In March, Sir Jim Ratcliffe said Manchester United would “run out of money” by the end of the year if costs were not chopped. The staff was reduced from 1,100 to 700 and £1m was saved by abolishing free lunches. Ratcliffe’s summer spending spree suggests United will see Christmas after all.
Two months before the owner spoke, the manager Ruben Amorim called his team “the worst maybe” in the club’s history. It felt extreme until an apparition of a United side lost a Europa League final to Spurs without leaving a trace on the pitch.
Austerity and apocalyptic language are an unusual way to turn a club around, but the money saved on soup and sandwiches in the canteen has been poured into a splurge, with £200m spent on forwards and a lump set aside for the pursuit of Brighton’s Carlos Baleba. It’s faintly ominous that United seemed to decide only after splashing out on strikers that their midfield also required attention. Rebuilds though are seldom linear.
The ‘big clubs’ always come back. Don’t they? When Graeme Souness’s Liverpool were buying Neil Ruddock and Julian Dicks you knew the aberrations would stop eventually. Arsenal’s slide during Arsene Wenger’s sunset years was bound to be corrected. So, Manchester United – your turn.
Arsenal are the new season’s first opponents and their recovery offers hope to United’s fans. But there’s a difference. The chaos – strategic and spiritual – was never as bad at Arsenal as it has been at United.
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What United seek after their 15th place finish in May is not revival so much as resurrection. Let’s relive the 2024-25 campaign, their worst in the Premier League: 18 defeats (the most since 1973-74), only 11 wins, a record low 44 goals scored, with a minus-10 goal difference. Amorim won only seven of his 27 games in charge.
“It’s not hard to see from the outside what it’s been like,” Luke Shaw said this summer. “A lot of the time I’ve been here over the last few years it’s been extremely negative. It can be quite toxic, the environment, it’s not healthy at all.”
In August in the Sir Alex Ferguson era, season previews would ask whether United could ever be deposed. Ferguson’s “repel all boarders” principle sent many an invader splashing back into the waves. Now, credibility is the first, modest target: a team that functions, fights, and excites.
Unlike falling giants from earlier times United have been flirting with a much darker fate. In a league of corporations worth billions, another couple of years of signing the next Antony, Rasmus Hojlund, Jadon Sancho or Mason Mount might have sent them to a place of no return. History and tradition can only stretch so far.
The path back from oblivion is rockier. And once their fabled global fanbase gets bored and wanders off to cheer for someone else, who would hear their cries in the night?
United are two clubs in one. The holding company is still owned by the Glazer family, who have cost the business £1.2 billion in debt interest, fees and dividends. The first-team operation is controlled by Ratcliffe. United broke new ground in elite football by effectively franchising-out their own football team. It's an uncomfortable arrangement. But Ratcliffe’s execs have forged ahead with a £50m training refit and a £2 billion stadium project that will be more complex to deliver than Disneyesque drawings suggest.
To make United worth watching again – to make Old Trafford’s sleeping heart race – might seem a meagre aim for a club with 20 league titles. But it all starts from there. To give the people what they fully want – Fergusonian pomp and circumstance – will take longer. United used to be the pre-eminent football club in Britain. Now they’re not even No 1 in Manchester.
Cultural theorists will note that disintegration can be as addictive in the digisphere as success. As any sports editor will confirm, you could publish a story about a United player changing their brand of shower gel and digital tracking will show a spike.
A Man Utd tale – any Man Utd tale – is the day’s first dopamine hit for many content shovelers. Maybe, as the Glazers seemed to feel instinctively, the football was incidental to the business, the commerce, the story churn. But not forever.
It can’t just be for Bryan Mbeumo, Benjamin Sesko and Matheus Cunha – the £200m worth of forwards – to save United’s soul. Ferguson used to say to his teams: “Don’t even think about letting this club down today.” Since he left, too many have. Letting the club down became institutionalised (from the very top).
No longer can people sit in pubs trying to think of a player – any player – who improved after joining United, while running out of space to list those who regressed, or those acquired too late, or too expensively (Casemiro, Alexis Sanchez, Radamel Falcao). Or those allowed to stay and stagnate (Antony Martial, Victor Lindelof).
There is no going back to the Ferguson monarchy but his founding principles of talent-plus-dedication need fishing from the skip. Once the message starts getting round that decadence and drift are over, United will at least cease to be a vast hiding place for the overpaid, a deal-making factory masquerading as a football club. If not now, maybe never.
Photograph by Ash Donelon/Manchester United via Getty Images