Inside Woodward's Man Utd reign: 'I've never met anyone like him in football'

Ed Woodward strode across the rickety wooden panels of the mixed zone at the Jan Breydel Stadion. Manchester United had just vanquished Club Brugge 7-1 on aggregate to qualify for the Champions League and Woodward, wrapped in a raincoat over his Paul Smith club suit, offered two thumbs up to the throng of reporters.

It was 2015 and United were back on the continent after a season devoid of European football. United had invested impressively and Woodward was optimistic in what would be his last televised sit down with MUTV ("When people see Schweinsteiger on the teamsheet, that's gonna send some shivers down the spine.") Four months later, United were still in Europe - the Europa League.

It was on Woodward's watch United became a yo-yo club; going up into the Champions League and then down into the dispiriting Europa League. The season they returned to the Champions League, United finished behind PSV Eindhoven and Wolfsburg in the group stage and fell into the Europa abyss.

United were relegated to the Europa League again last season and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer was rewarded for the 'achievement' of reaching a second-rate final with a three-year contract. He was the third United manager to be dismissed within a year of scrawling his name on a contract.

Branded 'a specialist in failure' by United fans who arranged a flyover at Burnley in 2018, Woodward accepts his tenure was a failure. Animosity towards him has become so febrile Woodward has limited his visits to Old Trafford in the last two years and when he lived in Cheshire he deliberately did not socialise.

At a time of the rule of six, United let in six. After the behind-closed-doors thrashing by Tottenham last term, some intrepid fans headed to John Gilbert Way and unfurled a 'Woodward out' banner that Woodward clocked as he was driven out of Old Trafford.

Woodward's mother found coverage of her son to be so negative she could not bring herself to read it anymore. Woodward's wife, Isabelle, deleted her Facebook account following the attack on their home in January 2020 and sinister songs about her husband.

Not all of his interactions with supporters were negative. Woodward was thanked by United followers for visiting the Manchesterplatz memorial to the Busby Babes in Munich in 2014 and he checked in on the wellbeing of staff after the Manchester Arena atrocity in 2017.

The morning after the night before against Paris Saint-Germain, he was deified by hungover fans at Charles de Gaulle Airport who urged him to make Solskjaer permanent manager. Like Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, Woodward and United will always have Paris.

Solskjaer, Louis van Gaal and David Moyes presided over finishes outside the top four. Mourinho did too but salvaged his first season when United completed the set in Stockholm. The Uefa Cup was the only significant trophy not to have resided in the club museum and that emotionally-charged evening in the Swedish capital, two nights after the horrific scenes at the Manchester Arena, was the zenith of Woodward's epoch.

The cutting conclusion would be that cash came ahead of cups on Woodward's watch. "Did this happen under Fergie?" Moyes asked at a non-football event during the draining tour of Australia and Asia in 2013. Woodward regrets clarifying on an investors' call that 'playing performance doesn't really have a meaningful impact on what we can do on the commercial side of the business'. Friends of Woodward insist he only cared about the commercial side as it enabled United to compete in the transfer market.

That does not wash with those who click through the turnstiles or even those who witnessed Woodward at work. One source said Woodward 'took the p--s' in the transfer market and another seasoned figure said they had 'never met anyone like him' in all their years in football.

Woodward missed the boat on a surfeit of eminent coaches. Sources close to Woodward say he finds some 'gutting', with his unsuccessful pitch to Jurgen Klopp believed to rankle. Woodward got it right by appointing Mourinho, defying the antiquated manoeuvrings by Sir Alex Ferguson, in 2016 and then got it wrong by not supporting his manager.

Mourinho was furnished with a new contract in January of 2018, not backed in the summer and then sacked in December. Woodward had read seven books about Mourinho prior to their working collaboration yet seemed oblivious to the rancour if Mourinho was denied a centre-back. He was.

Woodward maintains he was merely the messenger Mourinho shot at, that it was the recruitment department who vetoed Mourinho's recommendations. United insiders say the last four months under Mourinho were 'death by a thousand cuts'.

