The Rat’s Nest

Manchester United in 2025, Two Decades On From The Glazer Takeover

“You have to say with the Glazers and the way they’ve done all this, it’s like being scammed. It’s like they’ve scammed Man United,” said ex-Arsenal striker Ian Wright on The Overlap recently. Whilst the sentiment was understandable, no-one can seriously claim the Glazers scammed anyone back in 2005. Say what you want about that family of inbred weirdos - and I literally wrote the book on what they did to United - but they were always perfectly clear about why they were getting involved: To transfer as much filthy lucre as possible out of the club and into their own pockets.

When someone is as straight-forward and up front as the Glazers were, there are two options: Withdraw your finances and refuse to be treated as a mug; or go along with it and hand over your wallet.

In 2025, now everything is panning out exactly as those of us who were opposed to their takeover predicted, it understandably suits all those who went along with the treacherous turncoat Ferguson, as he performed a volte-face and made claims about the Glazers having given him assurances, and being “wonderful owners,” to pretend “Yeah, we were indeed ‘scammed.’” The reality is that they chose to believe in a fairytale; one in which the evil ogres were actually successful businessmen who knew what they were doing; that those crying wolf couldn’t possibly know better than the banksters providing all the funding (at the height of the sub-prime CDO ‘boom’, ahem); and that a benevolent ruler would never sell his people out for some pieces of silver (despite him having not just risked his kingdom for a horse, but one he was trying to blag ownership of).

“Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me” runs the adage, but the majority of United fans fooled themselves back then, and are fooling themselves again. This time they’re happily buying into the fantasies peddled by Glazer 2.0: Jim ‘The Rat’ Ratcliffe. There was lots of hype and hope following Ineos's takeover of Manchester United's football operations. After all the talk of the Glazers exiting the club, the Ineos deal simply shored up their ownership, albeit slightly diluted. Whilst fans tell themselves that – unlike the Glazers – Ratcliffe has generously injected cash into the club, that was merely a condition of doing business, as the club’s SEC 14D-9 filing from January 2024 makes clear:

In addition to reiterating that the board representatives and the Board of Directors would require the same per-share consideration to be paid to the Class A shareholders and the Class B shareholders, the board representatives conveyed to Offeror that to move the July 2023 Proposal forward, Offeror would need to commit to a substantial primary investment as well.

[…]

Following these discussions, on October 13, 2023, Offeror provided Manchester United with a revised proposal, pursuant to which: (i) Offeror would purchase up to 25% of all outstanding Class A Shares through a public tender offer at a price of $33.00 per share; (ii) Offeror would purchase 25% of all outstanding Class B Shares through a direct purchase from the existing Class B shareholders at a price of $33.00 per share (the “Class B Share Sale”); and (iii) Offeror would purchase $300 million of primary Class A Shares and Class B Shares (in the same proportion as the Class B Shares compared to the Class A Shares then-outstanding), at a price of $33.00 per share, to be effected in two tranches, $200 million at the time of the closing of the Offer and $100 million prior to December 31, 2024, in each case, intended to be available for the purposes of stadium redevelopment (the “October Proposal”).

There is very little about Ratcliffe’s deal that makes any sense, least of all financially. As usual when that's the case, the void is filled by others: "He's not interested in money, he wants a legacy!" his cheerleaders suggest or, equally absurdly, "He's a boyhood United fan! He just wants to see the club successful!"

And apparently it must be true, because he told us that himself in a searching interview conducted on, er, the club’s in-house TV channel with the wife of one of the United players. (It was reminiscent of the MUTV interview with Joel Glazer in 2005, when his ludicrous flannel similarly won over many fans, but has – strangely - long since been memory-holed by the club’s official website.)

This is the same Ratcliffe, remember, who only three years ago told the BBC's Dan Roan he supported Chelsea:

"I have a split allegiance really. When I was in London for many, many years, Chelsea I could go and watch - it was quite difficult to go and watch United."

It was "quite difficult" for a billionaire to travel 180 miles from London to Manchester? Yet he doesn't seem to have much trouble now, as a Monaco-based tax exile, who is subject to a legal cap on the number of days he can spend in the UK.

