SAF's Interview tomoz

Originally Posted by Mao's Favourite Starling

Might have known you would come in pontificating


You talk such utter shite! If the Glazers wanted to sell him? Yeah right, they are really gonna £#%&! off the best (trophy-wise) manager United have ever had for Ronaldo's transfer fee aint they



Would we £#%&! you brainless £#%&!tard



Yet again utter toilet coming from your fingertips! The interest alone is more than £60 million per year so I would love to see your accounts





Utter #@&%! talking utter #@&%! about something he knows #@&%!-all about

Drama Queen.

Originally Posted by Lou_Macari_Chippy

Drama Queen.

Far from it, just sick of #@&%!s like you talking shite and pretending to be knowledgable


Stick to the bluejays you @#%&!

Originally Posted by Mao's Favourite Starling

Far from it, just sick of #@&%!s like you talking shite and pretending to be knowledgable


Stick to the bluejays you @#%&!

Again, drama queen.

The glazers look at everything from a business perspective. Fergie looks at things from a football perspective. Now i do agree that ronaldo is an excellent player and one that has greatly contributed to the success this year, but if you think the glazers will turn down silly money for one player just because fergie wants to keep him then you're in denial mate.

You're also somewhat deluded if you think we couldnt compete for trophies without ronaldo, we have class all over the park and are plenty able to compete with anyone regardless of whether ronaldo plays or not, the fact that you believe we couldnt compete is frankly disrespectful to the rest of the squad.

Now before you have another spaz attack, try to relax, take a chill pill and at least consider that some of this could actually be possible. It's really not that far fetched.

Originally Posted by Lou_Macari_Chippy

The glazers look at everything from a business perspective. Fergie looks at things from a football perspective.

that's far too simplistic. selling beckham was a good move in football terms and a bad one in business terms but both fergie and the club were in favour. selling ronaldo for, say, €120m might well actually be a good decision in purely football terms - we could bring in some serious talent for that - but bad in business terms because of the image, merchandising etc. side. it's far too simplistic to suggest the glazers will accept and fergie won't if it's silly money on the table and a large part would be made available for buys.

You're also somewhat deluded if you think we couldnt compete for trophies without ronaldo, we have class all over the park and are plenty able to compete with anyone regardless of whether ronaldo plays or not, the fact that you believe we couldnt compete is frankly disrespectful to the rest of the squad.

that's not the point. i love watching the best player in the world doing things no-one else would even try IN A UNITED SHIRT. the rest of the world is jealous of us. US. not real, not barca, us. for a fan, there's no price you can put on that.

It's inevitable that Ronny will leave in the next 1-3 years imo. But he's said from day 1 this will happen. He's been pretty straight about it and he's probably the best player in the world right now so of course he is going to be a wanted man and speculated about. Madrid are scum and do it publicly but you can bet every top team in europe has talked about him.


I'm just thankful for the last few years, seeing this lad in a shirt has given us all memories we will never forget of a special special talent and none of us know how long he'll be here but l will enjoy every minute that he is.

then i'll wish him luck and mufc will go on, somebody else will come in and take his place and we will still be that great club we all love

Originally Posted by borsuk

that's far too simplistic. selling beckham was a good move in football terms and a bad one in business terms but both fergie and the club were in favour. selling ronaldo for, say, €120m might well actually be a good decision in purely football terms - we could bring in some serious talent for that - but bad in business terms because of the image, merchandising etc. side. it's far too simplistic to suggest the glazers will accept and fergie won't if it's silly money on the table and a large part would be made available for buys.

It may be simplistic, but which ever way you slice it, if the glazers want to cash in they will, they own the club and have proven that they will do whatever they feel necessary. They may think that having ronaldo on the team has more benefits than selling him - thats a business decision based on numbers, ronaldo is an asset with a value attached.

Originally Posted by borsuk

that's not the point. i love watching the best player in the world doing things no-one else would even try IN A UNITED SHIRT. the rest of the world is jealous of us. US. not real, not barca, us. for a fan, there's no price you can put on that.

No problem, but the glazers dont look at things from the perspective of a fan, again all the decisions they make are based on business and numbers and value.

All i'm saying here is that with private ownership, the owners have the ultimate say, sure they value what fergie has to say and his opinions greatly and of course they dont want to piss him off but at the same time they are running a business here and like any business they cant allow things like sentiment get in the way of their decisions.

Sorry, but thats the way the world works.

the glazers will be realising over the next 12 months that the best way of making money cosistently in football is to win things, to be the best, which to do you need to back fergie with whatever he asks for. selling his biggest player behind his back would not be good for the glazers and they wouldn't do it imo

Lou sees inside the minds of the glazers.

