This article was originally published on November 15th 2023 and has been updated to reflect Manchester United’s announcement that they have agreed a deal for Sir Jim Ratcliffe to purchase a minority stake in the club
A picture has been doing the rounds recently that tells us a lot about the modern-day Manchester United and the malicious sense of pleasure that others have taken in their downfall.
Advertisement
It is an adaptation of LS Lowry’s 1953 painting, Going To The Match: the stick-like figures, the smoking chimneys, the backdrop of long-gone heavy industry of north west England.
This, however, is not a crowd of football enthusiasts streaming to the turnstiles. It is a picture of them trying to get away. “Previously unseen LS Lowry entitled ‘Old Trafford 65 minutes’,” reads the caption, cruelly.
Never did a picture tell a truer story as the #ManUtd fans left on 65 minutes leaving the weary run down Very Old Trafford after getting a hiding off the real #United #NUFC
— Newcastle Consortium Supporters (@NCSL1892) November 1, 2023
The supporters of England’s biggest football club — and, despite everything, that is still what United are – have had to grow accustomed over the last decade to the humour being at their expense.
United have not won the league championship for 10 years. They have not even gone close to doing so (in their two second-place finishes they were 19 and 12 points adrift) and in some of the more harrowing ordeals, most recently the 3-0 home derby defeat by Manchester City last month, there have been mass walkouts before the final whistle.
In the main, though, the 70,000 or so who flock to Old Trafford for every game have remained largely supportive during the years when their club, under the U.S. ownership of the Glazer family, have strayed dangerously close to tragicomedy.
Every game is a sellout. Manager Erik ten Hag is shown the crowd’s warmth, just like Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, Jose Mourinho, Louis van Gaal and David Moyes were before him. For all the brooding discontent, all the years of pent-up frustration, there have been only brief and sporadic occasions when the crowd have voiced audible dissent at one of Sir Alex Ferguson’s successors.
Advertisement
And with the news that billionaire Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s company INEOS will buy a 25 per cent stake in United, the club’s supporters will desperately want to believe this represents a change of direction — or, at the very least, the start of something new.
Nobody can blame them for thinking that way, either. Because, ultimately, isn’t that the very essence of being a football fan? To hope, to believe and, in times of melancholy, to visualise better times ahead? Without hope, what else is there?
“It’s been the destruction of Manchester United,” Edward Freeman, formerly the club’s commercial director, says of the 18-years-and-counting Glazer era. “It’s a beautiful football club being ripped apart. It’s been a disaster. They really have destroyed the club.”
At the same time, it feels like a bit of a push to assume November 2023 will go down in history as a seminal month in the club’s modern history.
Yes, there will be changes behind the scenes and a number of executives will be vulnerable once Sir Dave Brailsford, previously the performance director for British Cycling, concludes the audit he has been putting together on behalf of Ratcliffe.
All the indications are that Ratcliffe, with a personal fortune close to £30billion ($36.4bn), wants to upgrade several departments of the club, just as you might imagine when the football operation is clearly coming up short. A club with United’s size and ambitions should employ some of the best achievers in the industry. That, plainly, is not what Brailsford has found in his due diligence.
The chief executive, Richard Arnold, is expected to leave. The football director, John Murtough, might follow or be downgraded. Ratcliffe wants sporting control in return for his £1.3billion investment. Replacements will be brought in and the existing workforce, including Ten Hag, will be expected to impress during these getting-to-know-you stages. Ratcliffe has media aides working on his behalf to depict it as the beginning of a brave new world.
Advertisement
Realistically, however, let’s not overplay this.
The Glazers — the six children of the late Malcolm Glazer who own 69 per cent of United — remain in overall charge. They still own the club and it remains to be seen exactly how much influence they are going to allow someone who has, in effect, taken over the east wing of a once-beautiful mansion that, as everyone knows, needs a bit of care and attention.
“I’m very sceptical about how much freedom he (Ratcliffe) is going to be allowed,” says Chris Blackhurst, author of recently published book The World’s Biggest Cash Machine: Manchester United, the Glazers And The Struggle for Football’s Soul.
“If I own 100 per cent of a business and someone puts in 25 per cent, who’s in charge? Seventy-five per cent is a lot more than 25 per cent. And if United are going for a player who costs £100million, £75m comes from the Glazers. That is simple economics. There is no getting away from it — and if they don’t want the deal to go ahead, they will have the power to block it.”
