First things first

I already knew exactly what I needed to do on day one at the club, so I didn't have to waste time doing the usual 'niceties'. Straight down to business.

Time to analyse the current playing (and non playing) staff.

As much as I admire Giggsy in a footballing respect (certainly not so much away from the sport!), I wanted a proven, top quality assistant manager. Was only one man for the job; Mauro Tassotti. He didn't know me from Adam, but obviously he was very aware of who Man Utd were. I was frank with him - I needed the best man to assist me and I felt that was him. I explained what my plan at the club was. He seemed enthused. We thrashed out the details and he came in for Giggs. Giggs was a bit upset, but what you gonna do? Decided the rest of my key backroom staff seemed up to the job. No need to replace the youth setup. Brian McClair knows what he's doing.

Next job was deciding who to get rid of. Sounds so callous, but I don't have the time or space for players I don't think are gonna be worth keeping round. I'd also started to build a list in my head of who I wanted to bring in, and that list was getting bigger by the second.

Mauro and I took a look through the coaches reports on the squad. We knew we had to be aggressive about this task and decided that to our best knowledge we'd be looking to offload any player we didn't genuinely believe would (or perhaps could) get on the first team bench at some point. This was a list that eventually included the likes of Paddy McNair, Nick Powell, Jesse Lingard, Tyler Blackett and a whole slew of youngsters you've probably never heard of (with all due respect, of course).

Now, given I needed to also focus on young players to bring into the club, I didn't really have the time to deal with selling around 30 unwanted players during preseason, so I decided to bring a director of football to look after the task. In the end the currently unemployed - and very fucking old - Italian, Fermo Favini, was the man we went for. He's being doing this stuff to a high standard for a very, very long time.

And on to the potential incoming players; I had built a list of about 52 players to bring in to the club. Our board had given me about £80mil to spend and I intended to spend every last penny securing as many of these players as possible! I quickly signed up Tielemans from Anderlecht and Zivkovic from Ajax - two young players most people will surely be familiar with. Also managed to snap up Ould-Chikh, a young Dutch winger from Twente. Beyond that, there were lots of knock backs from enquiries, which is to be expected when you go round asking teams if you can have their wonderkids. But, we did manage to organise some deals for a handful of Argentine kids who wont be able to join till 2016 and even then will likely need to be farmed out to Belgium to pick up work permits - but at least we will have secured their services.

The negotiations are continuing and we're about to play the MLS Superstars in some sort of preseason trophy lark that I'm finding it hard to get excited about. Anyway, next time I'll firm up who we've managed to capture and how our preseason has gone!