Daill Mail - 08.08.2019

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Daily Mail, Thursday, August 8, 2019 Football

E

d WoodWard’s

absence from Man-

chester United’s

pre-season tour for

the first time in six

years this summer was sup-

posed to have given him

the chance to negotiate the

tighter transfer window,

yet it was chaos as usual

yesterday.

While agent Federico Pastorello

was beating a path to the execu-

tive vice-chairman’s door at Unit-

ed’s offices on stratton street,

Mayfair, seeking a move for his

client romelu Lukaku — who has

been on strike all summer —

another of the 11th-hour deals

which have characterised Wood-

ward’s £850million of spending in

the past five years came to

nothing.

Tottenham’s Christian Eriksen,

the kind of playmaker the club

badly needs, was simply not that

convinced by the ambition or

genuine interest of United, who

had made no approach before

yesterday, according to the sell-

ing club.

For an individual who has

proved so skilled at generating

commercial revenue for United,

the 47-year-old is surprisingly

poor at spending it. The word

from inside United when he

stepped into the top job was to

expect a brash, wheeler-dealer

approach to the transfer market

from the former JP Morgan

investment

banker. He was

replacing david

Gill, a chartered

accountant to his

fingertips, and

certainly added

immediate

colour.

The back-

ground was grey

— private edu-

cation at Brent-

wood school in Essex, a Bristol

University physics degree and

Pricewaterhouse Coopers tax

advisory role before he brokered

the Glazer family’s debt-lever-

aged purchase of United for JP

Morgan.

But Woodward brought a more

approachable, vivid persona and

seemed like a child in a sweet

shop when it came to buying

players. He was self-evidently

pleased that his phone was view-

able on a table when a call from a

well-known agent came in at one

social gathering.

Player acquisition has been a

more complicated, nuanced proc-

ess than he perhaps ever antici-

pated, entailing dialogue with

representatives and clubs and

shrewd negotiation.

Woodward and his negotiator

Matt Judge, officially United’s

head of corporate development,

do not seem to operate this way.

Harry Maguire heard nothing

from Woodward for weeks, despite

a relationship with Mike Phelan,

ole Gunnar solskjaer’s assistant,

who knows him well. He arrived

on Monday for £80m — precisely

the figure Leicester City had been

demanding all along.

Newcastle United’s sean Long-

staff could have been signed for

£20m this summer but now

United are likely to end up paying

£70m next summer instead.

This is why Woodward, who lives

with his wife Isobel and their

three-year-old twins in Cheshire,

has had a heavy, costly reliance at

United on intermediaries Jorge

Mendes and Mino raiola.

It would help if he had made

some progress in putting in place

a structure to improve acquisi-

tions. despite recruiting Maguire

and highly promising full back

aaron Wan-Bissaka from Crystal

Palace, the club enter deadline

day with a squad that looks thin

and includes two huge names —

Paul Pogba and Lukaku — who

have been in open warfare with

United. Instead, the communica-

tion failings have extended to the

search for an individual to oper-

ate between Woodward, solskjaer

and the academy, overseeing the

football side of the operation.

darren Fletcher was approached

by Woodward, yet 10 weeks later

had heard nothing more.

Fletcher is a candidate because

United are seeking a ‘cultural

re-set’ — to cite their mantra of

the moment — taking the club

back to the values instilled by sir

alex Ferguson at a time when

some common sense seems lost.

T

HErE are tensions

within the academy,

where Nick Cox —

brought from sheffield

United to become head of acad-

emy — last month replaced Nicky

Butt who is now head of first

team development, even though

the two get on well. Butt feels

undermined by the reshuffle.

Privately, coaching staff have

voiced frustrations with some-

thing as basic as the lack of view-

ing areas of the Carrington acad-

emy pitches from their offices.

There is even unhappiness

about the new first-team bus,

which is seen by the players as

inferior to the vehicles which

transport other top Premier

League clubs.

Players were so tired of personal

sponsor appearances last autumn

that they refused to participate.

It took such a step to bring a

meeting between Woodward and

then-captain ashley Young.

some on the football side feel

Woodward does not like confron-

tation and that the interminable

Pogba controversy would have

been better dealt with by telling

the player some home truths.

Woodward might have made

United incalculably richer but

some tell of a penny-pinching cul-

ture, of endless emails, bureauc-

racy and cost justifications.

Sportsmail has established that

Woodward seems considerably

more popular with staff on the

commercial side of the business

than those involved in football.

Woodward will not be relin-

quishing responsibility for player

acquisitions. after six difficult

years it is thought he wants to be

the one to preside over the assem-

bly of a squad which will lead

United back to glory.

This is even though the ‘re-set’

has signalled an acceptance that

his hugely expensive strategy of

bringing in ‘galacticos’ like Pogba,

angel di Maria, Bastian schwein-

stieger and radamel Falcao has

failed. Far from being embar-

rassed in 2016 that the club was

spending £89.3m to buy back

Pogba, Woodward cited the size

of the fee as evidence of United

being back on the map. after

signing di Maria from real

Madrid, he told the club’s institu-

tional investors about a ‘12-times

increase in Google searches’ for

the player. ‘There is a feeling that

we have the start of something

special,’ he said at the time.

Now United

are building

around youth

and British

players —

Maguire, Wan-

Bissaka and

daniel James,

the promising

winger who has

arrived from

swansea.

The summer

tour has also provided

evidence of talent in the pipeline

— exciting forward Mason Green-

wood and attacking midfielder

angel Gomes.

The scouting structure has been

enhanced in the past few years

with more full-time staff across

the world. With a forward line led

by Marcus rashford, the unpre-

dictable anthony Martial and

untested James, it is easy to see

why some bookmakers have

United at 40-1 to win this season’s

Premier League title.

Many fans will feel that the

problem lies at the top of a club

which has simply not made

progress and struggled for

any sense of identity and vision

since Ferguson and Gill walked

away.

This season should be Wood-

ward’s last tilt at restoring the

past, those supporters will say.

The Glazers will simply look at

United’s imminent annual finan-

cial results, which are expected

to take revenues to £600m.

For the foreseeable future,

Woodward is bulletproof.

It’s transfer window chaos again for free-spending

United, there’s academy unrest, no director of football

and unhappy players. Yet still Woodward remains...

BULLETPROOF

IAN

HERBERT

Deputy Chief

Sports Writer

Protest: fans

express their

feelings at a

match against

Burnley last

season GETTY IMAGES

Head

of it all:

United’s

top man

AFP

ED’S TOP 10 BIG

MONEY SIGNINGS

1 Paul Pogba...........£89.1m in 2016

2 Harry Maguire...£78.3m in 2019

3 Romelu Lukaku..£76.2m in 2017

4 Angel Di Maria...£67.5m in 2014

5 Anthony Martial...£54m in 2015

6 Fred........................£53.1m in 2018

7 Aaron Wan-Bissaka......................

£49.5m in 2019

8 Juan Mata........... £40.3m in 2014

9 Nemanja Matic...£40.2m in 2017

10 Henrikh Mkhitaryan..................

£37.8m in 2016

v1

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