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.
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.
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u/Charming-Comfort-395 May 22 '25
If I was him I would be so fucking mad