Mourinho only knew three United scouts by name, so compiled his own shortlist of targets with analyst Giovanni Cera, who followed him to Tottenham and Roma. Harry Maguire, Napoli centre-back Kalidou Koulibaly and Milan Skriniar of Inter Milan were the top-tier targets, with Mourinho adamant Woodward would not entertain dealing with the Tottenham chairman Daniel Levy for Toby Alderweireld.

Atletico Madrid captain Diego Godin and Bayern Munich's Jerome Boateng were among the experienced options. Ruben Dias and Nikola Milenkovic of Fiorentina were identified as more junior options. Manchester City paid nearly £20m less for Dias than United did for Maguire and the Portuguese was voted the PFA Player of the Year for 2021. Boateng, now at Lyon, started in Bayern's Champions League final win over Paris Saint-Germain two seasons ago.

Woodward was encouraged by United's trajectory under Mourinho following his second season of a second-place finish and reaching the FA Cup final. By then, the mood had soured and Mourinho had come to the end of his tether with Paul Pogba, describing the Frenchman as 'selfish' to a senior United player.

Pogba was dubbed 'His Excellency' by Mourinho during a coaching seminar in Portugal in 2019. A nickname reserved for Carrington was 'The King'. Mourinho was resigned to his fate the moment France won the World Cup as he suspected Pogba's ego would swell. He told confidants he was 'f----d'.

Mourinho still found his dismissal a shock as Woodward had backed him over his treatment of Pogba in his final weeks and actually encouraged Mourinho's authoritative approach. Pogba was on the bench for three of Mourinho's last four fixtures in charge.

The bar is low, but Mourinho is comfortably United's finest manager post-Ferguson. Amid the negative 'body language' that has vexed interim manager Ralf Rangnick, supporters who revelled in Solskjaer's and Luke Shaw's apparent schadenfreude at Mourinho's expense following United's win at Tottenham in April now sympathise with the Portuguese. United are still trophyless and Solskjaer's softness has emboldened a dressing room of underachievers.

"There are occasions when you have to ask yourself whether certain players are affecting the dressing-room atmosphere, the performance of the team, and your control of the players and staff. If they are, you have to cut the cord," Ferguson said at the Harvard Business School in 2012. Woodward cut the cord with the manager rather Paul Pogba.

That was Woodward's cultural reset at United: empowering millennials who undermined not just Mourinho but his successor. Solskjaer was such a diplomat he tied himself in knots with one player, telling them they were starting a game only to lose his nerve and retain the underperforming regular.

Woodward is conciliatory in his assessment of the David Moyes era, or error. Woodward feels the absence of a structure was unfair on Moyes, now excelling as manager of West Ham. Woodward hails from Chelmsford in Essex and counts a number of West Ham followers among his friends, which possibly accounts for why he found the 3-1 defeat at the London Stadium in September 2018 especially tough.

United began building the foundations of a structure by hiring John Murtough in late 2013 and then the authoritative Van Gaal. Of the myriad of mistakes with recruitment, Van Gaal's hit-rate particularly pains Woodward, who has been scathing of the signings of Morgan Schneiderlin and, rather oddly, Daley Blind.

Woodward insists the recruitment department would now veto a manager's targets if they were unconvinced. "Managers are not scouts," a United insider said. "Scouts are scouts and recruitment experts, analytical guys, data guys, these are scouts." The irony is Marcel Bout, the opposition scout under Van Gaal, remains at United as the head of global scouting.

Van Gaal was still left short in key areas - centre-back and centre forward - and the punctual Mourinho encountered frustration with Woodward during his first summer over the delay in signing Pogba and Henrikh Mkhitaryan.

Mourinho was particularly aghast at the handling of the Ivan Perisic saga in 2017. Mourinho spoke with Perisic directly and the Croat told him Inter Milan would not budge on their £50million valuation, even vowing not to fly to China for Inter's pre-season tour. Mourinho was dismayed when Perisic, looking as helpless as a hostage, was filmed at Milan airport.

Woodward promised Mourinho United would sweat it out and make a deadline day bid for Perisic in order to obtain him for a cut-price fee. Mourinho reminded Woodward that pre-season was a time for bedding in new players and he wanted to have the flexibility of switching to a back three with Perisic.

