sense!
 
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Selling the club to INEOs is the worst single decision the club has made since SAF retired.
 
bond19821982 said:
Thread 'List down all the bad decisions by the club since 2013'
https://www.redcafe.net/threads/list-down-all-the-bad-decisions-by-the-club-since-2013.450268/

Created this thread back in 2019. Funnily enough, 5 years after we are still making same mistakes .
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This reminded me of a very old thread I started:
https://www.redcafe.net/threads/when-will-united-win-their-next-title.386040/

This forum had an air of pessimism regarding the Glazers even in the late 00s, but only a few could have predicted, even in 2014, how bad things would become.
 
bringbackbebe said:
1. Not separating commercial from footballing operations. Rather than football as mainstay business with commercial revenue as a by product, we did the opposite.
2.Gill & SAF moving out at the same time and handing over control to Woodward
3. "We can do things in the transfer market that other clubs can only dream of"
4. Hiring managers diametrically opposite of the previous manager, requiring a squad rebuild each time. Also not having a "United" way of playing.
5. Entertaining egos in dressing room and allowing injured players own control over their recovery giving them both massive contracts to protect asset value (outcome of point 1).
6. Utterly terrible scouting. I mean, VDB and Antony aren't even real footballers.

Key of all:
Under LVG, we got rid of many players who broke through our academy or started from a younger age and who could have been decent rotational or backup players. Welbeck, Evans, Rafael, Cleverley, Januzaj, Will/Michael Keane. Those two years, we also sold almost every veteran who represented the spine of United - Rio, Evra, Vidic, Giggs (who retired), Van Persie, Bebe. For me, LVG era is truly the most disastrous of all periods for the long term damage it did to our culture.

I really wouldn't call extending ETH, not sacking Mourinho earlier, hiring Ole etc big mistakes.
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My unpopular opinion is that Gill was actually pretty useless at his job. He should have been succession planning between 2006 and 2009 whilst Fergie was getting on with his main job of winning everything.

Post 2011, Fergie's retirement was always going to be a problem as Gill ensured there was zero plans for what comes next.
 
The clear winner for worst decision was appointing Moyes. No explanation is required.
 
I mean feck me where do we start and finish.
In no particular order…

- Giving LvG and ETH free reign on transfers.
- Hiring Ed Woodward
- Ineos
- Not sacking ETH in the summer
- Giving job to Ole after his caretaker stint
- Not sacking Ole after Europa final defeat
- signing Mount
- signing Zirkzee
- signing Antony
- signing Onana
- signing De Ligt
- signing Hojlund
- signing Yoro
- signing Malacia
- giving Rashford a bumper contract
- giving Martial a bumper contract
- completely changing the ticket exchange policy
 
Moyes was the single biggest mistake. Not on field, it was an embarrassing but short tenure, but behind the scenes him being here ripped out the culture we'd spent 25 years building in a few short months. Some of it he actively wrecked some just by his presence, but we have never recovered from it.

We've made some daft mistakes since but it all started there. Had we appointed Mourinho in 2013 we would have been so much better off now.
 
Moyes would have made more sense if SAF had stayed on for another season, with Moyes as his assistant.
 
- Anything to do with the Glazers
- The Ed woodward leadership
- The John Murtough reign
- Releasing DE GEA
-Alexis sanchez
- Not listening to Ralf
- missing out on Declan Rice
- Rashford new 375k contract
- Hojlund 72 million
-Anthony- 80 million
- Dan Ashworth ( whatever happened there)
 
KStandBarmyArmy1993 said:
My unpopular opinion is that Gill was actually pretty useless at his job. He should have been succession planning between 2006 and 2009 whilst Fergie was getting on with his main job of winning everything.

Post 2011, Fergie's retirement was always going to be a problem as Gill ensured there was zero plans for what comes next.
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He may have been useless on the footballing side but he certainly knew his limitations and acted accordingly. If you see the era before that (Kenyon), it was Woodward like with "oh, I have money which I'm going to throw". Gill stabilized that bit and supported a proper rebuild between 2003-2005. We worked on our scouting, youth players started coming through to fill squad roles and there was overall a sense of structure in place by 2006. If Woodward had got in a proper manager (Capello, Ancellotti, Mourinho, Klopp or Guardiola) and let them be, things would have been perhaps different.
 
