What exactly is it that the Glazer family has done that makes Manchester United fans whine so endlessly? I ask only because I’ve just finished watching Gary Neville’s frequently ludicrous interview with British billionaire Jim Ratcliffe – who since purchasing a 27.7 per cent stake in the club in 2023 has overseen its football operations – and am none the wiser.
After hearing Ratcliffe, very patiently, it must be said, appraise Neville of the truly parlous state of the club’s finances – it seems obvious if the Glazers are guilty of anything, it is of being too trusting. For the last 12 years, the family on the other side of the Atlantic has apparently obligingly signed every cheque they’ve been asked to in order for the club to go on attracting the world’s best players and managers. Over that same period, however, very obviously the Reds have been run with same regard for value as is the NHS.
‘They’ve given management a lot of rope – too much rope, obviously,’ Ratcliffe says. ‘The previous two teams of management have to take a lot of the blame.’
Manchester United fans never tire of talking about how the Glazer family, by enacting a leveraged buy-out of the club, has saddled it with debt, but what difference in itself has this debt made to the end product – namely the football the first team produces? The answer is none. The funds have always kept flowing – more plentifully, in fact, than ever before.
Since the departure of Sir Alex Ferguson in 2013, Ratcliffe points out United ‘have spent a billion pounds on players, which is pretty much the same as Manchester City… but we haven’t spent it that well.’ As a result – given the laws of, err, capitalism, repeated failure to qualify for the lucrative Champions League tournament and the inability to draw on infinite reserves of oil money a la their Abu Dhabi-owned neighbours – the club not surprisingly now finds itself in queer street.
‘Manchester United would have run out of money by the end of the year… in the last four years it has lost £330 million,’ Ratcliffe says, adding 1,100 people are now employed by the club and that since 2018 annual costs have increased by £100 million. ‘It’s a bloated organisation and has made mistakes.’
It’s at this point in the conversation multimillionaire Neville, who despite educating his children privately is never shy of burnishing his left-wing working class hero credentials, attempts to take Britain’s second richest man to task for his efforts to reduce expenditure at United by ending the practice of providing free lunch for all staff.
He says: ‘I think when it comes to food and Manchester United’s staff being fed, the idea of me eating differently than my compatriots in the office, the groundsmen, the kit men… I find that difficult from an equality perspective.’
Politely – ‘I get that, Gary’ – Ratcliffe doesn’t in return ask the former defender if he ever had, from an equality perspective, any problem when playing with being remunerated rather differently to his groundsmen compatriots, but instead points out the money that finances free lunches is ultimately ‘the fans’ money’, adding he would rather see it spent on players that might help the football club win matches.
‘Can we not do both?’ Neville asks, sounding for all the world like a child with no concept of what money is, and seemingly having not listened to a word Ratcliffe has said.
While I’m reluctant to draw too much wider significance from the story of a private business – in this case a very famous football club – in decline, it is hard to ignore the reality that what its fans fear is happening at Manchester United is obviously to a greater or lesser extent also afflicting every part of life in the UK.
Our high streets, our infrastructure, our cultural institutions, even our ability to make things – all of it seems long ago to have been first sold to the highest bidder and then badly managed or hollowed out with a rapacity that once terrified but now seems entirely routine. This week it’s Thames Water in the headlines, but before that it was Debenhams, and before that Cadbury, and before that P&O Ferries and British Steel and so on and so on. Great generators of long-term wealth, each gutted and stripped for short-term profit.
One hopes eventually something will be done about it – a similar political force, perhaps, that has taken hold in the US will replicate itself here – but until that day comes Manchester United fans should remember that the club they love chose all by itself in 1991 to list itself on the UK stock market for the sole purpose of raising a quick buck, and by doing so made itself vulnerable to precisely the kind of economic forces that have led it to where it finds itself today.
They should then count themselves lucky that their American benefactor continues – despite their near constant ingratitude – to send the cheques, and that in Ratcliffe they have a mini Elon Musk, come to turn the ship around by first eradicating waste.
But please, in the meantime, enough with the whining.
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