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LOS ANGELES — Louis van Gaal has won his battle to dictate the format of Manchester United’s future pre-season tours, but the Dutchman has been told the club will continue to clock up the miles on lucrative summer trips.

LOS ANGELES — Louis van Gaal has won his battle to dictate the format of Manchester United’s future pre-season tours, but the Dutchman has been told the club will continue to clock up the miles on lucrative summer trips.

Van Gaal, who took charge of his first game as United manager with a friendly against LA Galaxy at the Pasadena Rose Bowl on Wednesday evening in California, vented his frustration with the schedule of the club’s four-game tour of the United States, complaining of the “dreadful distances and jet lag” which were affecting the preparations ahead of his first campaign in charge, and hinting that perhaps the club were “too big” for their own good.

Having arrived almost 30 minutes late for his pre-match conference at the Rose Bowl, due to gridlocked Los Angeles traffic on Tuesday, Van Gaal delivered a blunt assessment of the demands placed on his players by the club’s commercial ambitions.

“We have to prepare for the season and when you have commercial activities and dreadful distances, having to fly a lot and the jet lag, it is not very positive for a good preparation,” Van Gaal said.

“Maybe it is too big a club. Not only in a sporting sense but also commercially. We have to do a lot of things that normally I don’t allow.

“I have to adapt to this big club but I think also this big club has to adapt to Louis van Gaal. I hope we can have some balance to that.

“The tour was already arranged and I shall adapt and United will do everything to adapt to my rules. But yes, I hope that (it will be a shorter tour next summer). They have already said that to me and I am very confident that it shall be.”

United have embarked on annual summer tours since playing a fixture in Australia in 1999, with the club travelling the globe every pre-season to promote their brand and meet the demands of sponsors such as Chevrolet, whose £53 million-a-year (S$111.76 million) shirt sponsorship deal will be officially launched in Detroit next week.

And with the club’s entourage amounting to 153 staff in the US, with the club’s commercial department engaged in a series of high-profile events with sponsors, executive vice-chairman Ed Woodward insists that summer tours are here to stay.

He did concede, however, that Van Gaal would be fully consulted and given the final say on preparations for next summer’s tour, with the club likely to return to the Far East for a trip potentially lasting three weeks.

“The core of the tour is preparation for the season,” Woodward said. “One of the things we will do differently is to sit down with Louis very early for him to tell us how he wants the tour to be constructed. He will give us the skeleton of the tour and we will discuss that with him.”

Despite Van Gaal’s concerns over disruption to preparations, United’s trip this summer is one of the shortest and least demanding of recent years. Last summer, when the team toured Australasia, the club made a 38,600km round trip and in 2012, they covered 35,400km when visiting Durban, Cape Town, Shanghai, Oslo and Gothenburg.

Woodward, no longer on the tour because of work commitments, argues that United cannot ignore the potential of the US. Speaking before Van Gaal made his comments, Woodward said: “America and Asia are the two core places we tend to go to and both of them deliver a huge amount. The Premier League has been very clear in saying America is the No 1 developing market.

“It may be strange to describe the US as a developing market, but if you look at the stats from the World Cup, the NBC numbers were two and a half times the previous Fox and ESPN (World Cup) numbers and despite finishing seventh (in the Premier League last season), we were the No 1 most-watched team (on US TV). This is a very good country for us from a potential sponsorship perspective, a potential media perspective,” he added. “We’ve got more fans here than we have in the UK.”

The Red Devils made a good start to their tour, giving Van Gaal a win on debut. Wayne Rooney scored twice late in the first half of a 7-0 friendly victory over the LA Galaxy.

Danny Welbeck scored the first goal, while Ashley Young and defender Reece James scored two second-half goals each as United opened their tour with a polished win.

FIVE REASONS WHY MAN UTD NEED TO TRAVEL PRE-SEASON

1. Only 1.7% of Man Utd’s 10 million UK fans live in Manchester

2. There are more Man Utd fans in Indonesia than in the UK

3. There are more Man Utd fans in the Maldives than Norwich City fans in Norwich.

4. The smallest group of fans is 20, in Sao Tome – a small island off West Africa

5. Almost 325 million Utd fans live in the Asia Pacific region, 173m in the Middle East and Africa, 90m in Europe and 71m in the Americas.

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