GlazersHater said:
It all comes down to having no structure in the sports area, seeing our transfers since Sir Alex retired is depressing.

Big transfers:

Mata 45M
Fellaini 32M
di Maria 75M
Shaw 37M
Herrera 36M
Rojo 20M
Blind 17M
Martial 60M
Schneiderlin 35M
Depay 34M
Darmian 18M
Schweinsteiger 9M
Pogba 105M
Mkhitaryan 42M
Bailly 38M
Zlatan free
Lukaku 85M
Matic 45M
Lindelof 35M
Alexis Sanchez 34M
Fred 60M
Dalot 22M
Maguire 87M
Bruno 65M
Wan Bissaka 55M
Daniel James 18M
Cavani free
Pellistri 9M
Telles 15M
Diallo 21M
Van de Beek 39M
Ronaldo 17M
Varane 40M
Sancho 85M
Malacia 15M
Lisandro 57M
Casemiro 70M
Antony 95M
Bayindir 5M
Onana 50M
Mount 65M
Hojlund 74M
Mazraoui 15M
Zirkzee 42M
de Ligt 45M
Ugarte 50M
Yoro 62M

Thats about 2B spent in players. How many of those 47 players would you still sign in retrospective?

I'd say Shaw, Zlatan, Dalot, Bruno, Diallo, Cristiano (in his first season) worth their money thats 6 out of 42 signings. Excluding this season signins as its too early to tell.

Thats beyond awful recruitment, thats incompetence mixed with bad luck as well. I mean we all know its impossible to get only hits in the market but thats dross business. We have more total failures than medium hits, Maguire, Van de Beek, Sancho, Casemiro, Antony, Mount, Hojlund.... It's amazing really.

So yeah I think its pretty safe to say the worst decision of the last 12 years its been running the club without a proper sporting director.
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It would be mental to repeat the Cristiano transfer with the benefit of hindsight.

The season before Cristiano, we came 2nd in the league, scored over 120 goals in all competitions and reached a European final. In Cristiano’s first season, we came 6th and scored around 50 fewer goals.

It’s not a complete coincidence. Everyone could see he made the team and dressing room unbalanced.
 
GlazersHater said:
It all comes down to having no structure in the sports area, seeing our transfers since Sir Alex retired is depressing.

Big transfers:

Mata 45M
Fellaini 32M
di Maria 75M
Shaw 37M
Herrera 36M
Rojo 20M
Blind 17M
Martial 60M
Schneiderlin 35M
Depay 34M
Darmian 18M
Schweinsteiger 9M
Pogba 105M
Mkhitaryan 42M
Bailly 38M
Zlatan free
Lukaku 85M
Matic 45M
Lindelof 35M
Alexis Sanchez 34M
Fred 60M
Dalot 22M
Maguire 87M
Bruno 65M
Wan Bissaka 55M
Daniel James 18M
Cavani free
Pellistri 9M
Telles 15M
Diallo 21M
Van de Beek 39M
Ronaldo 17M
Varane 40M
Sancho 85M
Malacia 15M
Lisandro 57M
Casemiro 70M
Antony 95M
Bayindir 5M
Onana 50M
Mount 65M
Hojlund 74M
Mazraoui 15M
Zirkzee 42M
de Ligt 45M
Ugarte 50M
Yoro 62M

Thats about 2B spent in players. How many of those 47 players would you still sign in retrospective?

I'd say Shaw, Zlatan, Dalot, Bruno, Diallo, Cristiano (in his first season) worth their money thats 6 out of 42 signings. Excluding this season signins as its too early to tell.

Thats beyond awful recruitment, thats incompetence mixed with bad luck as well. I mean we all know its impossible to get only hits in the market but thats dross business. We have more total failures than medium hits, Maguire, Van de Beek, Sancho, Casemiro, Antony, Mount, Hojlund.... It's amazing really.

So yeah I think its pretty safe to say the worst decision of the last 12 years its been running the club without a proper sporting director.
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If the question is how many of those guys were an unqualified success it might be only Bruno who fits that description. It is beyond logic how bad the recruitment has ended up.

