Manchester United legend Gary Neville told part-owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe he was 'alarmed' that nobody had suggested a way around cutting £40,000 of funding from the club's former players association. Ratcliffe and his fellow senior INEOS colleagues slashed that figure from the budget as part of a sweeping range of cost-cutting measures to fix the finances at Old Trafford.
Boyhood United fan Ratcliffe, who bought into the club last year, has made himself unpopular with some fans by announcing a wave of redundancies, raising Premier League matchday ticket prices, removing concessions for pensioners and children, and cancelling Sir Alex Ferguson's £2million-a-year ambassadorial salary.
But it was the funding for ex-players which irked Neville, who made more than 600 first-team appearances for the Red Devils. And the 50-year-old was particularly troubled that a relatively simple money-spinning solution had been ignored.
Neville told Ratcliffe on The Overlap: "£40,000 was taken away from the Association of Former Manchester United Players - that's not the players who played under Sir Alex Ferguson, they're players from the 1960s and 70s.
"I look at that, and I have a little bit of knowledge of the club, and I just think it's £40,000 from players who were giving a lot back to the local community, big supporters of United. Why not look at that £40,000 and put Harry Maguire and Bruno [Fernandes] in a dinner?
"Sell 1,000 tickets for £40 each, raise the money through a dinner, maybe do a raffle and give the ex-players their money, and do it in a way whereby it's not looking like a cruel decision, which it is? Why would that not be looked at?"
Ratcliffe responded with: "Nobody suggested that, because I would have supported that." To which Neville replied: "Well, Jim, that alarms me, because if people aren't suggesting that to you at the club..."
Ratcliffe jumped in: "The people at the club are not cruel or heartless." But Neville wouldn't let it lie as he pushed back: "Why couldn't the current players put a grand each in for them? Things like that, if it came to me and I was looking at a decision like that, why can't we reinstate that?"
And Ratcliffe concluded: "Maybe we can, I don't know, I can have a look at it. I'm not aware at that level of detail, to be honest."