United don’t need oil cash now JR’S bringing a team of winners to Old Trafford
I DON’T blame Manchester United fans for being angry, frustrated and upset at the circus surrounding the sale of their club… and a bit baffled.
I also don’t completely understand the ins and outs of why the Glazers selling a minority stake will help in any way because, as far as the fans are concerned, it doesn’t resolve the biggest issue – the owners themselves!
I may know more about teamsheets than balance sheets, but I believe that Sir Jim Ratcliffe, who owns a multi-billion pound company in the INEOS Group and also has a sports empire, can be the difference United and boss Erik ten Hag (below) need.
What has gone wrong at Old Trafford? Well, plenty.
Yet the bottom line is, it’s always about money. And now, after years of everyone else desperately trying to play catch-up, United are doing the same with countries who own football clubs.
It’s hard to compete when you are up against the wealth of a nation, especially an oil-rich one. Maybe United fans would prefer the Glazers to sell to Qatar because then they could at least compete on level terms with City, Newcastle and Paris Saint-germain.
What do the majority of fans actually want? They want money spent on players, basically. They don’t want to know about balance sheets, they want to know how much they shelled out on this striker or that defender.
Well, guess what, I’ve looked at United and, in fact, for all the criticism of the Glazers, they have spent serious money on transfers – even if they didn’t dip deeply into their own pockets to finance the purchase of the club.
Since they arrived, the net spend has been close to £1.5billion. That’s NET, after sales of players.
Those figures are even more incredible when you consider United have paid out more than £1bn on interest and debt repayments, and dividends to finance their ownership.
So the money is there, even if the decision-making process isn’t. That’s where Sir Jim comes in. He has financial interests in several different sports – including the INEOS Grenadiers cycle team – and he’s had a trial run in football at Nice in France’s Ligue 1. He also has two people within his organisation – in Dave Brailsford and Jean-claude Blanc – who have a real track record in successful operation of huge sporting ventures. Brailsford was performance director of British Cycling and played a pivotal role in making them the most dominant team in the world, and Blanc was CEO at Juventus and PSG, and played a key part in making the Tour de France a global attraction.
By all accounts, Ratcliffe’s company will inject capital into strengthening the sporting side – not just buying shares.
United clearly need better organisation. They’ve made a series of bad calls over their manager and seen vast sums wasted on players bought by one coach, then jettisoned by the next.
It’s a vicious cycle, but you can see from the template at Liverpool that if you get the right appointments at the top, then sensible decisions follow.
And, in turn, that it is possible to compete... even with the oil-rich clubs.
United can definitely compete – theoretically, they could have spent £2bn on players since the Glazers took over and STILL turned a profit.
But quite possibly the owners didn’t understand football and so didn’t appoint the right people.
If Sir Jim can sort out the sporting side – and it is clear he wants direct control of football operations – then the rest will follow.
Success on the field delivers success off it – and the income to rebuild the stadium, the training ground and all the other facilities.
So, even with 25 percent, the fans can hope that it will transform the club – even if it doesn’t quite yet get rid of the owners they love to hate.