Blackhurst devoted the best part of a year to researching and writing about the subjects of his book. The Glazers, in other words, are his specialist subject and he is dubious, to say the least, about the popular narrative that Ratcliffe will have the ability to swish a conjurer’s wand and, abracadabra, start to make everything OK again.
“They (United) have fallen behind on many levels,” says Blackhurst. “It needs a complete overhaul and I don’t see how the Ratcliffe deal enables that to happen.
“It’s a sop, really. It’s some sort of gesture, and I guess he will turn up at matches. But I would feel a lot more confident about Jim Ratcliffe if I saw something in his track record of sports ownership that suggests he is the real deal and knows what he is doing.
“If Ratcliffe had come to United after taking Nice (the club INEOS owns in France’s top division) into the final knockings of the Champions League, put them top of the French league and everyone was saying, ‘Wow, this guy is some sort of sporting messiah’, I’d feel very differently.
Advertisement
“He has owned two football clubs, (Switzerland’s) Lausanne and Nice, neither of whom has done fantastically well. At Nice, he appointed his brother (Bob) as chief executive and put Dave Brailsford in charge of transfers. I’ve nothing against Brailsford. He obviously knows how to get the best out of a cycling team, but does he know anything about football?
“As ever with a deal like this, there’s a lot of PR spin. But the history of the Glazers is that they don’t do partnerships. They never have and that goes back to Malcolm Glazer, the dominant figure in their lives, who was impossible to work with, an idiosyncratic, ruthless business-boss.”
If this seems a downbeat tone, it is worth pointing out that Blackhurst is not alone in thinking that Ratcliffe’s role is being overplayed in parts of the media.
Freeman also believes the fans should be realistic about where the real power exists: “I have a lot of misgivings. It’s a minority holding, it means nothing. He (Ratcliffe) says he is a Manchester United supporter, but it doesn’t make a great deal of difference to me. I don’t think it gels, going forward, as a positive situation. It sounds like a disaster to me. I just think the fans will take anything they think will be better than what they have got now.”
At Old Trafford, as United huffed and puffed to a 1-0 win over promoted Luton Town in November, and the away fans were impudent enough to sing, “You’re not famous anymore”, the protest banners were out again.
Glazers Out
History, Dignity, Integrity, You Stole it All.
We Want Our Club Back
Some Things Are Worth Fighting For.
The protests continued because the relevant supporters have made it absolutely clear that, as long as the Glazer name is above the door, they still consider their football club to be in a state of distress.
This time, the pre-match demonstration had shifted from its usual place on Old Trafford’s forecourt and was held outside a corporate entrance at the corner where the Stretford End and Sir Alex Ferguson Stand meet. The idea was to protest against the way ordinary fans were being edged out in favour of what became known, courtesy of former United captain Roy Keane, as the “prawn sandwich brigade”.
Advertisement
Yet there were only 60 or so protesters involved when previously it had been several thousand and, watching this scene unfold an hour or so before kick-off, it was clear some were frustrated that so many fans were stopping to take pictures rather than joining them behind the banners.
Man Utd v Luton today. Anti-Glazer protestors still getting the message out there. Scene outside one of Old Trafford’s corporate entrances #MUFC
— Daniel Taylor (@DTathletic) November 11, 2023
No television cameras were filming what was happening. A couple of journalists had wandered out of the stadium but it soon became evident this was not going to be one of the anti-Glazer campaign’s bigger events.
Protest fatigue? Possibly, because these demonstrations have become such regular occurrences. But the volume will inevitably go up again at some point and, at the heart of everything, it boils down to the fact the hardcore fans always wanted a clean break from the Glazers, rather than just a fraction of the club being sold.
Ed Woodward, the Glazers’ go-to man, departed in February last year. Arnold, who replaced him, is expected to be replaced by Jean-Claude Blanc, the former Juventus chief executive who left a high-ranking role at French champions Paris Saint-Germain last December to oversee the INEOS Sport portfolio. But the Glazers will still be there, in absentia, running the club by remote control from the U.S. state of Florida.
On that basis, not a huge amount has changed in the eyes of The 1958, the fans’ collective that organises the protests.
“We will be campaigning local politicians, the Premier League and Westminster (the UK government), continuing our protests against the tyranny of this ownership,” is the group’s message. “We will continue to build and unify this fanbase. We will continue with our strategy. We will continue until the ownership is gone.”
GO DEEPER
Explained: What INEOS' investment means for Manchester United
(Top photo: Peter Byrne/PA Images via Getty Images)
