Gary Neville tells Man Utd CEO of media to ‘get the f@@k away’ from squad and fans

"Creating Robots on and off the pitch! Get the f@@k away from them."

Gary Neville has accused Manchester United's CEO of media Phil Lynch of 'creating robots on and off the pitch'. The former United defender was evidently annoyed after footage appeared on Twitter of Lynch explaining how the club works with players on social media when talking to Sports Pro Influencers. Neville also suggested that he 'makes controlling fans sound like he’s trying to win a general election'. In the short clip, Lynch says: "Each one of these players are individuals. Some want charity focus, some want family focus, some want just football focus and I think it's really about trying to understand what narrative they want to tell and then we’re here to support that narrative. https://twitter.com/SP_Influencers/status/1455181062238318593 "It does get a little tricky sometimes. There's a lot of the mass media out there, trying to build that story, trying to build that tabloid piece of content. That's not what we do at all. "We're trying to work with them and understand the story they want to get out and we support that, join forces on that.

"We pull, twice a day, fan sentiment graphs for every one of our players. We have certain thresholds that alert us when we see fan sentiment going one way - be that a personal issue, an on-pitch performance issue and when that happens, we then start to work with the player and his team individually to try and counter that narrative a little bit.

"In a lot of cases it is just emotion and it comes off and it calms down anyway. But we do spent a lot of time on what we call social media monitoring and tracking and then working specifically with each individual player but it's 25 bespoke processes.

"It's not 'hey, here's the gameplan and it's going to work for all of you'".

The Sky Sports pundit reacted to the clip - which was originally posted on November 1 - on Sunday morning, the day after United suffered defeat in the Manchester Derby to rivals City. https://twitter.com/GNev2/status/1457304991224504328

Neville quote retweeted the clip saying: "Creating Robots on and off the pitch! Get the f@@k away from them.

"It’s a football club. He makes controlling fans sound like he’s trying to win a general election!"

It isn't the first time that the 46-year-old has criticised the use of social media within football, after claiming that it was a 'shame' that some of the England players didn't control their own social media account in March.

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• Gary Neville hits back at United fans, claiming ‘anything goes’ in Johnson era