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Big Sir Jim's massive folly

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Beamrider

Beamrider

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Look away now @tombrown. I promised a deep dive, so here it is. Dropping this now and then I'm out for a bit but will pick up any questions later. There is a TLDR at the end of each section.

Financial performance

Firstly, it’s quite striking how their performance ranks when divided into 2 lots of 4-yearly periods (2016-2020, and 2020-24). Now obviously covid is in there and messes things up to some degree, but a comparison with the other Big Six clubs is informative.

Revenue

This is the main one. I’ve looked at revenue in total to begin with. United’s revenue for 2016-2020 was £2,316m. For 2020-2024 it was £2,414m – an increase of just over 4%.

For comparison, the percentage increase in the other big six over the period was:

Man City 32%
Liverpool 24%
Arsenal 16%
Spurs 22%
Chelsea 24%

So problem number one, their revenue growth hasn’t kept pace with the other big six. There are all sorts of reasons for this. For example, stadium expansions (Spurs in particular), European qualification (affects all the clubs in one way or another), cheating (affects two clubs in particular), success on the field.

Commercial revenues

Let’s dig a little deeper. Applying the same principles as above, United went from £1,106m to £1,096m – a reduction of 1%. By contrast, all the other Big Six increased theirs:

Man City 37%
Liverpool 50%
Arsenal 40%
Spurs 69%
Chelsea 18%

And there it is. For years, United were ahead of the curve. They basically wrote the book on commercialising the club’s operations, it was the source of their huge financial strength through the Fergie years (success helped too) but that was the thing that set them apart in England, and even in World Football. It’s basically gone, or if you were going to be kind, you’d say they’ve maxed out. Fuck being kind, this is United we’re talking about, they’ve fucked it.

Media revenues

Media revenues can essentially be looked at as prize money. A huge part of the build-up of these revenues is on-field success (Premier League merit income, European income) and also appeal to the TV audiences (even when we were shit, we were still on the telly all the time because people tuned in to watch). Here, they’ve actually broadly kept pace with everyone else, except for City, who’ve had more on-pitch success and consistent Champions League qualification. But they still sit in third place in absolute revenue terms (behind City and us).

Grew from £780m to £901m – 16%.

Man City 34%
Liverpool 16%
Arsenal 15%
Spurs -5%
Chelsea 20%

Only Spurs decline, basically because they are Spurs, and winning stuff is what drives the figures here.

Matchday

Again, they’re doing OK here. From £344m to £391m, 14% increase.

Man City 20%
Liverpool 13%
Arsenal 20%
Spurs 4%
Chelsea 12%

Although Spurs opened their new ground, covid has held back their revenue growth over the 4-year period. They’ve more than doubled their matchday income over the 8-year period and much of their commercial growth will be from other events at their ground, so there’s a bit of a failing in my method here, but I chose it because it illustrates quite starkly where United’s problems lie – flatlining of their previously lucrative commercial operations.

Why?

Well, there’s probably a few factors.

Brand decline

The failure to deliver success and the lack of top-drawer players will turn off commercial sponsors. So just pause for a minute and ask how many United players get into our team, City’s or Arsenal’s? Probably none. Chelsea and Spurs, maybe a few.

How many truly global stars do they have to offer their sponsors? Maybe Fernandes? That’s it. Now take your pick:

Fernandes OR Salah OR Haaland OR Saka OR Cole Palmer OR Son Heung-Min.

Yeah, if you want a club’s top star on your promotional materials, you might just go for United over Spurs, but that’s it. The other clubs are more attractive, and have global stars that sponsors are prepared to pay for.

Historic deals

It was rumoured when United unveiled their huge sponsorship deal with Chevrolet that the marketing director of Chevrolet was fired soon after as a result, basically because he’d over-paid massively. Their 10-year kit deal had the same whiff about it, but then the price due under that deal tanked when they failed to get in the Champions League (and there were reports this week that they’ll lose £10m off that deal for losing the Europa final). In short, for a brief period, they punched massively above their weight and then got found out.