That list from Bruno on is god awful, there might be a couple that will still turn out a success but we go from mostly disappointing or underwhelming transfers to mostly a disaster pretty quickly.
 
bringbackbebe said:
He may have been useless on the footballing side but he certainly knew his limitations and acted accordingly. If you see the era before that (Kenyon), it was Woodward like with "oh, I have money which I'm going to throw". Gill stabilized that bit and supported a proper rebuild between 2003-2005. We worked on our scouting, youth players started coming through to fill squad roles and there was overall a sense of structure in place by 2006. If Woodward had got in a proper manager (Capello, Ancellotti, Mourinho, Klopp or Guardiola) and let them be, things would have been perhaps different.
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He knew his limitations because he knew he was rubbish and coasted.

Gill had the sense to run a mile if/when he sensed Fergie left as he knew he didn't have the intelligence to be in charge without a manager that knew what he was doing.
 
thisisnottaken1 said:
Ultimately our next title will come no earlier than twenty fecking years after our last. I knew that we’d be bad, but not this bad.
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Isn't it crazy how quickly time goes by.

Always remember mocking my Liverpool mates that it was 30 years since they won the League.

Not saying it will be that long but you never know! We are further away than ever from winning it.
 
There have been a laundry list of bad decisions, such as Ed Woodward, Antony, Casemiro, Sanchez, etc, but the one I always come back to is deciding that David Moyes was somehow the best fit for managing a squad of PL champions.

Moyes is a solid enough manager, but he was clearly not cut out for the role.

To make matters worse, the board never really backed him and the whole thing was just half-hearted. There were managers like Guardiola, Mourinho, Klopp, and Ancelotti who were available around that time and who would have inherited a solid, if aging team.

I just cannot understand the logic behind that appointment and we've never really recovered from it. Big clubs, successful clubs filled with trophy winners, require a manager with authority and pedigree. Sticking a guy in there who hadn't won anything of note just made no sense whatsoever.
 
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Having had the pleasure of supporting the club since the day I was born in 1955, I have had seen some great times.Sir Matt,Fergie and everyone in between .It has always been a pleasure and privilege to be a fan and support the club that me and my family have always supported.I have seen some great signings and some great players.However this last 12 years have probably been one of the worst periods I have ever known.We have made some real strange signings and have put a lot of faith in certain mangers.I would say we need a reset which I think we are now probably in he middle of.Keep the faith guys we are man united.
 
DutchSerb said:
Signing Sanchez or Ronaldo is hardly the worst decision. It's just another player. Transfers can be a bit of a gamble. The worst decision for me is definitely #2. Signing Moyes was bad, but keeping a manager you're not 100% confident in is worse. Also think Ole should've been let go earlier.
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And it's not right to lump Ronaldo, who smashed the goals in his first season, in with Sanchez who seemed to overnight drop from a top 5 in the league player to not even top 5 attacker at United.
 
LDUred said:
There have been a laundry list of bad decisions, such as Ed Woodward, Antony, Casemiro, Sanchez, etc, but the one I always come back to is deciding that David Moyes would be best-placed to carry the club forward.

Moyes is a solid enough manager, but he was clearly not cut out for the role.

To make matters worse, the board never really backed him and the whole thing was just half-hearted. There were managers like Guardiola, Mourinho, Klopp, and Ancelotti who were available around that time and who would have inherited a solid, if aging team.

I just cannot understand the logic behind that appointment and we've never really recovered from it. Big clubs, successful clubs filled with trophy winners, require a manager with authority and pedigree. Sticking a guy in there who hadn't won anything of note just made no sense whatsoever. Ironically, we've turned into the sort of club that Moyes used to manage.
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Fergie's second book said that all of his preferred choices were unavailable for various reasons, which is why they went with Moyes.

Though it may well be true, it does feel like a bit of an attempt to save face on Fergie's part.
 
DarkLord1984 said:
Fergie's second book said that all of his preferred choices were unavailable for various reasons, which is why they went with Moyes.

