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The debate about how Manchester United can fund a new 100,000-seat stadium has produced a great deal of commentary but very little arithmetic. Critics of the bear case point to various funding mechanisms: debt, equity, pre-sold hospitality, naming rights, fan bonds. Nobody has joined those together, applied them to what the stadium actually generates incrementally, and shown whether the debt can realistically be serviced. In response to the recent City AM piece, not one of the very many lovely (sarcasm) responses explained why anything I said in there was wrong.
All numbers here are in current money extrapolated from 2024/25 audited numbers. Revenues will rise with inflation over the construction period but so will costs. The two broadly cancel, so working in today’s money produces a model that is neither optimistic nor pessimistic on that dimension. Where the model is generous, I say so. I assume New Old Trafford opens in summer 2032.
**The build cost and the debt**
Assuming for the sake of discussion that the construction financing draws in equal monthly tranches over thirty-six months against a £2bn build cost. At 6% on a rolling draw-down with an average outstanding balance of £1bn across the construction period, capitalised interest and fees adds about £180-200m leaving the total required facility at stadium opening of around £2.2bn.
The most conventional structure is the one used for the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. Tottenham’s stadium debt, as per the accounts for the year ended 30 June 2025, consists of £847.7m of long-term fixed-rate bonds issued to US investors through private placements, supplemented by a small Bank of America facility. The package carries a weighted average coupon of 3.16% and an average remaining maturity of 17.6 years, including a 30-year tranche with bullet repayment in 2051. There is no meaningful amortisation (repayment of the principal amount) anywhere in the structure. The balloon repayments sit decades out and are a future refinancing question, not an immediate cash drag.
Assuming United achieve the same bullet structure, annual debt service on the stadium will be interest only. On £2.2bn at 6%, that is £132m per annum. They will worry about repayment in the 2060s.
**Six per cent is a conservative estimate**
Tottenham closed its private placement tranche in September 2019 at a weighted average coupon of 3.30%. At that point the Bank of England base rate was 0.75% and twenty-year gilt yields were approximately 0.9%. The credit spread Tottenham achieved was approximately 230-240 basis points over the relevant gilt. Apply that same credit spread to today’s twenty-year gilt yield of approximately 5.0-5.2% and equivalent long-term stadium bonds price at approximately 7.2-7.5%. Tottenham locked in a generational rate at the bottom of a cycle that ended in 2022 and has not reopened. United will be financing in a world where long-dated gilts yield approximately 5% and the credit spread for stadium project debt sits at approximately 250 basis points. That is the rate backdrop against which this project has to be built.
The CFG construction facility for the new NYCFC stadium, agreed in November 2024 by a syndicate led by JP Morgan and structured at SOFR (Secured Overnight Financing Rate) plus 250 basis points, confirms the same picture at the shorter end of the market. At inception, with SOFR at 4.5%, the all-in rate was approximately 7%. That facility matures in five years and will itself need refinancing into permanent bonds once the stadium opens, adding another layer of refinancing risk to any comparable structure.
Six percent therefore sits at the bottom of the plausible range for long-term bonds. Every 100 basis points above it adds £22m per year to the annual burden on £2.2bn. At 7%, annual interest is £154m. At 7.5%, it is £165m. This model uses 6% throughout to give the project its best reasonable chance of working.
**The revenue and incremental operating surplus**
The best comparable matchday and stadium commercial benchmark is Real Madrid’s renovated Bernabeu, which holds 84,000. It generated approximately £196m in stadium revenues in 2024/25 on Deloitte’s Money League measure, which attempts to create comparable numbers across clubs. Bluntly extrapolated to 100,000 seats, the figure reaches approximately £233m. It is very hard to see how a new United stadium generates materially more than that, even accounting for United’s global commercial platform. Call it £230m as the ceiling. United currently generate approximately £160m from equivalent revenue streams at Old Trafford. The incremental revenue from a new stadium in today’s money is therefore approximately £70m per year. I am going to assume that the £230m excludes non-MUFC events and that the £70m additional matchday revenue is very high margin with no associated costs. Both are generous assumptions.
On events, the most useful public data comes from the Wembley National Stadium Limited accounts for the year ended July 2025. Wembley is a reliable proxy with a similar concert/event capacity of 75,000 to 90,000 depending on stage set up. Wembley hosted forty-two major events in 2024/25, including fifteen concerts, up from ten in the prior year. The accounts break turnover into distinct categories. Experiences by Wembley, which is the pre-sold corporate hospitality and box membership product, generated £39.8m. Events revenue from all forty-two occasions generated £74m on top. Sponsorship added £7.3m, with total turnover of £127.3m.
Wembley note that five additional concerts in 2024/25 generated £22.8m of incremental events revenue, £4.4m per concert. That is the real-world benchmark for a large premium outdoor stadium in the UK for a major touring act. A new United stadium in Manchester can target, perhaps, eight concerts per year at run-rate, fewer than Wembley’s fifteen. Eight concerts at £4.4m gross generates £35.2m revenue. Other major stadium events add another £10m gross with total gross incremental events revenue of approximately £45m.
Non-MUFC events are naturally far less profitable as the club effectively becomes a facility to rent. Applying a blended 65% cost ratio, covering stewarding, security, cleaning, event-day operations and logistics, leaves a 35% margin and a net events contribution at run-rate of approximately £16m per year.