Conclusion – commercial department is under-performing, but they don’t have a lot to work with anymore.
 
Costs

But as always, if you cut your cloth accordingly, things should be OK. So, all Man United needed to do was keep their costs under control, right? At this point, Leeds and Peter Ridsdale would find themselves holding Jimbo’s beer…

Wages

OK, so wages is always a subjective one, and comparing club by club can be tricky.

Firstly, a lot of clubs out-source some of their functions. So, for example, United and us have always done most stuff in-house – catering, retail etc. This affects revenues and costs. So, for catering, the typical mark-up on sales is 65%. For every £100 of sales, you have a cost of £35 to cover the food costs, and the remaining £65 covers wages and overheads. You might end up with, say, 20% profit. If you out-source, you’d probably get £10 going into turnover, no wages or costs. If you do things in-house, you get £100 in turnover, costs of sale, wages and a net profit of £20. So doing things in-house boosts turnover and profit, but also adds wage costs. Arsenal moved to this model last year, I’m guessing to give them more wiggle room on the new UEFA FFP rule which is driven by turnover and player wages (not other staff).

My analysis on wages is based on the accounts, so it is imperfect for the reasons above. But comparison between United and Liverpool is like for like, Arsenal will be distorted because they switched, God knows what the others do. But the point is that United, flat at revenue level, need to keep their wage bill under control…

It grew from £1,175m to £1,405m, an increase of 20%. But hey, look at how strong their squad is…

Man City 30%
Liverpool 30%
Arsenal 13%
Spurs -25%
Chelsea 37%

So, their wage growth is lower in percentage terms than the other clubs, but they’ve won stuff, so there’ll be loads of bonuses in there. Spurs players presumably have to give something back for being so shit.

Conclusion – their players are massively over-paid, even compared to the huge wages on offer at successful clubs.
 
Player transfer fees

So, I wanted to look at a simple measure for assessing investment in the playing squad. I’ve chosen to look at a combined metric of amortisation (i.e. annual cost of writing off transfer fees) less profits on sale of players. It’s a kind of a net spend measure.

So, looking at the absolute costs over the last 4 years, United are the highest:

United £552m
Arsenal £475m
Chelsea £444m
Liverpool £313m
Spurs £285m
City £219m

City are low down here as, despite serious investment, they’ve made some chunky profits every year selling off youth players who’ve gone on to do well elsewhere. United, by contrast, have the second highest amortisation (behind only Chelsea) and the lowest profit on sale of players. In fact, they’ve got the lowest profit on sale in both 2020-24 and 2016-20.

What this means, essentially, is that they’ve retained players beyond their peak years and let them go for buttons, and / or they’ve over-paid for mediocre players that they then can’t make a profit on (Antony, Sancho, Casemiro and pretty much everyone they’ve signed in the last 2-3 years). Bear in mind that United seem to have a policy of building a one-year extension option into their major deals. In theory, this protects them against the TAA situation as they can arbitrarily extend and anyone who wants the player has to pay a fee. And they are still not making money on sales. That’s because the players aren’t of the quality that rivals will pay good money for.

And just to underline the level of spending, these are the costs of each club’s squads as at the end of season 2023-24 (i.e. before summer spending):

Chelsea £1,437m
Man City £1,110m
Man Utd £944m
Arsenal £882m
Liverpool £749m
Spurs £697m

The second-least expensive squad won the league. Go figure.

Could it go higher? Well, the December 2024 accounts disclose potential add-on transfer payments of £136m, depending on player appearances and success. On the latter point of success, the accounts comment that they haven’t paid anything out on these add-ons for the last 12 months, because if there’s no success, there’s no payment. They’re probably safe for a good while yet.

Conclusion – very poor recruitment.
 
Financing

This is one where I think you can kind of look through it and read “how benevolent are the owners?”. Not very.

Net interest costs, last 4 years:

United £92m
Spurs £170m
Arsenal £34m
Chelsea £24m
Liverpool £20m
City £20m

Spurs’ interest costs are basically because they built an enormous stadium, and that interest is payable to third parties. A lot of United’s interest goes to the Glazers, although they’ve not taken dividends so much of late.

