I dunno. There used to be a time when I greatly disliked the way they operated - encumbering a financially pristine club like United with a mountain of debt from the risky leveraged buyout, and seemingly clipping Fergie's wings in the market (to an extent). That kind of peaked with the Hicks and Gillet saga at Liverpool (mostly paranoia about the same unfolding at United), and the parent company's overall debt blowing up to £700+ million. But those days are thankfully gone, and the picture is much rosier now from a 'we might go bust' perspective. So the resentment factor has progressively been chipped away, by and large.
Now they allow United to spend
its own money, and don't interfere in the football side of things - which can be an issue with billionaire egomaniacs who're more hands on and have a propensity for micromanaging things and remaking their new toy in their image. Not perfect by any means, and someone like Sheikh Mansour or the Emir of Qatar would take things to the next level by pouring a lot of
their money into the club (especially in terms of infrastructure and training grounds - like the Etihad Campus or the Camp des Loges to Poissy development), but as a counter - if someone of that nature isn't interested, United is so valuable as an entity that there's a risk of another leveraged buyout where someone like Stan Kroenke handicaps the club further with harsh restraints, essentially setting the club back to the dark ages for a while.
So from that sense, I'm kinda happy with that status quo. They're not the best, but far from the worst. A couple things still bug me, though. Like, there's not enough money being invested into Old Trafford, when it's the physical epicenter of the club. Makes sense from a financial perspective because matchday revenues now form a substantially lower part of the overall pie:
Commercial revenue for the year was £268.3m, an increase of £71.4m, or 36.3%, over the previous year.
Meanwhile, broadcasting revenue for the year was £140.4m, an increase of £32.7m, or 30.4%, on the previous year, which the club says was "primarily due to participation in Uefa competitions".
And matchday revenue was £106.6m, an increase of £16.0m, or 17.7%,on 2014-15, thanks to that European participation and the club's run to the FA Cup final.
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-37339740
But Madrid are modernizing the Bernabéu and adding a roof, Barcelona are going to expand the Nou Camp to ~105,000 in the near future, Bayern moved from Olympiastadion München to Allianz Arena and expanded the latter from 65,000 to an Old Trafford-esque 75,000, etc. United are kinda standing pat in that regard (relative to clubs of similar stature) - the last minor expansion happened in 2006, even though there's a real chance to take the stadium to 95,000+ by expanding over the freight line. The whole structure would then be more symmetric, United can realistically fill out the additional seats, there'll be greater matchday revenue, the net asset value will go up, and minor bragging rights for stadium savants I guess.
