Details of a meeting between Manchester United staff and Richard Arnold have been leaked with the club’s chief executive facing some tough questions on how he handled the Mason Greenwood saga, as well as being asked whether he was aware of allegations against Antony before he was bought from Ajax. United came under fire in the summer when it was reported they were leaning towards reintegrating Greenwood into the first team.
A huge backlash ultimately saw United perform a U-turn by sending Greenwood out on loan. But it appears as though Arnold’s role in the original plan to bring the striker back had a huge impact on staff at the club.
According to The Athletic, an all-staff meeting was held on September 18 where they were given free reign to air any grievances and submit questions anonymously. It’s claimed that the vast majority of questions were centred around the Greenwood case as well as searching questions around Antony.
Arnold was grilled over United’s statement following their internal investigation, which controversially found Greenwood “did not commit the offences in respect of which he was originally charged”. That statement appeared to have a negative impact on staff at the club too as one question posed to Arnold asked how the club plan to deal with “all the negative, hateful and disgusting abuse towards the women’s team, the female members of staff, women in general on social media, as well as emails in our public-facing inboxes and in-person at the matches from fans”.
Arnold responded by insisting the club will support anybody who comes forward and added that United have “taken a lot of learnings” from the Greenwood saga. He said: “The first is around continuing to strengthen the education and welfare support to players to make sure at the front of mind is promoting healthier relationships and behaviours.
“We’ve also reviewed our process for dealing with allegations to make sure that we have a robust and consistent framework for the future. The other learning we’ve taken is to listen to feedback from domestic abuse charities and other groups and, in particular, Women’s Aid. And we’ve worked very closely with them for a period of time to make sure that the language we use is sensitive to the perspectives of abuse survivors who may not be at all involved in the case that we’re referring to but find, understandably, the situation very sensitive and we’ll continue that engagement going forward.”
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But Arnold refuted any suggestion that United were aware of allegations against Antony before he joined the club last summer. Arnold replied: “As with every player, we conducted detailed due diligence, including the help of specialist third-party agencies externally.
“Police reports remain confidential to the person submitting them to the police in Brazil. So people alleging (we knew) are not aware of how the process works in Brazil. And our due diligence did include checking legal records in Brazil, as it does for players that we bring in. So we did due diligence.
“This was not highlighted and indeed, the allegation in which people say that the police report was made was withdrawn at the time. And again, there’s coverage of that online and I won’t go into any more detail. So it’s absolutely not the case that we were aware of this and covered it up.”
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