Let’s be honest. The last decade has, for the most part, driven Man United fans to despair. Once the most feared, loathed yet admired team in English football, they’ve been a punchline for rival fans ever since Alex Feguson retired.
Over ten years, United fans have watched on in disbelief as the negligence, incompetence, inertia and indecision of the club’s owners, the Glazer family, dismantled the winning machinery of the Ferguson era and allowed rival clubs to catch up and ultimately eclipse the red side of Manchester. United were degraded and debased, reduced to a pastiche of its former self; a footballing anachronism haunted by its past, complete with the rusty, leaking, creaking stadium to go along with it.
If I had to choose, I’d say that the singlemost egregious act of negligence committed by the owners was leaving the same antiquated footballing structure in place for the best part of two decades. As the antithesis to the typically ambitious owners from overseas, the Glazers seemed content to run the club over email from Florida, apparently presuming that whatever experience they had operating an NFL team would translate seamlessly to the Premier League. “Hands-off” doesn’t begin to describe them. The club became something of a gravy train for funds, players, their agents, lawyers, the board and the Glazers themselves, but few were acting in its best interests. It’s a set of numbers on a spreadsheet to them, nothing more.
Whatever little evident interest the owners had revolved mostly around commercial growth, clicks, and sweating the brand. They shamelessly monetised every last drop of the club’s successful Ferguson-era legacy in the fallacious hope that commercial success would automatically yield sporting success, even though the evidence points to the opposite, while effectively abandoning oversight of the football operation and leaving it to more or less fend for itself.
They got away with it, too, for the first few years at least. Alex Ferguson’s sheer force of personality compensated for the Glazers’ total lack of competence or concern for the club, but as soon as he left, the stabilisers came off and the whole thing began to wobble. Every bit of skill and knowledge needed to run the club left with him, leaving behind the Glazers, David Moyes, and a bunch of bean-counters in suits minding the shop.
While their rivals over at Man City, Liverpool, Brighton and Newcastle shrewdly recruited promising players and created elite behind-the scenes sporting hierarchies in and around their squads and coaches, United’s owners were content to shun meritocracy altogether and appoint rookie Glazer loyalists like Ed Woodward, Matt Judge, Richard Arnold and John Murtough to senior positions which they should’ve been kept as far away from as possible. A strangely naive yet arrogant investment banker CEO who appoints himself de facto head of player recruitment, openly boasts about how much money the club have and then inevitably gets cleaned out in every transfer window ? I can only imagine the howls of laughter in rival clubs’ boardrooms. No other supposedly elite club would countenance allowing underqualified schmoozers and political operators to learn on the job in senior roles in the way United did.
With no sporting director or experienced head of recruitment to rein in the worst excesses of the litany of coaches who tried and ultimately failed to overhaul United, each manager was given a reckless amount of latitude regarding player recruitment, as the circus above him in the boardroom had no idea what they were doing, and the “scouting department” may as well have been a teenager playing Football Manager, always opting for the flashiest, priciest, most obvious players. What’s worse is that on several occasions, the club bypassed the manager’s veto by signing big name players in the hope of selling merchandise and garnering social media likes.
Rival fans often point to the amount of money the Glazers pumped into transfers and salaries, but this analysis is woefully incomplete. After all, it usually wasn’t their money, and more often than not, they were overpaying for the wrong players who didn’t improve the squad but had huge commercial potential.
Juan Mata, Marouane Fellaini, Anthony Martial, Angel Di Maria, Paul Pogba, Alexis Sanchez, Cristiano Ronaldo, Jadon Sancho, and Edison Cavani are all good players individually, but collectively they’re hardly indicative of a cohesive, long-term footballing vision. Undoubtedly some of the above were outright mercenaries who only joined on the condition of a big payday. Six coaches and 20-odd transfer windows later, United were left with a skewed, Frankenstein squad, made up of a mishmash of different and often opposing player skillsets.
Enter Sir Jim and INEOS. After a torturous 18 month process punctuated by media frenzies and unsubstantiated rumours, the Glazers finally ceded 25% (give or take) of their ownership to Ratcliffe and company, handing him the keys to the football operation.
It’s still very early days, and Ratcliffe will ultimately be judged on the size of the trophy haul, but so far at least, he’s talked the talk and walked the walk, poaching Man City’s head of operations for the vacant CEO position, along with the imminent arrival of new sporting director Dan Ashworth. Plans for a new stadium, if realised, will be transformative in restoring the club to its former status.
Since it was announced on Christmas Eve 2023 that the Glazers had accepted INEOS’ 25% stake, Ratcliffe has communicated more in two months than the Glazers have in 20 years. His regular engagements with the media and fans, along with his blunt assessments of United’s performance in recent years are a refreshing change from the Glazers’ shameful, cowardly radio silence. It has been a PR masterclass from SJR and INEOS, as they outline a well-articulated roadmap of the path back to succcess. I strongly suspect 25% is the thin end of the wedge which ultimately intends to oust the Glazers altogether, and that in itself is cause for optimism.
It’s difficult to get too excited given the number of false dawns United fans have had to endure over the last decade. The bright-eyed, happy-go-lucky fans we once were are now jaded cynics, numbed by the talk of “cultural resets” and constantly waiting for tomorrow. Maybe though, just maybe, better times aren’t too far away.