Though it may well be true, it does feel like a bit of an attempt to save face on Fergie's part.
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I'm sure there's a face-saving element to it, but logically it feels closer to the truth than Moyes being our first choice. Of course, at the time Moyes was appointed, the messaging from the club couldn't be "yeah all the other guys turned us down, so we scraped the bottom of the barrel".
 
The worst one is INEOS getting their minority share and giving the Glazer's a second chance. The Glazers are the owners. Every poor decision we've made is from people THEY appointed and decisions THEY signed off on. Ten Hag wasn't the one who negotiated the fee for Antony, nor did he have the authority to do that. The fact that we are teetering on the edge to having to sell one of our promising home grown talents to fund another rebuild due to their years and years of incompetence and negligence is a disgrace.

With INEOS coming in, I fear they're going to rip the heart and soul out of this club and everything that made us a special club will be gone with the end result being that Glazers make a fortune from selling and presumably INEOS buy a guaranteed cash cow. We've made cuts to charity, slashed contracts for club ambassadors including Sir Alex and want to follow the Dortmund/Brighton/Chelsea model of hoarding youth talent to sell them on for profit which was never part of our vision for youth.

We are the 4th (3rd if you take out 115 FC and their shady dealings) highest earning club in terms of revenue in world football. Our piss poor owners with their awful contracts, poor transfer fee negotiating, interest payments and dividends for themselves have us in a precarious position.
 
Hiring José

We were finally in the process of developing our style. Instead of building on what van Gaal was implementing, we did a complete u-turn which has set us back to this day.
 
Well it certainly wasn't Moyes - as bad as he was - he didn't waste hundreds of millions of pounds. He signed two players who true weren't good enough to win the league with but who actually were decent signings - nor did they cost us a fortune in wages.
 
Ineos/Ratcliff decision to offer Glazers opportunity to stay at club, to bleed more money at point where they would have to leave. Utter disgrace and ego driven move that cost club chance to be free from leeches. Our finances look grim as does league table. The future at present looks bleaker than the team.

However as club we have survived worse, will survive these, but how long they survive here will determine how long we take for recovery.

We will never die (RIP Babes)
 
Moyes being allowed to gut the structure Ferguson had built.
 
MadDogg said:
How would Mourinho have got us to win the league? Even at his peak he was a short-term manager that dropped off significantly in his third season, and by the point we hired him he was clearly past his best. He'd been declining since his last year at Real, with the issues that he had in the dressing room there seemingly changing his entire mentality in terms of how he interacted with players. Before that he always protected the players as much as he could, happily taking the attention himself. But at that point he changed, and now he throws players under the bus left, right and centre whenever things go wrong to try to protect himself. It's why he's having to step down another tier at every club since then, as not only does his style no longer work but he creates significant problems.

We also know a bunch of the players he wanted to buy in that third season, and almost all of them were just more older players who were on the decline and would have needed replacing in a year or two.
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I feel we were quite bad so he also needed sometime to bring us upto touching distance. He was probably one of the better managers in terms of buying players post SAF - Pogba, Bailly, Ibrahimovic, Fred, Dalot, Lukaku, Matic, Lindelof and promoting Mctominay - were all relatively okay, with major failures being Sanchez and Mkhitaryan. It is an unopopular opinion but I feel we should have supported him at the start of his third season when he wanted to get Ivan Perisic and Maguire (who we got eventually at a much higher value). He wouldn't have got us to play pretty football but his legacy would have made sure we aren't getting bitchslapped by each PL team at home like we are doing now.
 
United single biggest mistake since the Glazers took over has been to put non-football people in charge of running a football club. Everything else is just an expression of that.
 
Allowing Moyes to clear out the Fergie coaching team.
Ten Haag extension was obviously wrong
Dan Ashworth
Ineos?


Buying/Contracting, in no order:

Schweinsteiger
Falcao
Pogba
Antony
Casemiro
Sancho
Van De Beek
Onana
Lukaku
Sanchez
Mkhitaryan
Depay
Di Maria

There's £1bn of money thrown away
 
HackeyC said:
Buying/Contracting, in no order:

Schweinsteiger
Falcao
Pogba
Antony
Casemiro
Sancho
Van De Beek
Onana
Lukaku
Sanchez
Mkhitaryan
Depay
Di Maria

There's £1bn of money thrown away
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Harsh to put Pogba in there. He wasn't as good as we wanted, but he was absolutely lightyears better than anyone else on that list and indeed was one of our better players for his first four years until injuries destroyed him.
 
