The Glazers bought ManU nine years ago, "but only now is the takeover complete," according to Paul Hayward of the London TELEGRAPH. Louis van Gaal's appointment as manager "was by the Glazers, for the Glazers, and brings to a close the age in which the club’s American owners tiptoed around tradition." During former ManU Manager Alex Ferguson's long reign, the Glazers allowed the football side "to run itself." While Ferguson ran the club, "the Glazers fixed their energies on servicing the club’s debt" by extending the commercial reach to snacks, drinks, photocopiers and tires. ManU’s fans "can say goodbye to all that." Van Gaal "is the inverse of Moyes." He is a "technocratic autocrat, a continental A-lister who is romantic in his inclinations about the game but no abstract thinker in the more extreme Dutch sense." Though the appointment bears the imprint of Exec Vice Chair Ed Woodward, "their commercial dealmaker supreme, it also fits the business logic of trans-Atlantic owners who are ready to join the European mainstream of two-to-three year managerial cycles." No other big European club, with the exception of Arsenal, "is in the hands of an immovable patriarch" (TELEGRAPH, 5/20).