And don’t think the Glazers are exposing themselves to currency risk either. In the last reported quarter (to 31 December 2024), United took a loss of £16m on their loans (which the Glazers made them borrow in USD – the loss is a foreign currency movement) and they lost a further £11m on hedging (meaning they took the wrong bet on interest rates / currency). They lost £25m, in a single quarter, on their financing structure, on top of the £10m interest cost. Their total net financing costs in three months were higher than all of the other Big Six clubs (except Spurs) across 4 years.

Conclusion – Glazers are squeezing them hard, as is the dollar.
 
So why haven’t they gone bust?

Simple. Jimbo has injected equity to keep them afloat. About £238m in fact.

But they’re still in the shit. The latest debt is as follows (this is as at December 2024):

Glazers £338m
Bank loan £178m
Bank overdraft £210m (repayable on demand)
Other £6m (repayable on demand)

Total debt £731m, of which £216m could be called in at any moment. Now I need to caveat here re the bank overdraft. Football cash flow can go up and down quite significantly during the year, and it is very cyclical. It’s possible United got a shit-load of cash in early January that would pay that debt down.

In addition to the debt, they owe £477m of current debt (bills etc) which includes £391m in transfer fees, £179m of which is due after more than a year, the rest will be due in January (just gone) / Summer.

Against that, they have cash of £96m and balances payable to them of £135m (which includes £91m for player sales).

So, to summarise, the stuff they need to pay or refinance before the end of the calendar year:

Debt £216m
Transfer debt £212m
Other liabilities £86m
Total payable £514m

Due to the club:

Transfer fees £44m
Trade debtors £44m
Cash £96m

Total receivable £184m

Shortfall £330m

So even assuming none of their longer-term debt is called in, they need to find £330m, plus however much they’ve lost since. Some of this may have come in during January from Premier League media payments, but I don’t know what the current payment schedule is. And even if it did, you’d be looking at £50-60m perhaps, so less than 20% of what they need.

Conclusion – in a bit of a pickle, cash-wise. Jimbo probably wasn’t exaggerating the bankruptcy risk (although why he would talk about it is anyone’s guess, the absolute melt).
 
Overall conclusion

From a performance perspective, things are looking grim on and off the pitch. I’ve deliberately ignored looking at their overall loss levels and focused on the root cause of their current predicament:
  • Declining commercial revenue
  • Poor on-pitch performance
  • Growing debt and exposure to the US dollar
  • Awful player recruitment
  • Poor cost control, particularly player spending
These are just based on historic performance. They obviously lost about £100m of 2025-26 revenue on Wednesday night (although some of that money would have been lost to player bonuses and contingent transfer payments). I haven’t even touched on the question of what they’re going to do about that tip of a ground (valued at £222m in the accounts, by the way). That’s a massive weight around their necks that could easily take them down, and I’ll be fucking furious if they get any government money towards it (Spurs got a few £m, that was it).

Then they have a huge challenge to find the funds to meet their payments and debt commitments. The debt will likely be refinanced but if they don’t pay their transfer fees then UEFA will ban them from Europe next season… oh.

How do they get out of it?

Sell, sell, sell. Sell anyone who will command a fee. Don’t worry about whether they make a profit, they need to get cash in (so don’t sell to Barcelona, obvs, or to any of the Turkish clubs, they’re not renowned for paying on time, if at all).

Find an oil state sugar daddy, and hope you can game the system like City did (so you need to pray like hell that they win 115/130).

Failing that, best of luck trying to find an insolvency practitioner – no-one wants to touch football clubs with a bargepole. A mate of mine worked for KPMG back in the day and the grief they got for taking on Leeds was off the scale. There won’t be much of a queue for United.
 
Surely they'll just sell a car park.. a ladies team... a hotel... take your pick from the Chelsea playbook.
 
