I have done some Manchester United adding up so you don’t have to. The average salary in the UK, according to the Office for National Statistics, is £37,430. It would take almost 10 staff (9.4) at United to earn in a year the sum Casemiro reportedly makes in a week, £350k.
Even if the figures are a little off, you can see where efficiencies might best be made.
If we develop the sum, and the point, the cost of maintaining Casemiro for a year, a thinly used squad player don’t forget, costs United £18.2m, broadly equivalent to 486 annual salaries.
The announcement by cost-cutting champion Sir Jim Ratcliffe of further jobs to go, rumoured to be at least 100 – possibly double that on top of the 250 already axed – suggests that someone in the Ineos economic department might not have O’Level Maths..
Sir Jim argues that the job cuts are geared towards improving the team. Only that. Yet if that were the policy goal, he could achieve that by getting rid of Casemiro sharpish.
It is plainly the case that not paying a player £18m a year to warm the bench is the real saving, and one that would allow Ratcliffe to maintain the present staffing structure and still make a saving.
And think of the boost to morale that would achieve. Instead of turning up to work fearing your job might be the next under the hammer, you could be racing around Carrington and Old Trafford spreading positive energy.
You never know, it might even lift the morale of a team that badly needs something to pick it up off the floor.
Certainly what United fans don’t want is more negative commentary about the club. They have enough of that watching the team. Staff are not just a number. They have a name.
One, Jackie Kay, erstwhile head of first team logistics, has been at the club for 30 years. Her role, to which she ascended only two years ago, will still have to be done, presumably subsumed into the responsibilities of another.
Casemiro is just one example of United’s desperate recruitment record. Of course, Sir Jim will argue that Casemiro arrived before he did and that the whole point of Ineos is to ensure the end of just this kind of bloated transfer policy.
Hmm, how’s that going, Jim? Since Ineos took over they have appointed and sacked a sporting director, Dan Ashworth, who spent longer on gardening leave from Newcastle than the five months he was in post.
United paid an estimated £3m in compensation to hire him and presumably a further sum to fire him.
And lest we forget, a month prior to Ashworth falling, Ineos sacked a manager to whom they gave an extended contract in the summer. The combined cost of acquiring and firing Ashworth, of paying off Erik ten Hag and appointing Ruben Amorim was in the region of £25m.
These are punishing figures for a club supposedly run by an elite performance group.
Manchester United's co-owner Jim Ratcliffe (L) talks with Ineos' Director of Sport John Brailsford ahead of the English Premier League football match between Manchester United and Southampton at Old Trafford in Manchester, north west England, on January 16, 2025. (Photo by Oli SCARFF / AFP) / RESTRICTED TO EDITORIAL USE. No use with unauthorized audio, video, data, fixture lists, club/league logos or 'live' services. Online in-match use limited to 120 images. An additional 40 images may be used in extra time. No video emulation. Social media in-match use limited to 120 images. An additional 40 images may be used in extra time. No use in betting publications, games or single club/league/player publications. / (Photo by OLI SCARFF/AFP via Getty Images)
Ineos put business over football just like the Glazers (Photo: AFP/Getty)
And that’s before we tuck into the £140m transfer spend in the summer. Whilst £52m Leny Yoro shows potential, and Noussair Mazraoui has shown value at £12m, Matthijs de Ligt has hardly looked a snip at £43.9m and Joshua Zirkzee looks anything but a £35m striker.
With this scale of financial wastage you have to question the impact of staff cuts as a factor in improving the team. Clearly there is no equivalence between the sums burned on the recruitment of mediocre footballing staff and that saved by slashing jobs. To claim otherwise is disingenuous.
Clearly something else is going on here, and it’s not about the football. Ineos are operating in a petrochemical environment subject to rapid change and uncertainty. Much of the old fossil fuel-based industries are facing deindustrialisation.
The impact of renewable energy and the political swirl around it has further destabilised trading and investment conditions. Ineos saw its profits more than halved between 2021 and 2023, down from £3bn to £1.2bn.
This has put huge stress across the Ineos sporting portfolio, including United, who reported £300m losses over the past three years.
The involvement of Ineos across myriad sports has hardly been transformational. Since Ineos acquired a third share of Mercedes F1 in December 2020, the team has fallen behind their major competitors.
The Ineos cycling squad is no longer the Grand Tour challenger it was under Sky and are seeking new investment.
In yachting, the attempt to win a first America’s Cup for Britain ended in failure and acrimony with skipper Sir Ben Ainslie threatening legal action after quitting the Ineos Britannia challenger.
And now the All Blacks are suing Ineos over an alleged breach of contract after they say Ineos failed to make the first sponsorship payment of 2025.
United are the group’s flagship sporting brand. The story sold was that of the emotional relationship between United and Britain’s richest man, a fan coming to clean up the mess, to make United great again.
What this MUGA narrative ignored was the business case for the buy-in. Ratcliffe is a mergers and acquisitions guy. He made his fortune snapping up petro-chemical companies and selling them on.
This involves stripping out costs to make companies appear more profitable, which in return makes them ripe for investment or sale.
Furthermore, if Ineos are to go forward with their Wembley of the North vision, someone will have to pay for it. Sir Jim will not want to take on the debt burden alone. He will need private investors to share the risk, not to mention government infrastructure support.
Fans are not stupid. They have seen ticket sales hiked, redundancies made, and none of it has made a blind bit of difference to a team getting worse under Amorim not better.
That’s because the cuts appear to have little bearing on performance as claimed. It’s still business first at United, just as it was when the Glazers were running the football operation.
United are not alone in acting this way, of course. Their rivals operate on smaller staffs. Liverpool reportedly 900, Manchester City and Arsenal around 700. Those teams are just better at it.