What if David Gill had stayed?

tentan

Poor man's poster.
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Oct 5, 2013
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Back in 2013 we had the double whammy of Ferguson and Gill leaving at the same time.

But what if Ferguson retired but Gill had stayed on as chief executive for lets say another 10 years? Would we be in a better position than we are in now? Hell would the likes of Moyes still be our manager?
 
Even if he had stayed, I still think the club was hopelessly ill-equipped to cope with the post Fergie era. We'd still have struggled badly.
 
tentan said:
Back in 2013 we had the double whammy of Ferguson and Gill leaving at the same time.

But what if Ferguson retired but Gill had stayed on as chief executive for lets say another 10 years? Would we be in a better position than we are in now? Hell would the likes of Moyes still be our manager?
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Gill without Fergie would've yielded similar results imo. The catalyst to our descent was actually Fergie selecting Moyes, who was clearly in over his head at the world's biggest club. If we would've gone Fergie to Ancelotti or Fergie to Mourinho, it would've been much smoother - with or without Gill.
 
I think Gill is overrated by a lot of people because he made the smart decision to leave at the same time as Fergie. Fergie ran the club and everyone 'above' him was just focused on making sponsorship deals for the Glazers. I doubt Gill would have done much better than Woodward.
 
It would have been the same. We needed to hire a better manager than Moyes back then. The fact we had such pulling power but ended with Moyes still bugs me to this date.
 
I think the only thing that I said at the time could have been done better was when gill decided to leave. Leaving at the same time as Fergie meant that Moyes did not have experienced support above him. Perhaps someone more experienced than gill would have said “let’s keep an experienced coach or 2 till you get on your feet”, or perhaps we would have done our transfers better
 
We were already in a precarious position, footballing wise, when Fergie and Gill left.
Bringing in RVP, who made a significant contribution to that last PL title, papered over the cracks of an aging team, with poor quality in depth, despite a huge squad.
I think most fans at the time could see we were already starting to fluke it, half the time.

We all remember the “no value in the market” excuse in Fergies final few years, as City started building their title winning machine.
Moyes may have not been up to it, but crucially he made a fundamental mistake in dismantling the existing coaching and training regime.
However, he was left with a crumbling squad consisting of both aging and mediocre players.

Would David Gill have prevented Moyes from wrecking the coaching set-up?
We’ll never know.
Even if he did, the squad had already been weakened under his and Fergie's tenure, no doubt down to the Glazer’s cold hand.
He may have been more responsible on the club’s finances though, compared to recklessness of Ed fecking Woodward.



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Our transfer business was really poor under Gill and Fergie after the good 2005/2006 period when we picked up VDS, Park, Evra, Vidic and Carrick within 12 months. Not sure what exactly Gill’s role was in the transfer windows that followed. But he did not leave us equipped to deal with the challenges ahead.
 
I don't think Gill was particularly impressive. Sir Alex did a hell of a lot of the job that would typically be expected of him.

A bit of calmness and continuity I suppose. He may have stuck with Moyes a bit longer and probably would have gotten Baines signed for him.
 
I think people overrated Gill, we were doing well as fergie was carrying us. We actually were t that strong in the transfer market during that time
 
Honestly, if Gill had stuck around after Ferguson retired, I think things might’ve been a lot steadier. Gill knew the club inside out and was good at keeping the balance between the board and the football side. Maybe we wouldn’t have rushed into Moyes, or at least he’d have had more backing.
 
I'm going to go against the apparent grain so far in the comments and say it would have been much better. Woodward was an absolute disaster in that first season with them blowing money on Fellaini for more than his release clause, chasing players who didn't want to come for months, and then getting duped by fake lawyers for Herrera. None of these things happen with Gill, in my opinion. I could see United dropping off but being close to the Champions League places, having made 2-3 decent signings. The mixture of Moyes and Woodward was too much inexperience that first season.
 
Gill wasn't a great CEO and his lack of succession planning is a massive reason why we're in this mess.

I despise him now but Peter Kenyon was better at the job. Shame he ended up at Chelsea.
 
Had a similar discussion the other day. Loosing both at the same time and replace them with Moyes and Mr "Watch this space" Woodward was disastrous and tranformed us in the circus we are now. If we kept Gill for another couple of years, I think we would have been better of now but there was a lot of work to be done after SAF left, espacially the scouting department.
 
There seems to be a misconception that the club is just the football set-up and a few financial affairs to attend to.
The footballing side, although a major part and the very essence of the club’s existence, is just one department.
There’s the likes of the commercial department, administrative, finance, operations and HR etc.

The CEO’s job is to oversee all of that and work with his executive team to keep the whole ship afloat and prospering.
David Gill is credited with running Utd smoothly and effectively, leaving Fergie to run the footballing side.
When it came to recruitment, the club had people (e.g. lawyers, etc,) to negotiate for new signings.
Every anecdote I’ve heard or read, says he was a decent, honourable and effective head.

Woodward by contrast, appeared to assume the football was just there.
Just throw some more money at it and things would continue as normal and hopefully whatever manager was in charge, would manage to create another winning team.
The main deal for him was the club’s commercial income.

I wouldn’t be surprised if he thought that the clubs revenues could just keep on growing, with scant consideration of the possibility that the football team could enter a prolonged period of decline on the pitch, with an eventual negative effect in the clubs finances.

