Glory Glory, Mass Redundancies
Nobody in their right mind would suggest that Manchester United shouldn't try to run themselves to a manageable financial condition, but these redundancies may hit them in invisible ways.
Here we go again, then. Following the 250 redundancies made last summer, it’s now been confirmed that Manchester United are to release a further 150-200 people from their employment during the summer. This is to be combined with cutting back the canteen, which has been providing subsidised food to staff, and comes on top of other money-saving measures such as cutting Alex Ferguson (and David Gill) from his £2m-a-year ambassadorial role with the club, cutting up company credit cards, refusing free travel and accommodation to the FA Cup final and cancelling the Christmas party.
This hasn’t all been about cutting costs, of course. It’s also been about bringing more money into the club, hence the decision to remove concession prices for under-18s and over-65s and hiking the price for unsold tickets to £66, which went down like a cup of cold sick among supporters. According to The Athletic, “at least 100 more redundancies would cut staffing costs by £18m at the upper end. A figure closer to 200 could save £36m”.
But how does this fit in with the club’s overall financial picture? Well, we all know that Manchester United have lost a lot of money over the last few years. They’ve lost £370m over the last five alone. And while saving £36m would save the club some money, it feels like something like a drop in the ocean in comparison with some of the other ways that they’ve found to set fifty pound notes alight over the years, which include (but are not limited to):
Giving Erik Ten Hag a new three-year contract after winning the FA Cup, giving him the money for a rebuild, and then sacking him nine games into the following season and replacing him with Ruben Amorim. This cost them an estimated £21.5m. Manchester United have now paid an estimated £75m in compensation to the managers they’ve sacked since Alex Ferguson left in 2013.
All that palaver over tempting Dan Ashworth away from Newcastle United, only to sack him five months later at a total cost of £4.1m.
Interest payments on their debt cost them around £37m a year. This debt is in part related to the leveraged buyout which put the club into the ownership of the Glazers in 2004. The Glazers also took out £166m in dividends over the course of a decade between 2012 and 2022, though this has since ended. The total cost of this takeover recently passed £1bn.
And let’s not even get started on the amount of money they’ve wasted on the transfer market in recent years. I mean, good lord. They still have a net figure of almost £400m in transfer fee instalments to pay for players they have already signed (and not inconceivably already loaned out), half of which is due within a year.
Manchester United’s current wage bill for players only is estimated at £171.4m. It’s essentially the joint-second highest behind Manchester City, between them, Arsenal and Chelsea. It’s almost three and half times the wage bills of Nottingham Forest or Bournemouth, who are third and sixth in the Premier League. At the time of writing. Manchester United are 15th.
So in the overall scheme of things, the saving of £36m is a drop in the ocean. Half a Rasmus Hojlund, if you will. But none of this is to say that Manchester United are cash-rich. Their cash reserves dwindled significantly during the pandemic, not least because they continued to pay staff rather than putting them on furlough. In a sense, Jim Ratcliffe is right. they do need to make cuts.
Are they being made in the right places? Difficult to say. It’s been rumoured that a large proportion is coming from the scouting department this time, which certainly lends itself to low humour, if nothing else. The club has a very large staff. The largest in the Premier League. But there has been a surprising amount of triangulating and moralising over the merits of the various departments within the club over the last week or so.
It’s worth remembering that these people were all deemed necessary at one time. We shouldn’t talk about redundancy as though some people deserve it more or less than others. Lives will be turned upside-down by this. As somebody who’s gone through it, I have nothing but sympathy for those who will be thrown out of work.
And it is worth asking the question of whether the side-effects of this are even worth the financial savings. Goodness knows what morale must be like around the club as a whole at the moment, but it seems difficult to believe that it is anything above rock bottom, and what effect this might have on the team itself is unlikely to be positive.
If Manchester United have this grey cloud sitting over the entire club as an institution, how on earth are the players supposed to motivate themselves to go out onto the pitch and be worthy of the lavish amounts of money that they’re paid every weekend? Would players recommend that others join them?
So much of what happens around the club under Ratcliffe seems a weird and unpleasant mixture of pugnacious and rash. Take, for example, the women’s team. The perception was carelessly allowed to take hold that the new owners of Manchester United don’t care about their women’s team. There’s a different conversation to be had about that, but the ineffectual nature of the club’s response to that criticism has only allowed that to become embedded.
The Ten Hag saga is one thing, but the arrival of Ruben Amorim was something else. Amorim didn’t want to come until the summer. He has a specific way of playing and wanted to bring in the players he wanted and have a pre-season with them in order to impress his tactical system on them. Manchester United insisted that he join NOW, and four months on it’s all been making everyone look a bit daft.
This sort of thing had already been endemic within the club for years. The constant leaking from the dressing room was just one highly visible symptom of an institution that was being run badly from the top down. But now there are new people running the show, and they’re making rash decisions which sometimes come with a side-order of heartlessness thrown in. Perhaps if the club hadn’t pissed £200m up the wall on new players during the summer or had cut their wage bill, they wouldn’t quite find themselves in this sort of a pickle.
You have to ask what sort of world we’re living in where Manchester United can’t use the leverage of their name to encourage excellent young players to their club. The counter to this may even be that they’re perfectly capable of doing that and that the problem is that they break them once they get there. We only need to see how well some of their alumni are getting on to wonder whether there’s something in the water at Carrington.
Perhaps coming from two down at Goodison Park on Saturday will finally light their season. Or perhaps this will turn out to have been a case of incredibly expensive footballers pulling something out their backsides even when their team’s performance hasn’t deserved it in the slightest. Perhaps they’ll beat Ipswich Town tomorrow night and everything will be alright again. And perhaps that is more important than the hundreds of people losing their jobs. It is indeed a funny old game. As has been the case for most of the last ten years at the very least, Manchester United need to stop making bad decisions. That might keep more people in those jobs in the first place.