David Gill
David Gill
David Alan Gillis British football executive, formerly chief executive of Manchester United and a vice-chairman of The Football Association. He served as vice-chairman of the G-14 management committee until the G-14 was disbanded. He sits on the UEFA Executive Committee as of 2013. Gill was elected as a FIFA Vice-President sitting on the FIFA Council in 2015; rejecting this position in protest at Sepp Blatter until Blatter announced his resignation as FIFA President, following the 2015 FIFA corruption case...
NationalityScottish
ProfessionSports Executive
Date of Birth5 August 1957
We, as clubs, were not happy, by and large, with that reduction when it was made three years ago and we would like it to return back to that level. The proposal is not to go to UEFA and say 'go from 13 to 17,' but 'this is how we can do it.' We may be right or we may be wrong, but let's have a dialogue about it.
We did have concerns and we now have in place the business plan which was in place when they took over.
We hope to make one or two very big signings this summer - and we are already committed to that.
Our plans were to bid for the player (Rooney) in summer 2005, but Newcastle United's bid and Everton's subsequent interest in selling him, forced us to accelarate our plans or risk losing him,
Namely the manager will assess what he believes a player is worth and he will discuss that with the board and then we will go after that target. If we can achieve it at that target, great, but if we can't we will have to move on to the next player.
We have our budget set for the summer and that won't change.
We had to support our player and genuinely felt, like Rio has said, that it was an honest mistake. It is important to know that Manchester United never said, and Rio Ferdinand never said, that a mistake hadn't been made.
We discussed buying a defender. The view was the priority at that time given the way we were playing was that we needed support up front and that is why we bought Louis Saha.
We genuinely believe to this day that it was an honest genuine mistake and we never imagined the punishment would be eight months. The precedent dictated that it was unlikely to be that. We don't regret he played for that period.
We have a very strong balance sheet. We are very comfortable we are generating cash. We can compete successfully in the transfer market.
We don't have major limits in the transfer market.
We have the fact we sell out every week to 67,500 and hopefully 75,000 in the future. We have a lot of assets.
As a club, Manchester United are very supportive of the collective agreement.
The board had concerns before they took over, but they've demonstrated they will listen.