Manchester United legend Eric Cantona has revealed he spoke several times to Ed Woodward about becoming club president at Old Trafford.
The Frenchman is still widely regarded as one of the all-time Premier League greats, and he’s also one of football’s biggest characters, having taken his eccentric personality into the world of acting since retiring from football.
Still, it seems Cantona was also ready to return to Man Utd, insisting that he felt the club needed a president of football, and that he would be the ideal man for the job.
Speaking to The Athletic, Cantona says he offered himself to former United chief Ed Woodward, but the club turned him down.
“Ed Woodward is great at marketing but not great at football. United should have a chairman and then they should have a president of marketing and then a president of football, who is in charge of all the decisions in football. So I proposed to them that I should be president of football,” Cantona said.
“I met him a few times. But they did not accept it! I still think me or somebody else, they should have somebody for football. It should be somebody from the club, who knows football and the club.
“I thought about something also. This club has on social media hundreds of thousands of fans. If they create an application today saying that 50 per cent of the club can be sold, then why should you have one person or two people who invest £500million?
“Instead, you can have hundreds of millions of people who spend 10 euros, 20 euros, 100 euros, 1,000 euros, and 50 per cent of the club is owned by the real fans of Manchester United.
“With social media now, you would do that like this.
“But they did not want me to be the president of the club! They did not want me! And the fans have to know that I went and travelled to Manchester to give them the opportunity to succeed in the next decades. And they did not want it.”
It would have been intriguing, and certainly entertaining, to see Cantona taking up such a role at United, but it remains to be seen if it would really have worked as well as he clearly thinks it would have.
Cantona lacks experience in such a role and his outspoken nature might have given MUFC a whole other kind of problem to deal with.