Glorious past... but he is WRONG man to take club forward
IN the early weeks of the post-Ferguson era, when they did not have the remotest idea how much of a struggle was to come, Manchester United allowed David Moyes to release Mike Phelan from their coaching staff. It is a measure of their desperation to locate the old ways that they are now ready to appoint him technical director. Sir Alex Ferguson’s achievements seem so miraculous in the light of all that followed that Phelan seems touched with genius — by association. But this appointment is not the enlightened one the club need. United should be looking for a director of football who can begin to make their business in the transfer market coherent and prudent at last. Manchester City can teach them. In director of football Txiki Begiristain, they have an individual, steeped in the playing side of the game and embedded in the network of clubs and agents, who pursues priority targets long before a transfer window opens. There are typically three or four individuals for each targeted position, always back-up options. Begiristain has turned City into negotiators who know the value of a player and are not dependent on agents to do their bidding. When the asking price for Paul Pogba topped £86.5million in 2016, they walked away. Likewise with Alexis Sanchez. When Radamel Falcao was being touted around in the 2014 summer market, City were the ones who said ‘no’ to the wages. It is a role which requires powers of negotiation and judgment, not just a good relationship with the manager and the popularity around the club which makes Phelan the easy fit. The kind of steel which makes negotiations with an agent like Mino Raiola manageable. The level of Raiola’s influence at United has become unhealthy. At the turn of the year, five of his clients — Pogba, Romelu Lukaku, Henrikh Mkhitaryan, Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Sergio Romero — were at the club. The technical director needs to be an equal party in the relationship with the managers who come and go. And though Ole Gunnar Solskjaer says United do not need as many as six new signings, the evidence of the past week, in Barcelona and on Merseyside, suggests otherwise. A rebuild could take three transfer windows. The Ferguson way that Phelan knew was often off the cuff — recommendations from a few trusted contacts to which he applied his own innate sense of value. When Moyes took over, United described the process of trying to discover the keys to Ferguson’s system as the equivalent of locating a ‘black box recorder’. Since Ferguson, £1billion has been spent. Yet Chris Smalling and Phil Jones are still in defence. Rebuilding this squad is a massive ask. It is not a task for Phelan.