Photo by Ash Donelon/Manchester United via Getty Images
Photo by Ash Donelon/Manchester United via Getty Images
The JJ Gabriel exit demand has rocked Man Utd, and former player Louis Saha has made a bold Sir Alex Ferguson point about the whole saga.
Less than a month before he turns 16, JJ Gabriel has demanded that his registration with Man Utd be cancelled and that he be allowed to leave as a free agent.
Fans are equal parts distraught and angry at how this has been handled, as Gabriel burned bridges by not showing up for training.
Sir Alex Ferguson was a strict disciplinarian with youngsters, but Louis Saha believes the “monster” is already inside.
Louis Saha says Sir Alex would have failed to cope with JJ Gabriel
This is not the first time Gabriel has threatened to leave the club where he has been since the age of nine, and something tells us that even if United manage to make him stay, this won’t be the last time either.
There is a sense that someone needs to get hold of Gabriel and his advisers and shake some sense into them so that there’s no doubt left, and everybody knows where they stand, instead of having these shenanigans every few months.
Sir Alex dealt with these transgressions with an iron fist if he thought boundaries were being overstepped, but Louis Saha thinks modern football has become so rotten that even Sir Alex’s methods would not work.
Louis Saha spoke to Betano Sports Betting Site: Sir Alex Ferguson would not have been able to cope with this generation of football, with the families, the agents, even the social media and everything else, because he always wanted to protect the players, and you can no longer do that.
“Players are too exposed too early and the people around them just don’t care. They think they are writing their own story and that they can force the club to act the way they want, and they don’t think about what it could do to the player or their opportunities.
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“Not even Sir Alex could have stopped this because the machine is too powerful. It is the way that football as an industry has gone. They let the monsters inside and now they are here to stay, making everything about the money and the fame, and it is such a shame to see. I would go as far as to say it is now a disaster for these players coming through.
“You see it all the way down to the grassroots. Parents are super aggressive, fighting and making it all so strange and angry. They want to speak too early about salaries, cars, houses and all this stuff. It has become a madness.”
Gabriel is 15, so he cannot legally make his own decisions. Naturally, the focus falls on his advisors who told a player that young to miss first-team training when most players his age would dream of even being invited for it.
How Sir Alex would have dealt with it is certainly an interesting thought exercise, but a glimpse of it was seen in his handling of Paul Pogba’s exit.
He refused to play the game of his agent and promptly sent him packing because, for him, respect for the club was the priority. Perhaps Gabriel would have left United last year under Sir Alex. United have now made him bigger than the club by entertaining these antics.