Krishnan Sreekumar
Simon Jordan tells Manchester United chiefs to ignore club legend Gary Neville over their next manager appointment
Speaking to talkSPORT (h/t Express), former Crystal Palace owner Simon Jordan has urged Manchester United’s chief executives to ignore the thoughts of club legend Gary Neville in their hunt for a new permanent manager.
Ex-United skipper Neville, who now works as a football pundit on television, said that he believed that the Manchester side should appoint Paris Saint-Germain boss Mauricio Pochettino as their next manager over Ajax Amsterdam’s Erik ten Hag.
Jordan, who was the chairman of the Eagles from 2000 until 2010, said that the Red Devils need to ignore Neville as he did not have all the facts, and that one cannot be having other people ‘parrot’ in your ear with only half the facts they know.
“Good advice is something you can never have too much of but sometimes you have to make a decision based upon what you know to be the case rather than other people parroting in your ear about half the facts they know. Gary Neville doesn’t know all the facts.”
Pochettino and ten Hag are touted to be the leading candidates to succeed Ralf Rangnick in the manager’s seat at Old Trafford, once the interim manager’s tenure at the club expires in the summer. The German replaced Ole Gunnar Solskjaer late last year as the new head coach.
“You know everything, listen to me”
Neville came through the academy and broke into the first team in Manchester alongside the famous class of 92, who went on to become superstars in their own right at the club. The Englishman was extremely successful, winning 8 Premier League titles and 2 Champions League trophies while playing for his boyhood club.
Jordan was extremely critical of the former right-back, saying that he needed to understand that what happened at United 20 years ago is not what the club were facing at the moment, and the antidote to their current issues could not be effective with a backdrop of the team from how it worked in the past.
“Gary Neville didn’t get a memo sent to him saying: ‘You know everything, listen to me’. There’s a backdrop to understanding Manchester United 20 years ago and there’s a backdrop to understanding what the antidote to Manchester United’s problems currently are now.”
Although his comments about Neville were harsh, there is some truth in them. After all, a big club like United cannot heed the advice of former players to take big decisions, such as appointing the next permanent manager.
Neville may have been successful as a player, but as Jordan said, what applied to a side’s success in the past does not mean that the system worked similarly in today’s time. The former skipper is no longer an insider at the club, so he does not know the inner workings of the team to comment at length.
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That being said, Neville is entitled to an opinion, and perhaps that is all that he had to say when he suggested Pochettino’s name to become the next head coach at his boyhood club. Jordan seems to have had a severe reaction to an opinion in this instance.
For United fans, whoever they get between Pochettino and ten Hag may not matter much as they too cannot be experts on the subject. However, one thing is for sure – both these names are elite coaches who come with a reputation, which may prove to be an upgrade on the current situation at the club.