IMG-7730.png
 
Beamrider said:
Look away now @tombrown. I promised a deep dive, so here it is. Dropping this now and then I'm out for a bit but will pick up any questions later. There is a TLDR at the end of each section.

Financial performance

Firstly, it’s quite striking how their performance ranks when divided into 2 lots of 4-yearly periods (2016-2020, and 2020-24). Now obviously covid is in there and messes things up to some degree, but a comparison with the other Big Six clubs is informative.

Revenue

This is the main one. I’ve looked at revenue in total to begin with. United’s revenue for 2016-2020 was £2,316m. For 2020-2024 it was £2,414m – an increase of just over 4%.

For comparison, the percentage increase in the other big six over the period was:

Man City 32%
Liverpool 24%
Arsenal 16%
Spurs 22%
Chelsea 24%

So problem number one, their revenue growth hasn’t kept pace with the other big six. There are all sorts of reasons for this. For example, stadium expansions (Spurs in particular), European qualification (affects all the clubs in one way or another), cheating (affects two clubs in particular), success on the field.

Commercial revenues

Let’s dig a little deeper. Applying the same principles as above, United went from £1,106m to £1,096m – a reduction of 1%. By contrast, all the other Big Six increased theirs:

Man City 37%
Liverpool 50%
Arsenal 40%
Spurs 69%
Chelsea 18%

And there it is. For years, United were ahead of the curve. They basically wrote the book on commercialising the club’s operations, it was the source of their huge financial strength through the Fergie years (success helped too) but that was the thing that set them apart in England, and even in World Football. It’s basically gone, or if you were going to be kind, you’d say they’ve maxed out. Fuck being kind, this is United we’re talking about, they’ve fucked it.

Media revenues

Media revenues can essentially be looked at as prize money. A huge part of the build-up of these revenues is on-field success (Premier League merit income, European income) and also appeal to the TV audiences (even when we were shit, we were still on the telly all the time because people tuned in to watch). Here, they’ve actually broadly kept pace with everyone else, except for City, who’ve had more on-pitch success and consistent Champions League qualification. But they still sit in third place in absolute revenue terms (behind City and us).

Grew from £780m to £901m – 16%.

Man City 34%
Liverpool 16%
Arsenal 15%
Spurs -5%
Chelsea 20%

Only Spurs decline, basically because they are Spurs, and winning stuff is what drives the figures here.

Matchday

Again, they’re doing OK here. From £344m to £391m, 14% increase.

Man City 20%
Liverpool 13%
Arsenal 20%
Spurs 4%
Chelsea 12%

Although Spurs opened their new ground, covid has held back their revenue growth over the 4-year period. They’ve more than doubled their matchday income over the 8-year period and much of their commercial growth will be from other events at their ground, so there’s a bit of a failing in my method here, but I chose it because it illustrates quite starkly where United’s problems lie – flatlining of their previously lucrative commercial operations.

Why?

Well, there’s probably a few factors.

Brand decline

The failure to deliver success and the lack of top-drawer players will turn off commercial sponsors. So just pause for a minute and ask how many United players get into our team, City’s or Arsenal’s? Probably none. Chelsea and Spurs, maybe a few.

How many truly global stars do they have to offer their sponsors? Maybe Fernandes? That’s it. Now take your pick:

Fernandes OR Salah OR Haaland OR Saka OR Cole Palmer OR Son Heung-Min.

Yeah, if you want a club’s top star on your promotional materials, you might just go for United over Spurs, but that’s it. The other clubs are more attractive, and have global stars that sponsors are prepared to pay for.

Historic deals

It was rumoured when United unveiled their huge sponsorship deal with Chevrolet that the marketing director of Chevrolet was fired soon after as a result, basically because he’d over-paid massively. Their 10-year kit deal had the same whiff about it, but then the price due under that deal tanked when they failed to get in the Champions League (and there were reports this week that they’ll lose £10m off that deal for losing the Europa final). In short, for a brief period, they punched massively above their weight and then got found out.