Whilst Ratcliffe's cheerleaders claim he has so much money that he won't miss the £1.4 billion he's thrown at a dalliance in a loss-making football club, he hit the headlines in February for reneging on a contract to sponsor New Zealand's All Blacks, worth just £7.5 million. Who in business willingly trashes their own name and reputation for such a puny figure, when they're reportedly a billionaire?

There are plenty more questions which suddenly arise about Ineos, following their downgrading by Fitch in January, and claims of going ‘extinct’ posted on the company’s own website (not forgetting the longer-standing questions about their laughable idea that they could turn a profit taking on Jaguar Land Rover in their specialist field).

If Ineos’s Grenadier venture seemed delusional, everything Ratcliffe has done at Old Trafford smacks of a two-bob operator. The farce of the millions wasted on Erik Ten Hag and Dan Ashworth is well reported, but Ineos authorising £200 million to be spent on transfers last summer, with the club teetering on the brink of breaching football’s Profit and Sustainability Rules, was mind-blowing. The circumstances rendered such a splurge somewhat reckless even if history might have ultimately judged it well spent (alas!). Given it frittered virtually the entire available transfer budget on the preferences of a manager who was a dead man walking and didn't even make it to November, it is shocking mismanagement of the sort all the PR waffle had us believe Ineos would bring to an end.

With a new round of redundancies at Old Trafford in the offing, journalists were being briefed by club officials last month that it is necessary to prevent the club "going bust". If we are to actually believe this is now the position in the financial year after the one in which Ineos's army of highly paid lawyers and accountants conducted due diligence on United's accounts, it begs the question as to why the strife was not spotted, and the genius Ratcliffe advised not to invest anything in the club. The club’s accounts would have surely shown the extent of the problems the club was in, and also how desperately the Glazers needed his £300 million cash injection to shore up their own shareholdings. Why did no alarm bells ring that the self-styled ‘richest club in the world’ required a £300 million injection? And if the club remains in such dire straits now, even after his £300 million has been spent, why would The Rat not have been told to wait to move in on United until the club’s financial Armageddon struck and the share price crashed? No serious business operator pays such a fortune to become a minority shareholder in a failing business saddled with a billion pounds of debt.

Ratcliffe's cheerleaders will argue that waiting would have risked others beating him to the deal, but the fact is that there were no others. The mystery Qatari, Sheikh Jassim, was revealed in documents filed in January 2024 to have never provided proof of funds for his bid. Ratcliffe even scoffed, "I'm not sure he exists!" despite this implying that he'd just closed a billion-pound deal bidding against himself!

"But Ratcliffe MUST be a great businessman if he has the money to buy United!" wail fawning fans. The same circular argument was made by those backing the Glazers back in 2005, and look how that's worked out. Back then, the Glazers only managed to ride it out as long as they did because they had Alex Ferguson taking charge of the football, whilst selling out his principles and supporting them at every turn.

Glazer 2.0, as Ratcliffe should probably be henceforth known, has no such deflective force-field. Indeed, he has actively discarded with Ferguson after refusing to pay his on-going annual £2m retainer for being a club 'ambassador.' The optics almost seem as if Ratcliffe has been brought in to be the Glazers' lightning rod - a patsy to deflect attention - as he fronts all the decisions they wouldn't, or couldn't get away with making.

But just like Ferguson, Ratcliffe gushes over the hated Glazers - "The nicest people, they are proper gentlemen" - echoing the Scot’s regular fellating of the people who, since 2005, have cost United over £1 billion in financing costs for the 'privilege' of them owning the club, whilst it remains saddled with another billion of debt that costs over £30 million a year to service.

Whilst Ratcliffe sacks staff by the hundreds, the fact remains that in 2025 the biggest non-football-related drain on the club's resources remains the cost of the Glazers' 2005 takeover, and those payments could double when the loans come up for refinancing in 2027. Unsurprisingly, that's one marginal gain Ineos's bespectacled bores don't seem willing to address. But when their own 'expertise' has already seen around £230 million spent since May on, er, 'improvements' that have taken United to fourteenth place in the Premier League, it's no wonder Ratcliffe and his gang are seeking out scapegoats anywhere else they can find them to save those precious pennies.

