FSR limitations are going to get even stricter each forthcoming year, so this is a problem.
MUFC are looking at a budget of about £100m, due to FFP (The Athletic)
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In the latest episode of the United Hour Podcast, Nik @Rood and Imran @Annihilate Now! start with the good news by celebrating Manchester United Women's emphatic FA Cup win over Spurs at Wembley and the future of manager Marc Skinner.
Then it's the bad news and the ever worsening form of our Men with losses to Arsenal and Palace.
Finally the main debate - ETH Out now or keep him until the end of the season - if not longer. Are you Team Nik or Team Imran?
What will that do? There are good answers and bad. But what do you think that would do?
Hard to feel much sympathy when we've spent £180m this summer
Years of mismanagement catching up with us. We'll at least have CL money this season, but if we can't sustain it...
Clear the debt which will free up a lot of money.
Not really
FSR regulations are a function of player spending and revenue.
On the player spending side, new owners who give a shit would put a proper structure in place, which in turn would improve our squad planning, recruitment, player sales, and prevent us from continuing to hemorrhage money on players who aren't a good fit for the squad.
On the revenue side, we could probably expect new sponsorships / partnerships as well as increased revenues from stadium and academy improvements (since, you know, new owners would actually invest in facilities and infrastructure).
We have raised
15m Elanga
15m Henderson (all done but not announced yet)
5m Kovar
~2m from the academy players + Chong sell on
--
~10m for Fred
4m Telles
The academy sales have been over 35m .. total sales around 50m.
Wages have gone down .. Bailly will leave on a free.. got a loan fee for Williams.
If we had 100m before FFP, I don't think FFP is holding us back that much.. we should be able to spend close to 100m if needed.
I'd be happy if McT stayed. I like him. Maguire out for a backup CB pushing for a starting role wouldve been ideal, but that wouldnt have helped with FFP..
FFP is a distraction.. we either don't have the money, or we are talking about FFP to negotiate better deals.
15m Elanga
15m Henderson (all done but not announced yet)
5m Kovar
~2m from the academy players + Chong sell on
--
~10m for Fred
4m Telles
The academy sales have been over 35m .. total sales around 50m.
Wages have gone down .. Bailly will leave on a free.. got a loan fee for Williams.
If we had 100m before FFP, I don't think FFP is holding us back that much.. we should be able to spend close to 100m if needed.
I'd be happy if McT stayed. I like him. Maguire out for a backup CB pushing for a starting role wouldve been ideal, but that wouldnt have helped with FFP..
FFP is a distraction.. we either don't have the money, or we are talking about FFP to negotiate better deals.
I believe new owners can make a massive cash injection in a way that is compliant with regulations.
It is also hoped they could wipe or restructure the debt (on which United currently pays 20m£+ interests annually) and maybe not be as greedy at taking dividends out (I believe roughly 30m£ on average every year recently ?).
That's the most immediate upsides, financially.
Labeled your points 1 and 2.
1. This is possible without a sale. 100% appreciate that The Glazers seek utterly incapable and borderline vandalistic in this regard. But a sale to the 2 vampiric bidders doesn’t guarantee this.
2. Our revenue is maxed out. We top out on everything. No club on the planet is exploited as we are. There’s no juice left in the fruit. (See above re: vandalism).
There’s no nuanced and targeted critique by our fan base. It’s ‘Glazers Out’ - and by god they need to Fcuk off - but there zero interrogation of what the buyers will do. So why champion it?
Our fan base is listless. They have dollar signs in their eyes and are blinded by them.
We should be doing better than forcing them to sell. We should be advocating for what we need the club to be doing.
My prediction : we will eventually be sold. Be that now or 3-5 years time. Nothing will change. Money will be made. Nothing will be won. Investment will not be targeted and calculated.
It’s peanuts. Meaningless (see my post above).
Pretty sure the fanbase have been advocating for what the club need to do for a few years now. But at the end of the day we all know none of it can happen without the Glazers selling.
On point 2, I was thinking something more akin to what City have done. On the sponsorship side, that would mean inflated sponsorships with Qatar-owned organizations or INEOS. On the investment side, it would include heavily spending across all youth levels (since academy spending is exempt from the regulations) with a view to selling young players to fund the FFP / FSR allowances.
Whether those actions are ethical and/or desirable for our club are up for debate, of course. But I'm just saying those are some of the likely avenues that a new owner would take to navigate FFP / FSR restrictions.
Balls to short-term cash injections that enables the manager to sign more of his old pals from the Dutch league.
I want new owners to invest in facilities, infrastructure, and completely overhaul the sporting operations to put in place the best people available who will implement a long-term recruitment plan. This club is stuck in the doldrums and needs significant change from top to bottom; change beyond throwing more money at shitty lazy players
The fanbase have been advocating for 'back the manager' and that's exactly what we've done. The fanbase now needs to live with what they asked the club to do.
Why would they not? Glazers are selling because they realised they have miss managed their cash cow to the point it will not continue to be beneficial for then financially without significant investment which they do not have
Why do you think new owners would want to continue to miss manage their investment? It does not make business sense.
Yeah, bollocks to cheating.
Our sponsorship revenue is higher than almost everyone’s. We’ve sold the soul of our club. There’s nothing else to sponsor.
No buyer is going to increase revenues. There’s no headroom.
