How the Glazer family have ruined Manchester United more than you think

Manchester United could have new owners in the next couple of years, and fans are seeing light at the end of one of the darkest tunnels the club has ever gone down.

The Glazer family’s ownership of Manchester United was opposed from the start, it’s been opposed all 17 years of the way through, and will continue to be opposed until the day they’re gone.

Their 2005 hostile takeover came about via a leveraged buyout, after two years of gradually buying up shares.

For those not so well versed in financial jargon, a leveraged buyout is the acquisition of a company using a significant amount of borrowed money to meet the cost of acquisition.

The numbers alone are harrowing.

United were immediately plunged into £604 million in gross debt, having been debtless beforehand. Now, in 2022, the club’s gross debt falls just under the £600 million mark.

How, after 17 years, the club’s gross debt has only dropped by £12 million is criminal ownership. The debt figure is around 98% of what it was in 2005. It should never have existed in the first place.

Comfortably over a billion pounds have been taken out of the club to line the Glazers’ pockets, but less has been spent.

The Glazers’ personal financing has been minimal, with United’s owner financing being just £297 million from 2010 to 2020, the majority of this coming from share issues rather than the family themselves.

Yet since 2016 alone, they have taken out £166 million in dividend payments from the club. They are the only owners in the entire Premier League who take such payments.

The Glazer family have used Manchester United to pay off the interest on the loan they took out to acquire the club, and United have paid over £850 million in interest payments since 2005.

Should the responsibility be upon the club to pay off something they never wanted in the first place, or on the owners who burdened them with it?

In total, between money taken out of the club and the £465 million in share sales from which no profits went to the club, it is estimated the Glazers have taken around £1.6 billion out of Manchester United.

Including the recent signing of Casemiro, United’s transfer spend has been almost £1.5 billion in this time. But as stated previously, the amount of this financed by the owners is minimal.

The money spent has come from club revenue, which has in fact gone up under the Glazers. But correlation and causation are two separate things. 

A lot of the money made comes from matches. Both fans going to the ground and fans watching on the extravagantly expensive Sky Sports & BT Sport platforms in the UK, as well as foreign TV deals. This isn’t because of the Glazers.

Commercially, United have thrived as the club has been run by bankers and businessmen. But these men were only brought in by the owners because they facilitated their takeover, not for footballing reasons.

This is why the £1.5 billion spent by the club in transfer fees has largely been wasted, because the Glazers have simply not cared enough to appoint football people to make football decisions.

Until the retirements of Sir Alex Ferguson as manager and David Gill as chief executive, United survived despite underinvestment on the pitch as they had the best of the best running the club.

Once they went, the years of underinvestment coupled with the club being run by those not competent enough to do so led to its great demise.

Now, Manchester United are considered a joke. They finished sixth in the league last season and are now in their sixth season without a trophy. Winning one looks to be a herculean task for Erik ten Hag this season.

They have spent hundreds of millions on their squad in the years since Sir Alex and Gill retired, yet need an entire new one because it is unbalanced and lacks quality in most areas.

The wage bill is arguably an even bigger issue. Soccernomics, by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski tells us that a club’s wage bill is more closely correlated to its success than its transfer spend.

United’s wage bill is one of the highest in world football, yet they are not one of even the 20 best teams in Europe right now.

The club are forced to hand out large wages to average footballers, because they have so many already on higher than deserved wages that they are not in a position to say no. The same with transfer fees.

Underinvestment in the board and in recruitment has led to this, the club’s transfer strategy is non-existent and nobody seems to have a clue what they are doing.

It is easy to forget but football at the professional level is so much deeper than the 11 men on the pitch and the guy in a suit who shouts at them from the sides.

In other areas, United are lagging behind too. The Red Devils were the greatest team in the land, and their home ground Old Trafford is supposed to reflect this.

But the Theatre of Dreams is a dump. The idea of a roof that doesn’t leak every time it rains alone is a dream to most fans, much less a trophy.

Arsenal, Tottenham Hotspur and Manchester City have modern stadiums with state of the art facilities that create a world-class experience every matchday. 

Their training grounds, too, prepare them properly for these matchdays. Carrington is falling apart and needs desperate revamping.

The numbers alone are harrowing, but the impact of those numbers goes way beyond. The Glazer family have wrecked Manchester United, and the time to go has come.