United’s moneymen have long been invested in ‘engagement’ as much as trophies. In 2014, United’s commerical director Richard Arnold, who went onto become United’s CEO, paid lip service to on-pitch success, whilst telling us that it’s the cycle of change that generates the interest from which revenue follows:

“The primary aim is to be successful on the pitch. Everything we do on the pitch and off the pitch is aimed at that. So the more successful I am off the pitch, the more successful we are at generating money and the more money we have ensures that we always have the best players on the pitch. Those two things go hand in hand.

“The flip side of that is that the drama of sport is part of what keeps it really exciting – for the first time in a long time we experienced a disappointing season last year – and, actually, what we saw was the engagement levels went off the chart in terms of our fans.

“That stimulation of the uncertainty of sport, if you think about why do people watch soap operas – ‘what will happen next?’ – the hanging music and then the next episode. In sport, we’ve had 130 years of what will happen next, who will the big stars be and that uncertainty is what makes sport really exciting and that generates engagement off the pitch.”

To demonstrate this wasn’t an isolated viewpoint, then MUFC CEO and the Glazers’ long-time financial ‘whizz’ Ed Woodward gushed about failure thus:

“Take Liverpool. They still sell an incredible number of shirts and have the second biggest shirt deal in the Premier League. They have one of the biggest technical partner deals - and they haven't won the league since 1990. And you can put the last bit underlined and in capitals.”

So we know success is far from the be-all and end-all as far the Glazers are concerned. And, of course, they remain the club’s real power brokers, whatever Ineos’s current profile. Having teamed up with them, is it more realistic that Jim Ratcliffe – a guy whose idea of ‘charity’ is skiing facilities in the millionaire playground of Courchevel – is motivated by the filthy lucre that he might earn from being in bed with these American Football franchise holders, or that he is desperate to see a team be successful that he regards no more highly than he does Chelsea?

It was telling, perhaps, that right from the off Ratcliffe focused on the issue of Old Trafford. Supporters who have been conditioned by the deliberate lack of investment and maintenance of Old Trafford, buy in to talk of United having a new 100,000 capacity stadium – a project which will inevitably mean eye-watering future ticket prices to sit in a futuristic, corporate Hellscape.

Last March, a regeneration task force was announced, claiming to be looking into United’s options around the redevelopment (or otherwise) of Old Trafford. Amongst its members are:

- Sebastian Coe – the one-time Olympian turned Tory peer is best known these days for his involvement in delivering the 2012 Olympics, which a UK government-commissioned study coincidentally found was an economic success. Less well remembered is how Coe was viewed as the safe pair of hands FIFA’s Sepp Blatter could turn to when he was mired in corruption allegations. As chair of FIFA’s ‘Ethics Committee,’ Coe refused to investigate claims against FIFA vice-president and gangster Jack Warner. Coe resigned from the oxymoronic role to join England’s 2018 World Cup bid team, led by serial idiot and erstwhile Manchester United director Andy Anson, whose uncanny ability to turn to shit everything he touched had seen him labelled ‘King Midas-in-reverse’ by Red Issue.

England’s bid team was soon mired in bribery allegations of its own, with Anson himself telling journalists, “They had concluded that, of the 24 [FIFA] voting members, 'at least 13 are buyable'.” Such a conclusion may, or may not, have been the sort of information available to someone, say, on FIFA’s ‘Ethics Committee’. As president of world athletics’ IAAF, in 2016 Coe was accused of “startling naivety” as the sport descended further into a massive corruption crisis. The generosity of this interpretation placed on Coe’s failings was emphasised in 2018 when Coe was further accused of misleading a parliamentary select committee investigating doping allegations. Coe, who remains IAAF president, says of his place on the Task Force, “I am honoured to have this opportunity to share my experience in support of this tremendously exciting project.”