Originally Posted by chorleyred

the glazers will be realising over the next 12 months that the best way of making money cosistently in football is to win things, to be the best, which to do you need to back fergie with whatever he asks for. selling his biggest player behind his back would not be good for the glazers and they wouldn't do it imo

Fully agree, especially if we are managing the debt ok and dont have any really serious financial pressures going on, but if there were some financial issues behind the scenes and the selling of ronaldo would solve them, do you really think the glazers wouldnt even consider it? I'm not saying or guessing what the glazers would or wouldnt do, all i'm saying is that ultimately they will be signing off on the big decisions. They wouldnt do anything behind fergies back, they would go to him, explain the situation and their reasoning and make sure he's the first to know, obviously if fergie then threatend to walk out they would have to re-think things but i doubt fergie would do that, i mean if he's not prepared to walk over the club being saddled with 800m worth of debt then he's not going to walk over the selling of a player.

The glazers will set ticket prices where they want.
The glazers will arrange whatever sponsorship deals they want.
The glazers will reserve the right to put AIG on the babes mural
The glazers will only sell to spend and wont inject any of thier own cash into the club
The glazers will decide how the debt is managed
and the glazers will ultimately decide on whether a star player should be sold when another club puts a massive bid on the table

By the way here's a thread from RI that i thought was pretty clear and exposed the glazers lack of investment to date. Success is here despite the glazers not because of them, people like Betties hotspot that are now running around telling everyone that the success is because of the glazers are very much off the mark according to these facts;

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

'd like to clear up a myth - the notion that Ferguson has been given a lot of money to spend by the Glazers and that this has contributed to our success. In reality, our success has come despite the Glazers. They leech money off our football club.

United transfer dealings since being under ownerships of the Glazers: (Note that I am including the upper estimates of sales outgoings here, as players like Carrick/Anderson/Nani cost less up front, much less in the case of the latter two. What I have included is the final potential fee) :

PLAYERS IN
Park - £4m
Foster - £1m
Vidic - £7m
Evra - £5.5m
Carrick - £18.6m
Hargreaves - £17m
Anderson & Nani - £35m (the maximum potential fee for both according to the Guardian. Can't find concrete sources.)
Kuszczak - £2.5m
Manucho - 0
Tevez - loan
Total spent= £90.6m

PLAYERS OUT
Ryan Shawcross - £1m
Phil Bardsley - £2m
Smith - £6m
Heinze - £8.16m
Rossi - £6.74m
Richardson - £5.5m
Howard - £3m
David Jones - £1m
Mikel - £12m
Van Nistelrooy - £12m (initially £10.2m)
Ebanks-Blake - £0.2m
Jonathan Spector - £0.5m
Kleberson - £2.5m
Neville - £3.5m
Total recouped = £64.10m

Net Spending since summer 2005= £26.5m

---
This means that since the Glazers arrived, we have spent a massive amount of £8.8m per season on transfers.

This value is considerably less in comparison to the 4 seasons prior to their arrival, where we spent a net amount of approximately:

2004-2005 - £23m
2003-2004 - £2.03m
2002-2003 - £28m
2001-2002 - £29m

So you see we've had drastically less to spend since they arrived, not more. And the amount that we have spent, £8.8m per season, considering the size of our club and the amount it makes in revenue, I'd bet my life on the fact that not a penny has come from the Glazers. They have given us nothing.


(Some sources:
http://www.footballtransfers.info/tr...3/league1.html
http://www.soccerbase.com/transfers.sd
http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2...sstory.sport10
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/foot...td/5225694.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/foot...ea/5043096.stm)

spread about by people desperately trying to rewrite the utter %@#$&!s they were spinning about the future of the United team back in 2005

as for Ronaldo, he's worth far more than money to this current United set up - he is pure gold.

And so is Ferguson.

As Gill said the other day (to the BBC I think it was), the business plan relies on big success on the field, and you don't achieve that by selling your best players.

It would take a ridiculously huge offer to get United to sell Ronaldo. And the buying club would need to be in a position to help pave the way to United buying replacements as well.

The truth is out there. It's a pity most of the doomlords aren't clever enough to use it properly.

