On Wednesday night Ed Woodward discovered another problem with the appointment of Ole Gunnar Solskjær as Manchester United’s manager. The Norwegian, the hero of the Camp Nou in 1999, is all but unimpeachable even if his team play lumpen football and a series of ill-conceived decisions have exposed an unsuitability for top-level management.
And so United’s fans’ ire must be directed elsewhere, and while the club’s executive vice-chairman has been in the firing line for much of his near-seven years running the club, Solskjær is not David Moyes, Louis van Gaal or José Mourinho, a hired hand who doubles as a human shield for Woodward. “He’s gonna die, Ed Woodward is gonna die”, as sung during the 2-0 home defeat by Burnley, is a repurposed chant historically aimed at Manchester City, less a threat than a vivid, unseemly expression of hatred.
Neil Ashton, the former Sun journalist and Sky Sports presenter whose new communications consultancy recently took on United as a client, with improving Woodward’s status a key goal, has some job on his hands to repair the relationship between the club’s de facto CEO and its supporters. “[Woodward]’s a guy that absolutely loves Manchester United,” Ashton said last week. “I want to change perception of not only himself but the ownership of the club.”
Woodward, though he rarely speaks on the record, is the frontman for the unpopular Glazer family, who will mark 15 years of ownership of United in May. Malcolm Glazer’s leveraged buyout of United was valued at £790m at the time and leading the gripes against them is the £1bn-plus drained from the club in interest costs and dividends to Glazer’s children; Glazer Sr died in May 2014. A November conference call for the New York Stock Exchange revealed the club’s net debts were £384.5m, an increase of £137.1m on the previous year. The original debt saddled on the club in 2005 was £525m.
A prominent accusation against the Glazers is that their ownership has leeched off the club’s glorious history, and that without Sir Alex Ferguson in charge for the first eight years of their reign, they would have no business to speak of. Ferguson worked in close cahoots with David Gill, the former chief executive who stepped down in the same summer of 2013 and was effectively replaced by Woodward.
The new man’s rise was hardly without trace, since the Chelmsford-born former Bristol University physics graduate, a chartered accountant and former investment banker, had been a close ally of the Glazers since he advised them on that 2005 takeover when working for JP Morgan Chase. Woodward soon joined the club’s commercial operation to become a star employee as United the asset was sweated heavily to help pay off what were cripplingly high-interest loans in the early years of the new ownership.
Operating from London, Woodward and Richard Arnold, United’s group managing director who is an old friend from both Chelmsford and Bristol, pioneered a global and regional approach to marketing and sponsorship that sees United-endorsed soft drinks in Nigeria and nutritional supplements in Japan alongside worldwide deals with blue-chip companies such as Aon and Uber.
The success of that strategy, since copied by United’s peer clubs among the football elite, keeps United high in the revenue leagues and has made Woodward a rich man. He earns a reported £3.15m a year, and possesses 539,000 Class A shares in Manchester United plc, valued at $10.8m, on which he receives healthy dividends. In the Old Trafford stands, however, he is decried as a leading architect of the club’s fall from grace. It is not that United have not spent money – around £840m has been lavished on transfers since Ferguson retired and the club pays out the second-highest wage bill in football – but that it has been wasted on folly and failure.
Manchester United’s wheel and it all goes Pete Tong for Ibiza
Though Ferguson carried the can for Moyes’s disastrous succession, Woodward is held responsible for the past three managerial appointments. Van Gaal was described by Woodward as “the perfect choice” in the May 2014 press release that announced his arrival. Two years later, Mourinho was “simply the best”. Solskjær, as his full-time appointment was confirmed last March, was the “right person to take Manchester United forward”.
Time has proven each of those statements to be ill-fated. Last June Van Gaal described Woodward as someone with “zero understanding of football who was previously an investment banker” to hit upon a widely held view. Despite his long involvement in the game, Woodward has never been the “football man” in the fashion that his predecessor, Gill, himself a chartered accountant and a former management consultant, became accepted as.
Since that first 2013 summer in charge, when Gill’s and Ferguson’s contacts books were abandoned by the new broom, United have struggled dreadfully in the transfer market, getting burned on flops such as Ángel di María and Alexis Sánchez, while enduring rocky – and costly – relationships with super-agents such as Jorge Mendes and Mino Raiola.
A long-trailed appointment of a technical director who would be responsible for transfer business has never come to pass, and so Woodward is in the public firing line for transfer sagas such as the current haggling over the Sporting Lisbon midfielder Bruno Fernandes. As with Solskjær’s failings and the whims of the Glazers, it puts him in the centre of the Manchester United storm.