- Gary Neville – The ex-United captain turned Manchester’s Donald Trump presents as some sort of business guru in his role on Dragons Den, but quite what insight he brings to the Task Force is unclear. Most of his business dealings seem to be carried out with other people’s money and/or end in disaster. There was the restaurant in Manchester. The restaurant in Leeds. The tiki bar. The café chain. The hotel. The other hotel. The football club. Neville’s grasp on business appears as shaky as his grasp on history. Whilst he now refers to “Ten years of an absolute shitfest of management by the Glazers,” just over five years ago he clearly had no inkling of said “shitfest”, insisting fans’ gripes with the ownership was simply due to results on the pitch:

“My biggest problem with the Glazer family over the past seven years is the [fans’ anti-Glazer] green and gold campaign 2004-06 where Manchester United weren’t successful. Arsene Wenger came in with the Invincibles [at Arsenal], Jose [Mourinho] came in [at Chelsea], that’s when there was a real hostility [towards the Glazers].

“All of a sudden in 2006 to 2012, where we were getting to three in four Champions League finals, and winning trophies, it went quiet. Then in 2014-15 when we started to get into a period of non-success again, it builds up again. The idea of screaming about the Glazers every ten minutes, saying they are not good owners of Manchester United, doesn’t get us anywhere.”

In 2017, former Manchester City Council chief executive Howard Bernstein all but anointed Neville his successor. “He’s got all the Manchester values,” said Bernstein. “I think he’s a man of total integrity.” It perhaps wasn’t quite the ringing endorsement it seemed, coming from one of the most corrupt people in Manchester. Bernstein had spent the previous decade handing over swathes of the city to the same UAE autocrats he went and worked for on leaving office. “The more you dig into it, the more you see that Abu Dhabi controls Manchester. The whole thing stinks,” reported the Sunday Times in 2019. There was a similar cosy relationship between Bernstein and Deloitte that was highlighted in 2017.

"One area the firm is extremely well known for is its planning team advising developers on major city centre projects. Certain rivals accuse them of having a near monopoly in this area, and the council of “bumping off” other consultants to be replaced by Deloitte."

Utterly shamelessly, just days after leaving public office, Bernstein took up a very cushy retainer with Deloitte. Back in 2017, Bernstein publicly insisted “the jury is still out” on Neville’s St Michael’s development, yet the council was itself heavily invested in it. Back then, the Manchester Evening News reported of the council’s joint development arrangement with Neville:

“At a later date the town hall intends to sell it on – at a massive profit, in all likelihood running into the tens of millions – and share the proceeds with GMP.”

The role of GMP Police and Crime Commissioner now falls under the GMCA, meaning the success of Neville’s huge new central Manchester development will directly benefit the office of fellow Regeneration Task Force member Andy Burnham, whilst the success of any regeneration of Old Trafford will benefit Gary Neville’s loss-making Hotel Football.

Investing in St Michael’s alongside the right-on Manchester City Council is long-time Neville business partner Peter Lim. In 2008 his company Wilmar was forced to admit its involvement in illegal land clearances; it has also been implicated in human rights abuse and utilising child labour.

Neville’s construction partner in phase 2 of the £400 million St Michael’s project is Salboy’s Domis Construction. Salboy is owned by Salford betting millionaire Fred Done, whose brother is behind the Peninsula group, sponsors of Neville’s Salford City FC. In 2019, the Charity Commission slammed Fred Done’s personal ‘charitable’ trust for what it diplomatically termed a “conflict of interest” when it donated £290,000 to a dam project which Done’s mansion overlooked.

In 2017, Fred Done’s companies received public subsidies of over £22 million for houses that were marketed to investors in Hong Kong. In 2023, Neville himself took the sales roadshow for St Michael’s to the Manchester suburb of, er, Dubai, where investors bought up 20 per cent of the residential properties. In 2017, at a conference in Cannes with Howard Bernstein, Neville called for more ‘premium’ housing “at the real high end” and expressed how “passionate” he was about “attaching hospitality to residential living.”

Now he’s on the Old Trafford Regeneration Task Force, Neville assures us, “While I want the best for Manchester United, I also want the same for the surrounding community.”