We'll be another Leeds I tell thee

Yeah right

we've spent a lot more since the glazers took over. we've also done our transfers very efficiently, in contrast to the old days. there's a lot more to it than club to club transfer fees (even assuming they're accurate, and slapping tevez down as zero on the basis of it technically being a loan is comical) - there are salaries, bonuses, assorted benefits etc. to take into consideration.

the fact is, we've been able to attract top talent, the kind of which we were not able to attract in the past and the results are clear on the field. fergie has been loyal to whoever owns the club - he was loyal to the plc board and now he's loyal to the glazers. i really don't think he gives a rat's arse who owns it, or sees any difference between being owned by a bunch of insurance companies and being owned by a ginger american trailer park owning gnome. i beg to differ, but i think his only interest is how far funds are made available for the transfers he wants and from that perspective he's made it clear that the current regime is better. he was always moaning about problems signing the players he wanted under the plc; now he praises the way it's handled.

don't get me wrong - i'm not defending the glazers in any way. the club is unnecessarily indebted, to a degree which could, given the right economic conditions, imperil its survival. and all this is solely to allow the glazers to take control at no risk to themselves and with no actual investment from them. the debt was and is utterly unnecessary. it is the price we have been forced, against our wishes, to pay for the privilege of having trailer park slum lords in charge. we pay 800 million so the glazers can have a new toy. and the benefits that fergie talks about - and pretending that there are no improvements in these areas is just denial imo, the equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting na-na-na-na - are unrelated to the debt. there was no reason that the plc board couldn't release funds to support fergie (we were, after all, in a far better position financially) or learn to handle transfers in an efficient and professional manner.

Well those numbers look pretty accurate to me. I think we have to accept that we now sell to spend and that net invested cash to date has been minimal;

Gill to Glazers; "Fergie says we need to buy a striker"
Glazer to Gill; "Ok who do you want to sell in order to raise the cash"
Gill to Glazer; "Er, how about Silvestre and Pique"?
Glazer to Gill; "Ok go for it"

Of course the swiftness at which we can now buy players is a bonus and one of the main reasons fergie likes the current setup, but from a pure investment perspective i think its pretty clear that the glazers are never going to risk one penny of their own money. Whats more, i think the key signings we have made, evra, hargreaves, vidic, anderson, nani etc could have been made under the PLC, ok a bit more paperwork to do but ultimately they would have still been united players.

The claim that success is despite the glazers and not because of the glazers is valid with the exception that the one thing the glazers did seem to do was wake fergie up and kick him back into life; the djemba miller bellion signings stopped and a new level of focus was found. Whether you think thats worth the price that the glazers bring is a personal opinion.

Originally Posted by Lou_Macari_Chippy

Well those numbers look pretty accurate to me. I think we have to accept that we now sell to spend and that net invested cash to date has been minimal;

Gill to Glazers; "Fergie says we need to buy a striker"
Glazer to Gill; "Ok who do you want to sell in order to raise the cash"
Gill to Glazer; "Er, how about Silvestre and Pique"?
Glazer to Gill; "Ok go for it"

Of course the swiftness at which we can now buy players is a bonus and one of the main reasons fergie likes the current setup, but from a pure investment perspective i think its pretty clear that the glazers are never going to risk one penny of their own money. Whats more, i think the key signings we have made, evra, hargreaves, vidic, anderson, nani etc could have been made under the PLC, ok a bit more paperwork to do but ultimately they would have still been united players.

The claim that success is despite the glazers and not because of the glazers is valid with the exception that the one thing the glazers did seem to do was wake fergie up and kick him back into life; the djemba miller bellion signings stopped and a new level of focus was found. Whether you think thats worth the price that the glazers bring is a personal opinion.

Oh just £#%&! off.

I can see why everyone would want to worry and pull this apart, but fact is none of us have enough information to say anything valuable. First of all we dont know what the Glazer's long term plan is.

I can only assume they wanted to own Man Utd and see what they could do with it. If they wanted profit, there are easier and less high profile ways to do it. If they wanted to offload debt, there were other companies they could have used. why target Man Utd specifically?

If they came with the intention of waiting for some kind of tv money boom and selling on - well then the club's health and popularity will be paramount to their interests. Maybe it ties into the booming ecnomy in China and our popularity there. Or maybe they're genuinely interested in Man Utd and wanted to be part of it, I know I'd have done the same to become owner of Utd.

Too many ifs and maybes though. You have to clear that hurdle before you can start speculating on plans for players, transfers, debts and so on.

Owners of football clubs are not some kind of comic book vilains who look to make as much money as possible via any scheme possible. they do not keep their eyes glued on the balance sheet, only small clubs do that to survive. Big clubs are like art collectors. Consider Ronaldo the world's most sought after piece of art.

