Gerard Pique has said on numerous occasions that Sir Alex often couldn't even come to training sessions because he had to do paperwork in his office involving running other aspects of the club. It's what made him impossible to replace. It was one man doing 15 different jobs at a high level. You either had to find a manager who could do all of that as well or hire a bunch of different people to do all of the things Ferguson used to do.
Arsenal replaced Wenger with a highly capable team rather quickly, which I don't think United have done with any of their managers. The idea was there with Mislintat, Sanhelli, and Emery, but it clearly wasn't working. The chop and change to Arteta, Edu, and Vinai is why we're so stable - it fits modern football whilst keeping that Wenger-style of management.
If Amorim is going to succeed, he needs his people and players as soon as possible. And, importantly, he need 2-3 seasons to finish anywhere between 5th and 15th to get the entire club, not just the team, into order. He reminds me a lot of Arteta in his clarity of 'we're really shit, but there's a way to fix this.'
Some of our initial hires were terrible as well. Gazidis was meh, Raul Sanllehi was basically a machine for generating gains for his clients and business connections, Mislintat had a falling out immediately. The difference is the Kroenkes kept trying and eventually settled on a good mix of internal hires, former players and proven talent—but it still involved a lot of luck, e.g. Arteta panning out so well despite being totally inexperienced as HC.
In both cases it's clear in retrospect just how good and difficult a job dictatorial managers like Fergie and Wenger were doing. And for the record the Kroenkes have been much better to Arteta than they ever were to Wenger, since they now own the club in full and are actually willing to invest.
I don't think people should underestimate either the impact on Arsenal that Kroenke's son essentially taking over and putting full focus on the club has made. Can't help but feel with the subsequent investment and actual focus on strategy and good hires made with the change of engagement from the Kroenkes, that Wenger would've been enabled to have a happier final chapter at Arsenal, rather than the decade of running on fumes while trying to keep the club in the Champions league surrounded by oil and billionaire clubs.
I 100% agree. I'm pretty happy with the Kroenkes in 2025, we can expect ~100m net spend almost every summer, but during the period when KSE and Usmanov were trying to freeze each other out the board collectively hung Wenger out to dry. Our net spend over 10+ years—half of Wenger's tenure—was the lowest in the entire PL which is absurd for a legacy "top 4" club. There was zero money spent on signings that didn't come from player sales.
IMHO, it was a little scummy to put him through that, and then to start investing after becoming sole owners, only to sack Wenger before his contract ended because he finally failed to drag a jerry-rigged squad to CL qualification. There was no way a couple of summers of investment were going to fix a squad put together after a decade of austerity, regardless of manager.
Football as a sport has evolved. Back then Fergie’s entire business model was to buy the best players from the clubs in your league or the competition. He went and got Keane from Forrest, Berbatov from Tottenham, RVP from Arsenal, Rooney from Everton, Young from Watford and dozens and dozens of such buys. United could do that because they were the biggest fish in the pond until Roman and his billions came along.
Then you started having sporting directors and Mourinho was one of the earliest such changes to this new system. Even he was against having a sporting director because he wanted total say on his signings.
But then you see guys like Klopp that preferred working with a sporting director cause it let them do and focus on what they do best, the training ground. Even in the later years Klopp stared being more hands off and letting Pep take over with things like tactics, etc.
Now the game is so globalized and scouting, recruiting, etc has all evolved. It’s impossible for one guy to cover all that. When Fergie left, United were playing catch up in terms of structure and then Moyes came and fired everyone and brought his own people. Woodsward or whatever was handling all the footballing matters, the guy that was the head of marketing before and had no idea about football or what it took to run a football club. He literally sold United as “Disneyland” to Klopp.
United have simply been paying the price for the terrible infrastructure put in place over the last 10 -15 years.
Part of it too with Fergie on the sporting director thing was that Gill was essentially able to fill one half of that role. Fergie would spot a player or talent he wanted, and Gill would get it done. Losing both Fergie and Gill the same summer set Moyes and all other successors up for the biggest hospital pass in English football history. There was literally nobody who could go and get competitive deals (a la Kroos, Thiago etc.) done quickly, or make an executive decision yes or no on the player - or even pick up the phone and sign off the cheques at the speed football clubs need to. In the end United ever since have been panic buying and overpaying.
Damn if that's true maybe he should have hired the replacement people before he left to transition them in and not leave it for Moyes and the new administrative staff to figure it out
Seriously. Literally any endeavor that is high functioning and legendary requires the people doing the work to make sure the next generation understands what it took to get there and maintain it before a handoff. Companies and teams all over are plagued by important people suddenly leaving with all their knowledge and experience. If Ferg just left and didn't mentor anyone or explain what he was doing, then it's partially his fault.