Conclusion – commercial department is under-performing, but they don’t have a lot to work with anymore.
Click to expand...
I hope your source for this is better than some dodgy bloke reposting unsubstantiated shit he read elsewhere, on an obscure LFC forum.😉
 
the count said:
I hope your source for this is better than some dodgy bloke reposting unsubstantiated shit he read elsewhere, on an obscure LFC forum.😉
Click to expand...

Manchester United's Europa League failure means they'll have to pay kit provider Adidas £10million. The Red Devils lost Wednesday's final and it means they'll now go two years without Champions League football - which breaches their agreement.

NB - it's a Reach website so pop-ups etc....

www.mirror.co.uk

Man Utd must pay £10m penalty as Europa League failure caps off dismal season

Manchester United's Europa League final loss leaves them without Champions League football once again and means they'll have to pay a multi-million pound fee to Adidas
www.mirror.co.uk www.mirror.co.uk
 
A
Beamrider said:
Manchester United's Europa League failure means they'll have to pay kit provider Adidas £10million. The Red Devils lost Wednesday's final and it means they'll now go two years without Champions League football - which breaches their agreement.

NB - it's a Reach website so pop-ups etc....

www.mirror.co.uk

Man Utd must pay £10m penalty as Europa League failure caps off dismal season

Manchester United's Europa League final loss leaves them without Champions League football once again and means they'll have to pay a multi-million pound fee to Adidas
www.mirror.co.uk www.mirror.co.uk
Click to expand...
Apologies for questioning you but frankly I am shocked that something I posted was factually correct
 
Anybody seen Dave Brailsford around the place since Wednesday night? You know the guy – small, hairless, always wears those designer specs that seem to have lost the hook around the ear, probably to marginal gains. Looks a bit like a Bond villain who’s been sat on by a bigger Bond villain. Any sign of him at all?

It’s never been entirely clear what Brailsford’s job is at Manchester United. Officially, he is head of sport at Ineos, the company owned by Jim Ratcliffe, who owns 25 per cent of United and who is never knowingly less than The Big Big Boss. So Brailsford is ... what? Not the pheasant plucker but the pheasant plucker’s son? Who’s only plucking pheasants till the pheasant plucker comes?

Tell you what he isn’t. He’s not the face of the calamitous end to United’s 2024/25 season. Say what you like about Sir Big Sir Jim but he was, at least, the one standing on the podium in Bilbao on Wednesday night, looking for all the world like a lanky henchman tasked with keeping the riff-raff away from Spurs chairman Daniel Levy, who was standing to his left.

But Brailsford came there none. And not for the first time either. The big sports brain who arrived at United 18 months ago and was apparently going to streamline everything to make it fitter and leaner and better run, seems to have started with himself. Certainly, when the shit hit the fan, nobody ran better than Brailsford.

There are plenty of photos on the newswires of him in the stadium before the Europa League final, not a single one of him afterwards. Not a peep out of him since, either – nor indeed any of the multifarious performance directors, executive vice-presidents and other big swinging mickeys who go to make up United’s seemingly endless club hierarchy. Maybe keeping the head down is the new marginal gain.

(On which note, a quick digression. In conversation with former Waterford hurling manager Derek McGrath one time, the subject of marginal gains came up. Specifically, the notion that Brailsford getting the cyclists on Team Sky to bring their own pillows on overnight trips being hailed as some unheard-of stroke of genius. “Sure we were doing that with the Harty Cup team in school in 2007…”)


Anyway, Brailsford is just another in United’s bulging coterie of failure-is-an-orphan Teflon executives. Yet another season comes and goes with it being everybody’s fault and nobody’s fault. The Glazers, Ratcliffe, Brailsford, Omar Berrada (the actual United chief executive, for those trying to keep up), Jason Wilcox (technical director, ditto) – all somehow in charge yet all somehow insulated from any consequences. In Ireland, we wouldn’t waste those lads on a football team. We’d give them a children’s hospital to build.

Ruben Amorim suggested after the Europa League final that he'd walk away from Manchester United if the club wanted him to. Photograph: Nick Potts/PA Wire.

