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 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.
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,
Kieran Richardson played for England last summer in Chicago and did very well but views himself as an England player and comes in and wants more money. I don't buy the argument that international appearances add value to a player - they come in and ask for more money. We are not a selling club and we seldom sell international players.
I would think if he gets convicted of something there may be some changes. We still go by innocent until proven guilty.
We have our budget set for the summer and that won't change.
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, 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 knew that his retirement would come one day and we both have been planning for it by ensuring the quality of the squad
The rolling contract was designed to specifically take away some of that retirement talk and retirement issue.
Arsenal are a great team. But we lifted the trophy eight times in 11 years.
Would we prefer to be lifting it? Of course we would. You can't look back, we have to look forward and say what are we going to do get it back next year.
Players aren't quite as mercenary as people make them out to be. Some of them are but some aren't.
The stadium expansion is currently at the feasibility stage and has to go through that.
There are a lot of lessons to be learned. We can all learn lessons.