MadDogg said:
Harsh to put Pogba in there. He wasn't as good as we wanted, but he was absolutely lightyears better than anyone else on that list and indeed was one of our better players for his first four years until injuries destroyed him.
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more the fact that he cost £30m per year given he left on a free. Very bad value.
 
Apart from the obvious ownership mess

Moyes is the obvious one.

Ridiculous transfer fees for average players.

Signing these players on ridiculous contracts, building their ego, realising they're not good enough, and making it impossible to move on.
(Might be the worst)

Not sacking managers soon enough when they were clearly not the right man long before.
 
Varun1 said:
Besides giving Woodward the DoF role...
Sacking LVG was a terrible decision imo, boring football but we were winning games including against strong opposition. He would have steered the team in the right direction and in due course, another, more excitiing, manager could have stepped in. The subsequent decision of sacking him in favour of Mourinho makes no sense!
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At what point do you decide to cut a manager loose though? He'd had two years and his second season showed no sign of improvement from the first.

I totally agree though that Mourinho replacement was ludicrous. Pep would have been the perfect next step after LVG and if we'd have anything about us a club our entire strategy would have focussed on making that happen.
 
Big Ben Foster said:
At a high level, giving every manager carte blanche to rip up the entire squad and spend hundreds of millions building a new squad in their image.

Now we're broke, with a crap squad and nothing to show for it.

As for your list, I agree on Woodward but disagree on Moyes. He was a very poor appointment, but he came in, failed, left, and we moved on. He didn't make tons of shit signings that we were saddled with for years. Overall, his legacy barely casts a shadow on the club.
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Agree with this. As awful as Moyes was, I still believe anyone who came in after Fergie was on a hiding to nothing. He didn't even last a full season. Fellaini and Mata are also probably two of our most successful signings post Fergie (despite neither being the type of player we needed).

Woodward and his cronies being given the keys to the club for 11 years is easily the worst for me. Every other decision stems from that.
 
So many bad decisions, some I can half understand- they were made by idiots.

But allowing Moyes to change coaching staff etc. I just don’t get.

I am a little more optimistic now than for a long time, seems like we might be trying to tackle issues and rebuild.
 
Moyes has to be at the top, the guy was a bumbling buffoon with now idea how to conduct himself at a club of this magnitude. Didn't help we paired him with another buffoon in Woodward. This one wins by a landslide.

Second one has to be Ole getting a permanent job before the season had even finished (with about 12 games to go whereby we only won two), and then later a fricking contract extension of 3 years for sabotaging a Europa League Final. This was a breaking point for me and I haven't been as invested as I once was because it was pretty clear we had no standards of winning at the club. Forget the large sums of money he wasted, his biggest black mark was that he cultivated an absolutely rotten culture by being a fan of the players rather their actual boss. We are still paying the price of his regime today.

Rounding off the podium is ten Hag, really had no business surviving the 2nd season, let alone being rewarded with a contract extension along with a £200m transfer kitty to waste on even more players. Doesn't overtake Ole for me because unlike that charlatan he actually delivered couple of silverware which will go down in history books. Set us back couple of years with the huge amounts he had wasted.
 
Kingofwinners said:
So many bad decisions, some I can half understand- they were made by idiots.

But allowing Moyes to change coaching staff etc. I just don’t get.

I am a little more optimistic now than for a long time, seems like we might be trying to tackle issues and rebuild.
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Most managers/coaches prefer their own staff, in fact some would point blank refuse to move without them, Moyes' mistake in this regard was he should have kept one or two for at least a season
 
Red in STL said:
Most managers/coaches prefer their own staff, in fact some would point blank refuse to move without them, Moyes' mistake in this regard was he should have kept one or two for at least a season
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Agreed - ultimately I don't think it would've made a huge difference though. Keeping Phelan or Rene for a season wouldn't have been the difference between 7th place and top 4.
 
Id love to see an alternative history where Micky Phelan was out in charge in 2013 and no other major changes take place
 
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