Woodward walked away with his pockets stuffed from years on a high CEO pay package, while also earning massive bonuses for growing the club’s commercial income.
He wouldn’t be the first or last CEO to ride high on short term success ( financially) and then bugger off with his CV polished, millions in the bank and leaving a ticking time bomb behind.


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Ekeke said:
Our first transfer window wouldnt have been as bad with Fellaini as our marquee signing.
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Maybe or maybe the clubs stance on no value being available would have continued and we wouldn't have signed anyone. Especially as we had just won the league at a canter.
 
Think like others have said, it wouldn't have made a difference. Other clubs, particularly City, had already lapped us off the field. In you name it, structure, recruitment, data analysis.

One executive wasn't going to do much. In truth the planning for what the club would needed to be like post Fergie needed to happen so much sooner then it actually did that your still trying to figure out it 10 years on.
 
I'm sure our first window would have been a bit better. Just having someone from the old era would have helped. I don't rate Gill on the basis he left when he did, a good CEO would have managed the transition.

In one summer we lost our CEO, manager, assistant manager and coaches. It would feck up any club.
 
Unlikely that things would've changed by that much. Football had changed and the entire organization was stuck in the 90s. Sometimes companies and organizations can't just turn on a dime and re-invent themselves. They just die (e.g., Blackberry)

It would've taken something drastic like hiring a really competent sporting director, giving them autonomy to go about their business, going from a model of a Fergie / Wenger type person as the manager to the manager being "just" another department head with the suits above him really in-charge. Being willing to aggressively hire / fire (also not a competence we had to develop thanks to stability under Fergie).
 
Raoul said:
Gill without Fergie would've yielded similar results imo. The catalyst to our descent was actually Fergie selecting Moyes, who was clearly in over his head at the world's biggest club. If we would've gone Fergie to Ancelotti or Fergie to Mourinho, it would've been much smoother - with or without Gill.
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I recall Mourinho was on the list but the Council of club elders were against his antics. Ancelotti would have been sublime at that point.
 
Gill is obviously less of a clown than Woodward but, without seeing him at another club, it’s impossible to judge how much of his reputation is down to his own talents and how much to having the luck to work with Fergie. Also, the quality of the squad had already deteriorated quite a bit in 2013 compared to 2008 so I’m not convinced he would have made a huge difference. Maybe it would have been a bit easier for Moyes to settle in but Moyes was not good enough anyhow.
 
Gill must be loving Woodward for how he rehabilitated his reputation.
 
Tyrion said:
I think Gill is overrated by a lot of people because he made the smart decision to leave at the same time as Fergie. Fergie ran the club and everyone 'above' him was just focused on making sponsorship deals for the Glazers. I doubt Gill would have done much better than Woodward.
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To be fair he was already leaving before he knew Fergie was retiring.
 
ron86 said:
I think people overrated Gill, we were doing well as fergie was carrying us. We actually were t that strong in the transfer market during that time
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Yes he's definitely overrated. He must have known that Fergie wasn't going to go on forever and should have had a proper succession plan in place.
On another note, I think Moyes might have done OK if he had come in a year earlier as Fergie's assistant in order to properly understand the club.
 
Monmouthshire Red said:
Yes he's definitely overrated. He must have known that Fergie wasn't going to go on forever and should have had a proper succession plan in place.
On another note, I think Moyes might have done OK if he had come in a year earlier as Fergie's assistant in order to properly understand the club.
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I think the club was ill equipped to be managed by anyone other than an extremely experienced, relatively older school manager like Mourinho or Ancelotti.

Moyes gets criticised for changing things up but he was rightly pointing out some of the archaic ways of working. Fergie was obviously great but his role spanned across so much that he was simply covering gaps no one could effectively fill.

I may even argue that Gill leaving at that time may have been a good thing if we appointed a CEO that knew what they were doing from a footballing perspective to transform the club to adapt to normal managers. Instead we had Woodward.
 
If Gill had stayed, Moyes would have got at least 3 years. And he would have won trophies.
 
I think it would have made a significant positive difference - surprised at all the comments saying it wouldn't

That first transfer window was a shit show because Woodward was out of his depth, IIRC Gill was eveb called back as an emergency to help get the Mata deal done at Xmas

Gill was much more of a football man than Woodward ever was
 
If David Gill had stayed, he'd have been around for longer.

I think that's about all you can say with certainty
 
We wouldn't have transcended into disneyland, i don't think, and shouting from the rooftops and telling the world just how big our war chest was each summer.
 
Don't think it would've made a difference. Gills one of those riding on Fergies coattails - I can't think of anything special he did during his tenure as the CEO of the club.
 
I don’t think much would have changed. His tenure is highly overrated I feel. Mainly because he had the GOAT football manager with him.
 
Gill was succesful because he was here with Fergie before the leeches and left with Fergie. I dont think there would be any difference after Fergie to what happened anyway. He would have gradually been eased out by Woodward and the parasites as well.
 
DarkLord1984 said:
Even if he had stayed, I still think the club was hopelessly ill-equipped to cope with the post Fergie era. We'd still have struggled badly.
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Far too much old school reliance on one man to make essentially every important decision. Once that man left, no one knew what the feck to do or how to actually keep the club operating at anywhere close to that level.
 
AshRK said:
It would have been the same. We needed to hire a better manager than Moyes back then. The fact we had such pulling power but ended with Moyes still bugs me to this date.
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It was a poisoned chalice. Whoever came immediately after Fergie would always be deemed a failure.
 
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