- Nancy Rothwell – Manchester University’s former President and Vice-Chancellor was a non-executive director of Astra Zeneca from 2006-2015. The pharmaceutical giant was prosecuted by the US government for bribing doctors in order to increase the company’s drugs sales. In November 2020, students at Manchester University rioted and tore down fences when Rothwell’s staff tried to turn their halls of residence into quasi-prison camps, as a ‘safety’ measure. Rothwell was accused of treating students “shamefully,” and being cynically motivated by revenues she could extract from them during Lockdown. "She irresponsibly brought students back to campus to secure income from fees and rent and then locked them in their accommodation," said the UCU general secretary. The running of the university on her watch was “an exemplar of how not to run a university," according to students, and they passed a vote of no confidence in Rothwell – the first time such a thing had ever happened at the university – with 89% backing the motion.

- Anna Bensky – Formerly employed by, er, Deloitte, Bensky is a Peel associate director. In 2021, Peel’s wayward commitment to heritage saw their Liverpool Waters development cited by the United Nations as a key factor in the withdrawal of the city’s status as a World Heritage Site. In 2019, Peel was at the centre of an investigation into “The secretive companies hoarding England's land.” The Guardian reported:

“Multi-million pound corporations with complex structures have purchased the very ground we walk on – and we are only just beginning to discover the damage it is doing to Britain. […] Peel’s ultimate owner, the billionaire John Whittaker, is notoriously publicity-shy: he lives on the Isle of Man, hardly ever gives interviews and helicopters into his company’s offices for board meetings.

“Peel Holdings tends not to show its hand in public. Like many companies, it prefers its forays into public political debate to be conducted via intermediary bodies and corporate coalitions.”

A good example of this, which backfired on them badly, was Peel’s 2014 backroom dealing in tackling anti-fracking protestors at Barton Moss. Whilst police claimed neutrality in the long-running dispute, the reality was they, along with Salford Council, had been secretly colluding with landowners Peel in “ongoing cooperation and coordination between the Parties in order to promote and contribute to their mutual interests.” Peel had effectively recruited GMP to their private Corporatist agenda, to be used against the general public and ride roughshod over protestors’ democratic rights. Party to the collusion and agreement along with Peel was a drilling company called iGas. It has since changed its name to Star Energy, and is a minority partner to the fracking rights to the west of Manchester, including under Carrington, with the 60 per cent majority owned by … Jim Ratcliffe!

- Andy Burnham – The same day in January that Burnham was doing the media rounds to assure the likes of BBC Breakfast that no public money would go to foreign/tax exile billionaires for United’s new stadium, the Arts Council withdrew the grant handed to his Scrappy Doo sidekick Sacha Lord, who claimed the fraud committed in bagging £400,000 of, er, public money was all above board, and that he was actually the victim in the whole episode. This was after Mr Fraud had previously threatened, than hastily backtracked on, legal action to counter the original allegations. When the story first broke, Burnham had rushed to deflect the scandal of this blatant pilfering of the public purse, insisting that there was "a bit of a campaign that's being launched" and demanding "balance and recognition" of the “outstanding job” Sacha Fraud had done for the city. Many in Manchester have long experienced the reality of the self-basting Lord’s “outstanding” contribution as Burnham’s Night Time Economy ‘Czar,’ including as it does scandalous abuse of power and conflict of interest, whilst channeling money to his own personal, corporate ventures at the cost of small, independent operators.

Burnham is a master chameleon, and shameless with it. In 2020 he appeared at Neville’s Hotel Football, where he pledged to support the family of the murdered schoolboy Yousef Makki. At the same time, the Cheshire set mother of the killer, was employing MC2 to rehabilitate her family’s image and business, via a set-piece PR-puff interview in the Sunday Times. MC2’s co-founder is Mike Perls, trustee and corporate sponsor of Burnham’s mayoral charity. So whilst Burnham was crying crocodile tears and calling for “justice” on behalf of the Makkis, he was declaring financial interests gifted his office by his close associate Mike Perls, who was profiting from laundering the Molnars’ image. Strangely, media questions about the ethical considerations never once touched on Burnham, nor his many other overlapping incestuous interests.