Ruben Amorim suggested after the Europa League final that he'd walk away from Manchester United if the club wanted him to. Photograph: Nick Potts/PA Wire.
Little wonder that the working scrubs whose job it is to actually deliver results on the pitch have been one-upping each other since Wednesday night to make it clear to the outside world that their DMs are open. It started with Ruben Amorim using his post-match press conference to declare that he’ll walk away without compensation, if that’s what United want. Whether that kind of bravado survived Amorim’s next chat with his agent remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, Bruno Fernandes reckons he could see his way clear to helping the club if they wanted to sell him. There’s apparently a £100 million offer on the table from Saudi so you’d imagine everyone will see the way being very clear indeed. Alejandro Garnacho has started grouching and chuntering and wondering about the future. The Lying Rag says the whole squad is on the transfer list. Presumably Harry Maguire and Mason Mount will survive.

All in all, it’s just such a jolly good time for those of us who have somehow managed to hitch our football supporting wagon to the most venal, most disorganised, most hubris-laden sporting organisation on the planet. It’s almost enjoyable at this stage, a kind of arms-length foray into what the world of BDSM must be like. How much pain and ridicule can we take? Does anyone remember the safe word?

Only at Man United could you have a scenario where the players are offering to pay for club staff to go to a European final. Only at Man United is it possible for a chief executive to be saying in public that winning said European final is imperative to stave off another round of redundancies. Imagine how badly you need to have managed your business for either of those scenarios to be real.

Now consider the first story out of the gate the day after said defeat in said final. “Ruben Amorim has a summer transfer budget of a little less than £100 million ...” So wrote the Guardian at Thursday lunchtime.


So which is it? Is the club in dire financial doo-doo or does it have 100 mill to throw around? And if it’s the latter, why the hell are they telling people? For the first time in nearly 40 years, United can feasibly try to play the poor mouth in transfer negotiations now. They have always had to pay a United tax. Now they seem to be wilfully setting their own.

Seriously, what a shower. No wonder Brailsford is keeping a low profile. It might be the most sensible thing he’s done since he joined.
 
I suspect once Brailsford discovered the entire United squad had already been diagnosed as asthmatic and were on inhalers, he didn't have much in the way of marginal gains to add, except maybe the odd Bradley Wiggins Jiffy bag.
 
Beamrider said:
Overall conclusion

From a performance perspective, things are looking grim on and off the pitch. I’ve deliberately ignored looking at their overall loss levels and focused on the root cause of their current predicament:
  • Declining commercial revenue
  • Poor on-pitch performance
  • Growing debt and exposure to the US dollar
  • Awful player recruitment
  • Poor cost control, particularly player spending
These are just based on historic performance. They obviously lost about £100m of 2025-26 revenue on Wednesday night (although some of that money would have been lost to player bonuses and contingent transfer payments). I haven’t even touched on the question of what they’re going to do about that tip of a ground (valued at £222m in the accounts, by the way). That’s a massive weight around their necks that could easily take them down, and I’ll be fucking furious if they get any government money towards it (Spurs got a few £m, that was it).

Then they have a huge challenge to find the funds to meet their payments and debt commitments. The debt will likely be refinanced but if they don’t pay their transfer fees then UEFA will ban them from Europe next season… oh.

How do they get out of it?

Sell, sell, sell. Sell anyone who will command a fee. Don’t worry about whether they make a profit, they need to get cash in (so don’t sell to Barcelona, obvs, or to any of the Turkish clubs, they’re not renowned for paying on time, if at all).

Find an oil state sugar daddy, and hope you can game the system like City did (so you need to pray like hell that they win 115/130).

Failing that, best of luck trying to find an insolvency practitioner – no-one wants to touch football clubs with a bargepole. A mate of mine worked for KPMG back in the day and the grief they got for taking on Leeds was off the scale. There won’t be much of a queue for United.
Click to expand...
You need to publish this out there somewhere. I hate to say it, but for the real Utd supporters more than anything. They need to know how fucked their club is.
 
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