If he played for someone else the owners would be coveting him and would have gone to great lengths to get him.

what makes you think that just cos we have him we'd be so willing to let him go?

he's our prized asset and the envy of the world. all rich people have something like that and they dont look to sell their pride and joy at the next opportunity.

look at it as a human as opposed to some weird parody of a businessman.

this notion of the only thing the takeover did for the greater good of United was to wake Ferguson up is all part of the desperation to rewrite the utter %@#$&!s that were the predictions of impending doom for the United team, post 2005

it's said that there are no longer any Miller/ Djemba/ Bellion type signings but those players cost around £10m between them. Ferguson has recently purchased Posseban, Manucho, the Brazilian twins, Nutsack etc.

the reality is that after scoring 97 goals in 99/00 United waited a year for Van Nistelrooy (buying Forlan and failing in Europe in the meantime), and brought in Veron at the same time. they then swapped over a couple of seasons Beckham and the failed Veron for Ronaldo and an array of cheaper options and tried to mould a team. Rooney was added - on instalments - and Park was lined up in spring 05.

and during this period of rebuilding Ferguson guided United to another Title, the FA Cup in 2004, and the 2005 FA Cup final. later that year the curve bottomed out big style in Lisbon, Keane was soon joined by van Nistelrooy out of Old Trafford, and what has followed has been phenomenal. but it has still been played out to a backdrop of the same clueless mongs questioning virtually every decision Ferguson takes.

the transfer dealings of the last couple of years have been entirely in keeping with a club that is 100% committed to achieving and maintaining success on the pitch. in the early days of the plc this was to be achieved on the tightest of purse-strings, and that situation was only ever occasionally relaxed. was that because too many people wanted their slice of the United pie and put their own personal greed above the success of the team? yes. now we have just a few greedy @#%&!s to feed - as well as a collection of the banking industry scum's finest.

net spend ffs

anyone who thinks a top class team will have to sell to buy is a mong. selling to strengthen is of course a different matter; there are various reasons why a team can be improved by selling, and improving your squad by releasing/replacing those whose heart isn't fully in it is just one of them.

You're looking at if's and maybe's Luffy but i'm looking at transfers since they took over and the undeniable fact that we have spent an average of 8.8m per season since they took over.

Nothing that wrong with clearing out rubbish and replacing it with class though which is what seems to have happened for the most part. In fact i many would say that's 'good business' but it's business thats controlled by the glazers.

I really dont know why anyone is arguing with me here, clearly the glazers ultimately decide what goes on within the club (business) just like a home owner decides whether they will fix the leaky roof or buy several garden knomes and a fish pond. It really is as simple as that.

nobody appears to be arguing with you

people are simply presenting a more accurate picture of what is happening than you are

Originally Posted by Tumescent Throb

nobody appears to be arguing with you

people are simply presenting a more accurate picture of what is happening than you are

Yes, he does seem to have expended a lot of effort if his intention was to say something as simple and bland as "The owners will decide how to run the club"

Mao was; he claimed that only fergie decides who stays and goes and that united would not be able to compete without ronaldo. Very firm in his opinion he was.

I expect with winning the champions league there will be a major signing this summer without too many leaving so that 8.8m may increase, especially if they buy tevez properly plus one other major name, could be significant, and i'll have no problem putting that up here either if it happens, i'm not interested in bashing the glazers for the sake of it but we cant have them getting praise they dont deserve either.

Originally Posted by Lou_Macari_Chippy

Mao was; he claimed that only fergie decides who stays and goes and that united would not be able to compete without ronaldo. Very firm in his opinion he was.

I expect with winning the champions league there will be a major signing this summer without too many leaving so that 8.8m may increase, especially if they buy tevez properly plus one other major name, could be significant, and i'll have no problem putting that up here either if it happens, i'm not interested in bashing the glazers for the sake of it but we cant have them getting praise they dont deserve either.

what £8.8m? this is a figure that you have arrived at (largely by guesswork fwiw), but it is completely and utterly irrelevant.

as for United's transfer policy, it is well known and well documented that Ferguson and Gill amongst others identify their requirements for the maintaining and improving the squad, and they have never as of yet met any resistance from the owners to that end.

as such, it is most strange, mildly ridiculous and pretty £#%&!ing pointless for someone such as yourself to attempt to portray the situation any differently.


how's your forecast of Ferguson's imminent retirement going by the way

any better than your insistance that Ronaldo may in fact be on the verge of leaving

not that you're in any way shape or form keen to keep an ABU/ABF agenda to the fore. whoops, sorry, i mean neutral and objective agenda

you're pissing into the wind, son. nobody cares for the way you present your agenda. hth.