IT is unlikely we will ever get confirmation, but the impression is that someone in the Glazer family may well have had a word with Ed Woodward. Nothing too harsh of course; after all, you can’t fault the man who keeps the sponsorship income rolling in. But just enough to invite the Manchester United chief executive to use as much nous in negotiating club transfers as he does in securing the official club toothpaste in Cambodia.

After last season’s follies, when many a selling club seemed to use Woodward as a cash machine and when most of the transfer business got done late, there is clearly a new vibe at Old Trafford. Woodward has made four signings thus far for a total of £68 million and what’s more, unlike last season, you can see all four starting in their best positions: Memphis Depay on the wing, Morgan Schneiderlin and Bastian Schweinsteiger in midfield, and Matteo Darmian at right-back. Quite a change from last year’s uncertain mess.

What’s more, he has also recouped some £10m with the sales of Nani, Angelo Henriquez and Robin van Persie, three guys whose contributions to United this season were likely to range from nil to meagre.

And United are playing hard ball elsewhere too. Valencia are demanding the full £35m release fee for Nicolas Otamendi; Woodward says they won’t go much beyond half that for the Argentine centre-back who turns 28 this season.

Same deal with David de Gea. Real Madrid hope to grab the goalkeeper for a cut-price £18m, given that he has a year left on his contract. Fine, say United, in that case, wait until next summer and take him as a free agent. We won’t be bullied into selling.

You have to admire the chutzpah. It’s as if after two years of being a doormat to agents and selling clubs, Woodward has woken up to the fact that sometimes buyers have leverage too. The handling of the De Gea case is particularly interesting. Yes, United and Woodward made a mess of it when they failed to give him a new deal a month ago. But now they are indicating that maybe they are better off keeping him and letting him leave for nothing if their valuation isn’t met.

And there is a logic to their thinking. De Gea earns around £2.5m a year, or about half what a top-drawer replacement would command. Throw in the fact that his presence alone is worth a few spots up the Premier League ladder and a round or two extra in the Champions League and maybe letting him run down his contract is the most fiscally prudent thing to do.

Of course, none of this means Woodward gets an A on his transfer dealings. We are only halfway through the summer after all. United still need a forward who can, when necessary, fill in for Wayne Rooney as well as a viable centre-back. And if De Gea does go, they’ll need a goalkeeper too.

How Woodward handles those situations will determine his grade. But at the midpoint of the summer dealings, United are far ahead of where they were at this point last year. And they are not being pushed around either. That’s a credit to Woodward.

SOMETIMES there is just no imagination. So much of the English media greeted Leicester’s appointment of Claudio Ranieri as the “return of the Tinkerman”. It’s a moniker he gained at Chelsea because of his tendency to rotate his team, a notion which must have seemed crazy to the local media at the time, most of whom evidently never realised that Sir Alex Ferg-uson did exactly the same thing for much of his career at Old Trafford.

Anyway, since leaving Chelsea in the summer of 2004, Ranieri has managed seven different teams, from Roma to Juventus and from Monaco to Valencia. It’s not as if he hid under a rock, and he even enjoyed some success, leading Roma, Juventus and Monaco to second-place finishes.

Leicester is an entirely different challenge of course and you can debate the merits of Ranieri’s hiring. But trotting out this Tinkerman nonsense 11 years after the fact? Really? They can’t come up with anything better?

IT took the Football Association nearly a year, but they eventually concluded that text messages and emails sent by Malky Mackay and Iain Moody, however inappropriate, did not warrant a charge because the pair had a “reasonable expectation of privacy”.

During their time at Cardiff – Mackay as manager, Moody as head of recruitment – the two sent each other all sorts of messages which included language that was sexist, racist and homophobic. These messages, sent from club devices, were then leaked to the Daily Mail.

It’s obviously an ugly situation. The men have apologised, but the reality is that they will struggle to find further work.

Yet on this occasion, you can see where the FA are coming from when they argued for the “reasonable expectation of privacy”. We don’t tolerate racist or hateful public speech because it fuels a climate that is racist and hateful. Yet this was private speech between two consenting adults, at least until it was leaked.

At the same time, we punish behaviour that is sexist, racist or discriminatory in any way. Yet in this case nobody was able to prove – or even claim – that Moody and Mackay were acting in such a way. All we have is two guys talking to each other in a way that is unprofessional, juvenile and laced with problematic and occasionally racist terminology. That may be grounds for a sacking. It’s not – without further evidence -– enough for legal action or even FA sanctioned punishment.

These two were fools to talk the way they did. If their actions followed their speech patterns – and it could be proved – then they would deserve to get the book thrown at them. But that’s not what the allegation is.