Figures at United deemed Perisic 'not marketable' enough to warrant a £50m outlay. Perisic went on to score in World Cup semi-final and finals and win the Champions League with Bayern.

In the denouement to the shambolic 2018 summer window, Woodward excitedly told Mourinho the weekend before the deadline he had arranged to meet Diego Godin's sister, also his representative. Mourinho, sceptical, had his own contacts at Atletico Madrid through his agent Jorge Mendes and soon discovered there would be 'no chance' of signing Godin. United still pointlessly triggered Godin's release clause in a face-saving exercise.

What exacerbated Mourinho's lugubrious mood during the fraught pre-season tour of the United States was a lack of face-time with Woodward, present only for the first and last matches in Phoenix and Miami, where he was filmed frantically catching up with Mourinho in the Hard Rock Stadium tunnel. Mourinho had taken umbrage with Woodward flying to New Zealand the previous summer to watch the British and Irish Lions.

An affable individual, Woodward's ego emerged in the fallout of the 2018 summer window, a summer of briefing and counter-briefing. Mourinho had the platform of press conferences from West to East Coast and was unloading. United, without a director of communications at the time, eventually returned fire.

Boateng's injury record was derided and the word from the club was they had bought enough crocks from Bayern (Schweinsteiger and Owen Hargreaves). Maguire did not represent value at Leicester's £75m valuation. They signed him the next year for £80m.

Woodward and Mourinho were singing from different hymn sheets and the atmosphere became toxic. When Woodward visited the dressing room in the wake of the startling defeat at Brighton, Mourinho had already exited it to attend to media obligations. Woodward did not hang around for him to return.

That was the summer Woodward and the United AD (after dominance) came full circle. It was so uncannily similar to the supermarket sweep dash in 2013 that the manager did not see out the season and it set United back three years.

Moyes was a blinkered and archaic choice by Ferguson, never worthy of managing United. That was confirmed when he passed on Thiago Alcantara, who moved from Barcelona to Bayern Munich in 2013, and United had a risible joint £28m bid rejected for Everton duo Marouane Fellaini and Leighton Baines.

A deadline day move for Ander Herrera collapsed and United were unsuccessful with 11th hour offers for Daniele de Rossi of Roma and Real Madrid midfielder Sami Khedira. A loan deal for Real left-back Fabio Coentrao also collapsed. Woodward was out of his depth.

A month after his Easter crucifixion, Moyes was scathing of Woodward. Another source who worked with Woodward at United said 'he f---s up deals'. Some suggested he enjoyed the image of being perceived as United's de facto director of football, flying on a budget airline to Barcelona to gauge the possibility of signing Neymar in 2015.

Cesc Fabregas had already led United down the garden path in 2013, the summer Woodward erred by letting it be known he was leaving the Australia leg of United's tour on 'urgent transfer business'. United pointlessly outbid Real Madrid for Gareth Bale when the most basic of due diligence would have confirmed they were wasting their time.

Only last month, Murtough thanked Solskjaer for 'resetting the culture'. Even Woodward effectively rolls his eyes at that phrase now as United did not accomplish what they set out to achieve and he is said to have despaired at recent 'crap' performances.

Woodward was the kingmaker with all three permanent managerial appointments. Van Gaal was sounded out more than a month before Moyes's Carrington summit, Mourinho five months, and Solskjaer agreed to take over as caretaker two months before Mourinho's residency at The Lowry ended.

The exception was Solskjaer. United had no succession plan in place prior to the 5-0 annihilation by Liverpool at Old Trafford in October when thousands fled before the hour mark, some at half-time. Antonio Conte was open to taking over but, as reported at the time, United were 'not keen' on the Italian.

Come the infamous reboot of 2019, Woodward insisted he had nothing to do with recruitment. That was believable as he had been on holiday in Marbella in late July while United were still working on the Maguire deal ahead of the early August deadline. Only Woodward met Jude Bellingham and his parents when they arrived in Carrington in March 2020.

Some Woodward acolytes have championed his role in the re-signing of Cristiano Ronaldo. Without the intervention of Sir Alex Ferguson, Ronaldo would have likely been mocked up on a blue billboard on Deansgate.

United fans had their own banner for Woodward.