As Jimmy Savile realised decades ago, ‘Charidee, mate!’ is the perfect shield for deflecting almost all unwanted scrutiny. From the get-go as GM mayor, Burnham has cynically brandished his monthly donations to homeless charities, ensuring there is very little questioning of his office. When there is, he openly lies about it, such as that time he tried to distance himself from Laura Wolfe - a woman who was banned by Companies House from holding directorships - being involved with Vincent Kompany and his Tackle4mcr charity, on the basis that it was a separate entity from the actual Mayoral charity. Wolfe was centre stage at Tackle4mcr’s launch, whilst its address and website domain was registered to the same address as Wolfe’s business. In 2019, after Kompany’s testimonial was said to have raised £300,000 to help combat homelessness (in comparison, £40,000 was spent on ‘gift bags’ for the teams involved), Burnham gushed, ““I can’t praise Vincent enough, I’ve seen first-hand how committed he is.” That ‘commitment’ to making sure Mancunian people had access to cheap and affordable accommodation seemed to have evaporated a few months later, when the Sunday Times revealed his property development in central Manchester was given the go-ahead despite including none of the statutory ‘affordable’ housing provision. Kompany was also allowed to forgo Section 106 payments in lieu.

In 2020, the BBC produced a breathless documentary mini-series on Manchester’s property boom, ‘starring’ local developer Tim Heatley, whose on-screen persona suggested even Narcissus might regard him as a bit of a twat. Heatley, a braggadocious buffoon, had so little awareness, he happily referred to homeless people on camera as “the dust that gets thrown up” when development occurs. Heatley, then as now, was the chair of the Greater Manchester Mayor’s charity, and another key Burnham ally. Should Heatley hit any difficulty, Burnham’s GMCA office is on hand to bail him out with, say, £25 million of public money. As with Kompany, Heatley’s commitment to eradicating homelessness doesn’t seem to extend to putting his hand in his own pocket, with the Sunday Times reporting in August 2020 on how few of his developments include the requisite affordable housing units.

At the same time that Burnham and his cronies are proselytising about ending homelessness with your donations, on the streets of Manchester, homeless people report being targeted by what they call “Burnham’s begging squad”, who, it’s claimed, steal money from these vulnerable people and drive them out of the city centre.

We would be here all day if we were to start addressing the rest of Andy ‘King of the North’ Burnham’s questionable reign, be it his shambolic oversight of the perpetually corrupt GMP; his support for the gangster’s moll running Oldham Council; or his scandalous implication in the on-going cover-up of the mass rape and abuse of local children. But what is also relevant here, with regard to Burnham’s position on the Old Trafford Regeneration Task Force, is GMP’s secondment as Thought Police to tackle people who criticise Labour politicians. Those detectives’ recent visit to a grandmother in Stockport is not some one-off aberration; in June 2023 Burnham dispatched officers from GMP’s ‘Special Operations Branch’ to try and doorstep me after I had questioned him over lies he’d made in relation to his network of ‘Clean Air Zone’ cameras (basically a rebrandished Congestion Charge system that the Manchester public rejected in 2013 – that, having met with huge opposition, was then simply flipped to the surveillance system it was likely always intended to be, anyway. Despite lying through his teeth at every turn, Burnham got to play his usual role as heroic ‘Defender of the North,’ taking on the Whitehall Establishment, as more than £100 million of public money was frittered away). Needless to say, they got short shrift, but the pattern of (attempted) intimidation of dissenters by Burnham and his police force is as clear as the patterns of dripping contempt for the public, the misuse of public funds, broken promises, and whiff of corruption that seem to follow most of this Old Trafford Regeneration Task Force, meaning not a word any their little gang say can be taken at face value.

On the subject of which… A report commissioned by Manchester United from Oxford Economics was splashed over the media in January, propagandising the case for public money going to the new stadium development. Apparently a rebuilt Old Trafford would create “an extra £7.3bn gross value added to the UK economy and more than 90,000 employment opportunities.” Yet virtually all of the regeneration being accounted for was already earmarked under the Trafford Wharfside masterplan to which Hawkins Brown had been appointed in June 2022, with the development framework for it being underway since August 2019.