The fanbase have been advocating for years for proper recruitment structure above the manager (from leading people in the industry). Investment in facilities and proper squad planning in the sporting department (including hiring managers and players that fit the style) . All things which have not happened.
The club have not been doing what the fanbase asked for, if they were there wouldn't be so many complaints.
Most of the fan base called out the Murtough hiring and appointment of Fletcher. Now we hire a manager and pretty much all his signings are former players (so clearly we do not have a DOF)
Backing the manager does not mean giving the manager free reign to do what ever they want and you should not pretend it is.
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So the avenue left now is to cheat. Nice.
I wouldn't say 25-50m£ is peanuts per se : It's not a massive game changer, I'll give you that. It's not how we were gonna find the dosh to bid for Kane this Summer of course.
The only Manna from hell we can hope for is that the prospective new owners make a generous cash injection (on top of a generous investment to infrastructure) and yes, there's no guarantee they will do.
For what it is worth, I'm a fervent believer MU (and basically all clubs not named City and PSG) is slowly killing itself by following on this madness of player acquisitions at inflated prices. As it stands, it has already condemned itself to be in the CL every year to really make some profits and most other revenues have been indeed maxed as far as could be expected (bar maybe improved gates in a shiny new stadium). Dropping 150m£ each year in transfers and maintaining a wage bill like ours will have to stop sooner than later.
Even in an ideal scenario of the club being much better run by owners happy to reduce their thirst for extracting dividends, it is not sustainable.
Shouldn’t FFP benefit us relative to other clubs as we have a high turnover?
They haven’t mismanaged. They’ve done exactly what they wanted to do. They have a club worth north of £5bn and spent hardly anything to do it.
To the second part; I don’t think anyone is going to come in and do all that much. It’s a business that draws revenue and doesn’t need investment to improve.
There won’t be that much scope for big change.
They have miss managed that is why they are being forced to sell.
Purely from a financial perspective the club is in a unhealthy place without cash to manoeuvre. With facilities that are dire need of upgrade and are falling behind both on and off the pitch. Both on the sporting side and the financial side.
That is what you call miss management.
You don't think it's one of the immediate things Qatar (and probably INEOS) would do if they came in? Like I said, I'm not advocating for it, just laying out some of their likely moves to free up allowable spending.
It’s a £4bn profit.
Again. They’ve fecked the club. But they haven’t mismanaged according to their plan. They’re happy to sell a club they set fire to. They don’t care. Never have.
They wouldn’t actually need to cheat if they cleared debt via sale.
It was reported we could actually spend up to an extra 75m if we were sold before the financial year ended because of that.
You know little about money if you think £4bn profit on something that should be earning you in the tens of billions in your lifetime if you managed it correctly is not miss management.
You can still turn a profit and miss manage
Don’t resort to sh1te like that. The club was never going to make tens of billions for the owners at the same time the team stayed competitive. Impossible.
They’ve paid £750m, taken oodles of cash out, and are selling for £5bn+.
The horse has ran it’s race. Done. They won. Their goals were not our goals.
You have no idea what coming with streaming and clubs owning their own broadcasting rights
The death of the league? Great
Death of what league, where it's quite competitive with many big clubs but everyone expects the same team to win the league for the fourth year in a row?
Clearly if you believed that you would be happy they would sell the club.
Yeah of course that is what would happen
Shhhh
I do want the club sold. Asap.
I just don’t think that either bidder is going to do positive things with the club. Best case it’s City 2.0. Worst case Glazers 2.0. Both bidders are terrible.
We're all in agreement that Glazers have been poor stewards that will nevertheless receive a king's bounty in reward of very little they actually did except sitting on an asset that kept appreciating because of the torrent of cash flowing football.
Yes they maybe could have profited even more if they ran the club differently and better but well, that requires effort and a long view.
Though in reality that's actually debatable. There's a reason "sportswashing" or "financial doping" as we call it now is so potent at breeding success in sport. It's a lot easier to maintain your competitive edge when you don't care about being sustainable or profitable. Always has been in football.
I believe Berlusconi actually did lose a fair bit on AC Milan, all told. Selling it mostly wiped the bulk of losses. Now of course he reaped many indirect benefits in clout, influence, prestige or for his other businesses. But the club itself was just bleeding money in operational terms, at least officially.
Probably the same for Tapie in Marseille. Louis-Dreyfus in... Marseille. And most of the millionaires that did it partly for the love of the game.
That's why they all want a closed league : That's the only way to keep that insane gravy train rolling. Otherwise it's down to TV rights ever increasing (not guaranteed) or Saudi Arabia -or another- pumping more billions in the system.
Literally the only good thing about the PL is the shared revenue system. Removing that is good for us and bad for the league.
The American stealthy takeover of the league is taking us down that route and it won’t help the league or the game in this country.
to
Sport washing did not stop United spending as much as City over the past decade.
That's such a crap take
Well, no... and we're now paying for it and hitting a financial brick wall. The only path to continue following that arms race is to become a "sportwashing" club or at the very least either the toy of a "benevolent" aristocrat or another subsidiary in the sport portfolio of the INEOS group (which isn't too far off what Boehly or Textor -on a smaller scale- is doing).
I think United could be run sustainably and free of ulterior motives but probably at the expense of remaining as competitive as now (though perhaps still at an elite level)... But let's be honest : I don't think we're ready to accept that.