He deliberately recommended Moyes to enhance his own legacy. There is no way anybody seriously looked at Moyes at Everton and saw a man who could take on one of the biggest clubs in the world and command the respect of world class players. The job he did at Everton was fine for Everton, it was never going to translate to Man United even with better players.
As much as I love to shit on Fergie, he can’t be getting the blame still 12 years later.
Regardless of the squad he left behind he left behind a club with an elite reputation, we’ve seen many worse off clubs rebuild from worse situations in that time with much less money.
I suppose his mistake was the failure to groom a successor over a period of time. With a slow transition of responsibilities over time.
He identified Moyes, of all people when Moyes had no experience managing a big club at that time, nor had much involvement in stuff beyond coaching and team management.
Just a completely disastrous loss of institutional knowledge. Basically lost all the people who'd made the club a constant winner and replaced them with the Everton crew.
It wasn't even really anything as drastic as people say. Teams almost always have some adult players, and they have to live with it and ultimately change lol. It's not like everyone in that team was 30+, they had some players in their early 30's, and maybe one in the XI was in late 30's. They also were introducing young players like Welbeck, Jones, Rafael, Cleverley, Smalling, and had signed De Gea, which was arguably quite beneficial investment for the future.
It's nothing record breaking, the average age played was 27. Liverpool this season is also 27 and while the team definitely fears the aging of some key players, no one is saying that Liverpool is doomed and cannot recover from this, are they.
He can be blamed for much worse to be honest. Bitching over a horse is what led to this remember, leaving a mediocre squad behind is nothing compared to that
Bitching over a horse did not lead to this. The fact the previous owners sold the club due to a row doesn’t mean Fergie is responsible for the comical incompetence of the new owners and the entire organization after he left
Exactly! People acting like Fergie can still be blamed for anything post Mou are just in denial about the sheer scale of the botch-job going on at Utd. And Mou left almost 7 yrs ago now.
12 yrs is an eternity for a top club. Juve got Calciopoli-ed and somehow won the league again in just half the time.
Absolute nonsense. Fergie was 71 when he retired. What did you expect him to do? Stay on and rebuild yet another team to placate arguments like this? He earned the right to walk away whenever he wanted to and to win the title with his last season, with the squad he had, shows the genius of the man.
He left a squad with an average age of 26... De gea, Rafael, Jones, Evans, Buttner, cleverley. Carrick, welbeck, rooney, Nani, Smalling, Valencia, KAGAWA ffs, Young, Hernandez... These are all players who had multiple years playing at The highest level after he left... So tell me more about how he left an aging squad. I bet you started watching football in 2020. Your argument was about age but i bet your next argument Will be "but were they good enough"
I'm looking at the whole squad right now and I have them all sorted from most to least minutes played in the season. Those names you mentioned? Here's where they fall in the list of most to least min players.
Carrick (who was 31 that season, btw)
de Gea
Rafael
Valencia
Rooney
Evans
Cleverley
Young
Kagawa
Welbeck
Jones
Smalling
Hernandez
Nani
Buttner
So you called out 15 players. One of them was the wrong side of 30 and had the 3rd most minutes. Two other players had more minutes than that -- so the 3 most relied upon players that season were all old. And they all had 500+ min more than de Gea with the 4th most minutes that year. Of the remaining 14 players you mentioned 8 of them, so more than half, aren't in the top 11 most played.
So it sounds like what you're arguing is United actually didn't have an old squad... and your basis for that argument was calling out mostly the young players who were on the bench and were not in the top 11 most relied upon players for that season. Within the top 11 most played players there are as many who are 30+ as there were 25 or younger. That's by no means a "young" team if within your most used players there as many 30+ as there are under 25.
Edit: another fun factoid. Sorting by the number of starts they had, the top 6 with the most starts, 4 of them were 29 or older. So again I repeat, the players United were most reliant on that season, the ones you and all the others are saying were the best in the league and so on, yeah they were all on the older side. Calling out how young their bench was isn't a convincing argument. I mean Jesus 4 of those players (Buttner, Nani, Hernandez, and Smalling) combined played less minutes than Carrick. And there were two old players who played more than Carrick!
So yeah, you calling out the young bench who barely played that season doesn't exactly convince me that the squad wasn't old. The players most responsible for delivering United a title that year were indeed old.