Indeed, Peel’s Anna Bensky rather conceded this point last month when she pointed out that much of the regeneration is going ahead regardless of anything happening to Old Trafford:

“We can help deliver a vibrant new neighbourhood which boasts world-class cultural and sporting attractions on its doorstep as well as MediaCity which will be doubling in size over the next decade – bringing even more opportunity to the local community.”

The lunacy of the claims attributing the reported level of economic impact merely to a new stadium was evident within the report itself, had any journalist bothered to read it:

“The potential new stadium would provide an additional 25,690 seats, as well as hosting more non-matchday events, such as concerts. We estimate this could result in a net additional 1.76 million visitors to GMCA and real terms growth in visitor spending of 7.1% from 2023 to 2032.”

A new stadium with 25,690 extra seats would have to be filled SEVENTY times per year to account to add 1.76 million extra visitors. As usual with such reports, they apply magical, pie-in-the-sky thinking, often referred to as ‘modelling’ or ‘projections,’ to arrive at whatever conclusion is required by the person paying the bill.

Evidently, if there was no intent to plunder the public purse, there would be no need for ludicrous claims splashed across the media. There is either a genuine business case for Manchester United to expand the stadium, driven by supply and demand, or there isn’t.

The 1.76 million “additional visitors” figure was undermined in the report itself, given only slightly more people are filling the 75,000 seats Old Trafford already has:

“Data from Manchester United suggest over 2.3 million people visited GMCA in the 2023/24 season, both to attend matches and visit other attractions at the club, such as the stadium tour and the megastore. These visitors spent an estimated £358 million in the city. Of these visitors, it is estimated that 28.9% or over 682,000 were international. As a group, international visitors spend nearly three times as much per night as domestic visitors.”

There we see the focus on overseas visitors: Their expenditure at the rates suggested indicates a value per head of £295, versus £98 for a domestic visitor. And the biggest single outlay by foreign visitors is on accommodation. Hmm… Who do we know on the Task Force with an interest in hotels, who stands to benefit if United suddenly start attracting a far greater number of tourists?

The grift is stark – after all, it involves the Glazers, for fuck’s sake! Whilst Ratcliffe - famous for dismantling union opposition at Grangemouth in Scotland - goes round sacking hundreds of workers, taking United’s staff down to below 700, journalists churn out nonsensical reports claiming a new stadium will generate 90,000 new ‘employment opportunities.’ Burnham and all other local Labour politicians utter not a word. In Scotland, where Grangemouth is shutting down, Ratcliffe continues to pocket taxpayer-funded grants whilst the last of the workers are laid off.

United’s support is just as mute as the politicians. Twelve years after the self-proclaimed ‘socialist’ Ferguson saw the writing on the wall and quit, leaving the club in disarray, the support is so desperate for success that no-one has ever once questioned the idea of Dave Brailsford, up to his neck in cycling’s Team Sky doping scandal, tainting the club by his association. So it follows that fans should be equally unfazed by the idea of public money being funnelled to a stadium project that will financially benefit oligarchs like the Glazers and Ratcliffe.

The Manchester United Supporters Trust regularly runs a foodbank donation point on match days, collecting donations for needy locals. Its chief executive Duncan Drasdo also sits on the Regeneration Task Force – the idea of him collecting for the poor and needy on the one hand, whilst acting as a fig leaf for millions of public subsidies going to a billionaire tax exile on the other, is laughable. It’s doubly so given that back in 2005, Drasdo and Shareholders United (MUST’s previous incarnation) launched a “Not One Penny” pledge whereby they encouraged fans to boycott United under the Glazer ownership to starve them of the revenue that they’d come for. Starve them in 2005, help feed them in 2025.

Despite superficially being well-meaning, the perpetually useless MUST manifest equal parts fig leaf, chocolate fireguard and gatekeeper. As gatekeepers they help limit the scope of radical action United fans might launch against the Glazer ownership, through their constant appeal for “peaceful protest” or ‘dialogue,’ as they delude themselves these are the ways to have any influence.

