Tom

🚨💣The FACT about Manchester United’s financial position and state is that the club — only — is restricted by lack of support from the owners. Chelsea spent 2x as much and generates less revenues; but made it by selling its women team intra group. 1/n nytimes.com/athletic/6289798…

This sounds OK when put like this — but does everyone realize what it means in practice? This is not even remotely like when then powerhouse Arsenal under Wenger cut costs to fund the move into the new Emirates in 2006. This is like West Ham or Blackburn cutting costs in 2006. 🔺The top PL rivals are stronger than ever, City, Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea, Tottenham, Aston Villa and Newcastle. 🔺United’s player wage bill is currently 5th in the PL and if Rashford or Casemiro goes in January along with Antony — it de facto drops below Tottenham to 6th. It is from this position United would cut costs. A lot of costs has already been cut, but that won’t even remotely be enough to balance the books without CL or even EL income, a lot more costs must be cut. 🔺United is the PL club that has received by far the least amount of support from its owners, it is de facto negative by a mile while other clubs constantly are supported by their owners. It sounds like the £240m contributed is all the club is getting besides something in relation to the stadium. In comparison a club like Stoke got £160m from its owners in 2022 and in July 2024 it got another £133m. The owners of clubs like Arsenal, Liverpool, Tottenham and Aston Villa clearly are seeing the development in the football world where the financial gap is growing extremely fast between the better CL clubs and the rest. If you are in the CL — it’s not that hard to make the finances add up. If you are out of it, it’s close to impossible. Hence they are sanctioning higher spends than ever. Newcastle is the richest club in football and Boehly’s Chelsea is determined to spend whatever it takes to get to the top. This means that these teams de facto — significantly — has increased its spending the last years. So when United sets out to cut costs even further to balance the books when not even playing in the Europa League, over rivals are — fast — heading in the complete opposite direction. 🔺There is a misunderstanding that United actually always have spent more or less as much as Chelsea and City (ie everyone else) in the PL, but simply spent much worse than them. I actually thought this too. But then when you look at the actual numbers spent in relation to the situation on the pitch — it’s complete nonsense. United underinvested tremendously in its squad the last years under Fergie. Then provided very little support to Moyes. When the Glazers finally started to open the wallet — the club was miles behind City and Chelsea on the pitch. The total sums the City group invest in players each season today is on a different planet than what United invest in its squad, to put it in perspective — Haaland’s new contract is alone worth more than United spent on transfer fees the last three years. Chelsea’s spend on transfers the last three years is de facto more than 100% higher than United’s, ie more than twice as high. Like even more serious sources must be analyzed and explained because it’s almost never done. If you look in the annual report, United’s employee benefit total is the 3rd or 4th highest in the PL and not 5th like I stated above. This is a given, since United pays app. 125m to non player staff per year, it’s the biggest club employing more than 1,100 people full time. Arsenal pays its non-player staff 79m, ie 45m less, since they only employ 500-600 people full time and isn’t a listed company that needs economy functions that can handle rapid quarterly reporting etc. 👉I am a big optimist and I will never stop dreaming. But we should be extremely cleae on this — if the plan described in the letter to 1958 is executed, it’s absurd to place the expectations on the club above the 6-10 range for many years to come. Sure, over a period of 10 years, we should get into the CL once or twice. There is no reason for why United shouldn’t over perform every now or then. The resources at the club’s disposal means that it will be very far behind the top 4-5 clubs.