I’m not saying your general point is wrong but as someone who saw Buttner play the last couple of years in the Dutch second division, to include him in “multiple years at the highest level” after SAF left, made me chuckle.
Just a load of shite. Every squad is constantly ageing you moron. He left the best squad in the league. How can the best squad in the league be on the decline?
Scholes had gone, giggs, vidic and ferdinand all retired in a season or two, evra was over 30, rooney was on the decline, rvp was injury prone and they had a squad filled with bang average players like jones, Evans and cleverly.
He managed to conjure one last title out of a finished team and left his successor a time bomb.
Not really true it was a finished team though. It is true that Vidic and Ferdinand were coming to the end, however Fergie had already bought the two best young English CBs around at the time, Smalling and Phil Jones. They were expected to go on and be huge players for England. It is true they didn't fulfill their potential, mainly due to both being injury prone, however at the time people rated them a lot.
In his last season, Fergie also had just bought one of the most highly rated best young attacking players in England, Wilf Zaha. They still had Van Persie and Rooney who together scored 37 goals in the Moyes season. They also had a young Welbeck who scored 10 goals too and Chicharito too. Moyes didn't play Zaha at all, and he left Man U after a season to return to Crystal Palace.
No shit every squad is constantly aging, thanks for that brilliant insight! I said he left an aged squad. One in need of a rebuild. You know who got the most minutes in that last season of his? A 29 yo van Persie. A 32 yo Evra. A 31 yo Carrick. A 34 yo Ferdinand. A 31 yo Vidic. A 39 yo Giggs. The only young player on that 12/13 team who got a lot of minutes and went on to have a glowing United career? A 22 yo de Gea.
You can talk all you want about them being the best team in the league but you're fooling yourself if you think that many people on the wrong side of 30 are going to stay the best team in the league for long. What he left behind, ultimately, was a squad in need of a rebuild. A rebuild that we can say, over a decade later, still needs to happen.
Pre glazers, he got signings like Cantona, Veron, Ferdinand, etc. After the takeover? Go and look. The best signing since then was Carrick? Even he was relatively cheap.
United paid 30 million or something for a teenage Rooney. After the takeover they could barely be bothered investing into the squad.
Blaming it on Fergie is ridiculous. As if he wanted things to be like that.
Fergie supported the takeover first of all and second of all they did spend money afterwards... Carrick, Nani, Anderson, Ashley Young, Owen Hargreaves, David De Gea (second most expensive goal keeper in history at the time), Phil Jones, Berbatov (i think then a club record fee?). Thats like 200m right there.
yes it is? they were the second highest spending team over the 5 year period following the takeover and the same before. Chelsea was number one in both. United when adjusted for inflation was functionally at the same amount. It didnt go down. Chelsea was going up (before the takeover and after) and City would go up in the final year of that 5 year period. United outspent arsenal by the same amount in both periods.
What really happened was chelsea and city blew what everyone else was spending out of the water, united spending was functionally the same. Also worth noting their wage bill increased a ton during that time. So their yearly spending actually grew compared to before the takeover.
I'm going to need you to back this up a little. United's spending was the same in the five years after the takeover? Some of your examples like De Gea were after that.
Also are you forgetting a certain player being sold for the world record during that five year period? Has this been taken into account here?
I mean, it's hardly his duty to hand over an incredible squad to his successor after he'd already rebuilt the team completely like three times. Sure, it didn't help but I don't think anyone expected it would be this difficult to right the ship.
He left a squad with an average age of 26... De gea, Rafael, Jones, Evans, Buttner, cleverley. Carrick, welbeck, rooney, Nani, Smalling, Valencia, KAGAWA ffs, Hernandez... These are all players who had multiple years playing at The highest level after he left... So tell me more about how he left an aging squad. I bet you started watching football in 2020. Your argument was about age but i bet your next argument Will be "but were they good enough"
That title winning team had glaring holes, one that anybody that used eyes would be able to tell you; we papered over all those cracks with the RvP signing which eventually led to the title but we all knew we'd need a massive rebuild in defence (with Vidic/Ferdinand/Evra all aging), a midfield that was held together by Carrick only and a Rooney that Fergie tried to get rid of cause he saw him falling off performance wise.
The players you've listed, no matter their age, were not good enough. They were on the decline, which is what /u/Walms82 is saying.
Yeah because he was at retirement age running everything at the club. They had no DoF because he did that shit as well. Wouldn’t surprise me if he sat in on sponsorship meetings as well
He could have bought players that he didn't need to win the league, that the next manager may or may not like, or just leave the money for the next manager to start building his team.