The full Wembley picture is worth exploring because it frames what a major stadium events business actually delivers in practice. Wembley generated just £127.3m of total turnover from forty-two events including the FA Cup final, an NFL game, England home internationals, fifteen concerts and other major occasions. Cost of sales was £64.4m. After administrative expenses including ninety-two staff costing £11m, Wembley produced an operating loss. The only national venue of its type in England, with a mature calendar that United cannot replicate for years after opening, still made an operating loss. The cost base of running a major stadium as a 365-day events and hospitality business is heavier than most people think, and anyone projecting events contributions from gross revenue figures without working through the cost structure is not reading the accounts.
Old Trafford earns nothing from naming rights today and, putting aside the challenges Spurs have found in securing a deal, naming rights at £25m net per annum would be wholly incremental.
**Don’t forget the costs**
Running a 100,000-seat stadium with all of these additional revenue lines is going to cost a substantial incremental amount. As United themselves describe them: _“Operating expenses generally include certain variable costs such as Matchday catering, policing, security stewarding and cleaning, visitor gateshare for domestic cups, and costs related to the delivery on media and commercial sponsorship contracts. Other operating expenses also include certain fixed costs, such as property costs, maintenance, human resources, training and developments costs, and professional fees.”_ I assume operating expenses of approximately £20m more (an uplift of around 10%) per year than Old Trafford.
So that leaves a matchday and stadium commercial increment of £70m, events net contribution of £16m, net naming rights of £25m less additional operating costs of £20m. That is a total incremental annual operating surplus of approximately £91m. Allowing for the model’s intentional conservatism throughout, call it £100m.
A note on terminology is worth inserting here. What this model produces is an incremental operating surplus before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation: effectively an incremental EBITDA contribution. It is not free cash flow in the proper sense of that term. Free cash flow, as lenders actually compute it in a debt service coverage ratio, is the cash available for debt service after corporation tax and after maintenance capital expenditure on the stadium asset. Allowing for no corporation tax (most clubs find a way not to pay corporation tax) but maintenance capex of approximately £20m per year, the true cash available for debt service is approximately £80m, not £100m. The remainder of this piece uses £100m as the pre-tax operating surplus to give the project the most favourable framing. The reader should bear in mind that the lender modelling the debt service coverage ratio covenant, as CFG’s credit agreement explicitly requires following completion, would use the £80m figure.
**What £100m buys**
At 6% interest with a bullet structure, £100m of pre-tax operating surplus services approximately £1.67bn of debt before tax and maintenance capex are considered. Once those deductions are made, the true cash available for debt service of approximately £80m services approximately £1.33bn of debt at 6%. The modelled facility at opening is £2.2bn with an annual interest cost of £132m.
On the pre-tax operating surplus basis, the shortfall is £32m per year at 6%, £54m at 7% and £65m at 7.5%.
On a true cash available for debt service basis, the shortfall against the £132m annual coupon is £52m at 6%, £74m at 7% and £85m at 7.5%. At the rate implied by today’s gilt yields and Tottenham’s historical credit spread, approximately 7.2-7.5%, the true cash available for debt service covers approximately 50% of the annual interest.
The combined debt picture makes the position harder still. United’s existing financial debt, the $550m of senior secured notes refinanced in June 2026 at 5.36%, the $225m term loan and drawdown on the revolving credit facility, runs to approximately £700-800m in sterling terms. That does not retire when a new stadium opens. It sits alongside the stadium facility on the same consolidated balance sheet.
That leaves total financial debt with a new stadium of approximately £2.9-3bn. Annual interest at a blended 6% across the combined debt stack is approximately £175-180m per year. United should be able to achieve £200m Adjusted EBITDA in the Champions League at Old Trafford. Adding £100m incremental EBITDA still leaves total debt of a staggering 10x EBITDA. The total annual interest bill on club and stadium debt, at the most generous rate assumption, exceeds what United currently generates in operating cash flow before squad investment, transfer obligations or capital expenditure.
**The pre-sale caveat**
Various analyses propose that fan debentures and hospitality pre-sales reduce the debt quantum by raising upfront cash from season ticket holders and corporate buyers. The arithmetic is correct as far as it goes. The cost and longer-term impact is less frequently stated.
Pre-selling hospitality and fan bonds raises cash now against future revenues. That cash reduces the construction debt and therefore the annual interest bill. But those revenues are then not available as annual operating surplus once the stadium opens, because the seats and boxes are already committed at pre-sale, discounted prices. If you sell five years of hospitality at 50% upfront with a discount to secure the commitment, you save interest during construction but surrender that portion of the annual hospitality contribution for five years post-opening. It is not free money, and any model that counts pre-sales as reducing debt without also reducing future operating surplus is double-counting.
**Mind the gap**
The gap between what the new stadium can truly service and what it costs to build sits between approximately £870m at 6% and approximately £1.1bn at market rates. Tottenham found cheap financing because they refinanced at the bottom of a rate cycle. United will not get that opportunity, and no amount of structural creativity around SPVs or pre-sales changes the underlying arithmetic.
The equity requirement looks to be around £1bn. Even in a generous business case, United will need some big gifts from their owners to help pay for the stadium, whether from the Glazers, Ineos or a new shareholder because the cash flows simply aren’t enough.