This is a classic case of people arguing when both things are correct.
The Glazers are bad owners. The Glazers do take money out of the club.
However, they’ve also spent enough for us to be more competitive than we are.
Ultimately, being successful at the top level needs highly successful recruitment and top level coaching to take advantage of it. We’ve largely had neither.
Very true, at board level, the Glazers are absolute parasites, and Woodward, whilst helping to get some transfers over the line, has clearly shown he does not have an aptitude for the football side of this job at all, neither does Matt Judge.
This then trickles down into other stupid decisions as well, and you can see that Woodward has no clue in what happens with contracts of players we already have, somehow we end up grossly overpaying for players nowhere near good enough for the team, or who haven't even done anything remotely to earn the wage we've given them. Giving Phil Jones a new contract for example, basically all Woodward is seeing is an asset, he doesn't see a garbage, always injured, player, he see's an asset that he wants to make money off and cannot stand to lose on a free, so he gave Jones a new contract, and for what?
Of course, we have spent money, some would say large amounts, irrespective of where it came from, but aside from Woodward and Judge's poor recruitment we haven't exactly had the best managers either, which, again, is the fault of the higher ups, but alot of these managers did get players that they wanted, it's just that the players have been so crimincally underwhelming, i'm absolutely mind boggled as to how we've spent much money to just end up with the squad we've mostly ended up with up until this season.
The Glazers are never likely to go away as long as they are milking cash from us, however, i can see most problems being sorted at United if they were just willing to put an actual footballing structure in place, and by that I mean a person, a DoF if you will, that oversees all the operations pertaining to the footballing side, and let Woodward stick to the business side, which he clearly excels at. This would seem like the most obvious thing for the Glazers to do, yet they persist on sticking that financial banker mate in charge of footballing operations, despite having never done anything in this capacity before in his life. It boggles the mind, if they kept him to the business side he can just stick to making them money on the side which is what he is good at, and with a proper footballing structure in place we can begin to become competitive again I feel, because we'll have someone who knows what actually needs to be done, and not someone who is tripping on power with absolutely no clue as to the ins and outs of the footballing world, Van Gaal himself, regardless of what you think of him, has done it all in the game, and he said Woodward just has absolutely 0 clue, which I have no doubt is true.
Just shunt Woodward to the side and get some proper people in place for crying out loud.