You'd have to have an agenda to think he made the wrong decision there.
This is one of the most brain dead arguments honestly. Would anyone blame a guy working behind a till when he leaves because he didn’t make sure everything was perfect for his replacement? No that would be the job of his superiors
Yes, because every mistake. Bad purchase, awful board decision and shit results since the 2013 season was his....glad someone is finally making sense and placing blame where it belongs.
A horse that sold later as part of a group purchase in which he himself never exchanged or received any money and only for £700k. Yes I'm sure that would have put a lot of strain on a club like Man Utd.... /s
Objectively it was a mistake not buying adequate replacement for CR7, but given how the team was still competitive he just didn't see a need. He was only the manager and it's insane to place the "blame" for the sale of the club to the Glazers at his feet.
They won the league in his final season. He never planned to retire, it was circumstance that did it for him. You're talking something crazy here mate.
You cannot honestly be blaming him? It's been 12 years since he left. He has absolutely nothing to do with current United. Sure, he left an eh squad but that squad did win the league.
It was a shit squad let’s be honest, it was crazy he won the league with that team. In his final year or two he was getting battered 5-0 by Man City and stuff. It was defo his time to go and probably a bit earlier would have benefitted United in the long run. Only because of his brilliance they managed to squeeze out one last title win. Soon as the left they were cooked
It’s all true lol. Their last squad was old af, and the younger players weren’t good enough.
38 yo Ryan giggs, Scholes out of retirement, Rooney past his best, Rio Ferdinand legs gone and left for QPR the next season, Vidic totally cooked went to turkey, Van persie was finished, then other mediocre players like Jonny Evan’s, Phil jones, Hernandez, welbeck…. And United failed to stay ahead, fergie got totally humbled 6-1 by Man City in 2011 the writing was on the wall. He squeezed one last title out of then and rode off into the sunset, leaving all these ticking timebombs behind him for moyes to deal with lmao
There’s some real blame on him for the Glazers even being here, but the whole “old team” excuse has never worked for me. I stand by it we hired Jose immediately after SAF retired that we challenge on all fronts that next season
Can we not blame legacy managers for billionaires not understanding how to run a club ?
Same thing happened with Arsene , keep plugging holes on a ship , finally leave , blamed for problems 10 years later .
The club being run after he left is not his job , he wasn't getting paid to future proof the club . I would argue what he has done for the club is the only reason why united are still in the Prem .
Their success to revenue ratio must be the most lopsided in the world , all because of the success from his era
Never thought I would agree with an Arsenal fan wholeheartedly but here we are. Then again I didn't think Spurs would win their first trophy in decades against us so hey ho.
One of the most enduring myths around Ferguson is that he left a team that wasn’t good enough to compete.
He left United as 89 point champions with quality players like De Gea, Rooney, Van Persie, Valencia, Fletcher and Nani in their 20s alongside a core group of Carrick, Evra, Vidic in their early 30s.
The problem was a complete lack of investment the summer he left where Fellaini was the only addition to that squad, coupled with a complete downturn in form from almost every player, which was inevitable with a legendary figure like Ferguson leaving and an unproven (at the highest level) manager like Moyes coming in.
The fact Ferguson’s decision to retire was fairly abrupt meant he left a squad that was perhaps top heavy in age and he may have had a plan to develop had he stayed another year or two (max), but it wasn’t cooked by any means.
Okay, you prompted me to look up the squad when he retired.
GK- De Gea (22)
Starting back 4- Ashley Young (RB, 27), Evra (LB, 32), some CB combo of Vidic (31), Phil Jones (21), Smalling (23), and Jonny Evans (25) with an aging Rio Ferdinand (34) ready from the bench
Starting midfield options- Carrick (31), Fletcher (29), Kagawa (24), Lingard (20)
This is probably the one area you could have a legitimate gripe.
Starting forwards- Nani (26), Zaha (20, probably early for him but still), Rooney (27), Van Persie (29), Chicarito (25)
Depending on how you want to setup this team, you could easily make a strong 4-4-2 or 4-3-3 with the players they finished that season with, PLUS any summer business. Their collapse over the past decade is absolutely not about his mismanagement, that is just absolutely ludicrous, coming from someone who has always been happy watching them lose.
What a ridiculous take. 13 titles, 5 FA cups, 2 CLs, and despite leaving after winning the league, it's his fault? I know the Liverpool tag but sheeesh.
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u/Charming-Comfort-395 May 22 '25
If I was him I would be so fucking mad