This was seen most starkly in 2021 when, in protest at the Glazers’ backing of the proposed European Super League, some of the more radical element of United’s support invaded United’s Carrington training ground, and caused the abandonment of a match against Liverpool. With fans having finally struck a true blow against the Glazer ownership, the club was forced to mount a mammoth security operation, costing hundreds of thousands of pounds, in a bid to avoid another postponement. MUST quickly inserted themselves as the media face and contact point of the protests but, rather than call for all-out mobilisation to also prevent the re-arranged game going ahead and bring the Glazers to their knees, MUST played their part in dampening down the unrest, before settling for a promise of future talks that would lead nowhere, and achieve nothing.

It later transpired that MUST had actually already been engaged in secret discussions with United officials since late the previous year over a pointless and irrelevant fan share scheme, whose only practical purpose could be to funnel yet more money to the Glazers. MUST persisted with that self-delusion until being sidestepped by the Glazers’ announcement of a strategic review in 2022, which culminated with Ratcliffe buying into the club. Needless to say, their much-vaunted share scheme never materialised.

Similar gatekeeping was evident in 2010, during a previous period of protests and opposition to the Glazers following the revelation of the scale of the financial straits the club was in, after a prospectus was released for a money-spinning bond issue. As calls grew for the Glazers to sell, MUST got wind of what they termed ‘militant’ action, and, fearing it would undermine their pointless scarf-waving, began briefing journalists about it. The Times reported:

Manchester United supporters who launched the green-and-gold anti-Glazer protest are fearful that their campaign could be undermined by militant fans eager to adopt more aggressive tactics in their attempt to oust the club’s owners. […] the editorial in the latest edition of the influential Red Issue fanzine almost served as a call-to-arms to the hardcore elements of the club’s support for “far more radical action”.

“For all the publicity David Beckham wearing a scarf might garner, it’s not going to bother the Glazers,” it read. “Far more radical action is required. While MUST remain devoted to collecting meaningless e-mail addresses by the thousands, hopes turn to the self-styled Red Knights, but with the Glazers already having turned down one £1.2 billion bid, they are unlikely to decide to sell up.

“Rather than MUST frittering away £65,000 on some American lobbying agency as they have of late, that sort of money would be better spent flying some passionate anti-Glazer supporters to Florida and showing Joel and Co the strength of Reds’ feeling in person.

“The chants all tell how the Glazers are gonna die, yet in reality they’re free to walk out of the ground unchallenged. Until that changes, nothing will.”

Believing there was a clear risk of it being compromised, one group abandoned a plan to travel to London and storm Ed Woodward’s citadel - the club’s Pall Mall commercial offices. As a result, the protests largely fizzled out to nothing, until the next time, in January 2020. On that occasion too, snakes in the grass sought to undermine those taking up the fight.

There’s no doubt that in 2025, United’s support gets the representation it deserves. Whilst what little oversight MUST might once have managed is stymied by their desperation to be close to the club - be that on the fans forum, advisory board or Task Force - quis custodiet ipsos custodes? MUST’s website informs us that they “hosted and supported the websites for both remaining United Fanzines for which service we made no charge.” Is this still the case? Despite there being plenty to go at, I can recall no criticism of MUST in either publication at any time since 2005. As for all the other platforms, be they websites, fan cams, or anything else – forget it! You’re more likely to find them crawling to United for scraps of access, than analysing or exposing anything happening to the club.

It’s worth remembering: Only fifteen months ago virtually all these people were laughably heralding Ratcliffe as the answer to United’s malaise.

Such is the fickleness of football fandom. It neither realises its power, nor is interested in utilising it. In 2021, for once, people were shown how to use it, and then – for a fleeting time – did so. Most quickly fell back to sleep. Two months later, there was a pre-season friendly between United and QPR at Loftus Road. There had been some muted talk of a further protest, perhaps even targeting the staging of the match. I fully expected nothing to happen, but was intrigued all the same. Around the ground three hours before kick-off was quiet, save for more police than would be expected. I headed to a nearby pub where many United fans were gathering. It was clear there was no appetite for anything bar watching the game (with a minority happy to – more sensibly – stay in the pub). Some – not kids, note - spoke excitedly of watching the club’s new signings, as if that in any way mattered. Was it worth it? The big new signing in question was Jadon Sancho. Hilarious. He didn’t play that day. I don’t think he’s ever actually played since.