United debt up £137 million

DoomSlayer

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Friendly tip: dont read headlines and portray them as facta upon which you will form an argument.

What is the problem exactly? We literally tried to offload lukaku for dybala. Its like you think we dont have money to spend.

I, like many others I assume, read the fiscal reports. We have cash, and lots of it. We also have responsible directors that manage the cash well
Alright, since you said you are a finance guy and the club is in great condition - how much do you reckon the club can spend in one summer? Is it realistic that we can sign Haaland in January and then buy Sancho + 2 CMs, 1 CAM and probably 1 LB? Because that is the expectations I see a lot of fans having and I'm almost certain they are all in for a huge disappointment.
GLAZERS OUT!!! We are no longer a competitive football team.
I don't understand how there are still Glazer apologists. We are dogshit as a football club right now and our hope is that Ole does a miracle, turning out to be some sort of a genius manager that makes us competitive again.
 

Wumminator

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GLAZERS OUT!!! We are no longer a competitive football team.
That’s not always down to the ownership.

As far as I see it LVG left a misfiring team, with a lot of money behind it and some fantastic young prospects.

Mourinho was backed with hundreds of millions, signed everyone he wanted including the world’s most expensive player and left us languishing.

Biggest mistake the club ever made.
 

DoomSlayer

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That’s not always down to the ownership.

As far as I see it LVG left a misfiring team, with a lot of money behind it and some fantastic young prospects.

Mourinho was backed with hundreds of millions, signed everyone he wanted including the world’s most expensive player and left us languishing.

Biggest mistake the club ever made.
Who appointed Mourinho? Which genius decided to give him full power in transfer dealings? Which financial mastermind was so smart that fell for the old Jorge Mendes trick of "X club is interested in player/manager" at mid-season in order to get a new fat contract?
 

AshRK

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That’s not always down to the ownership.

As far as I see it LVG left a misfiring team, with a lot of money behind it and some fantastic young prospects.

Mourinho was backed with hundreds of millions, signed everyone he wanted including the world’s most expensive player and left us languishing.

Biggest mistake the club ever made.
And who appointed those managers? Cannot just blame everything on managers when we are run by incompetent people.
 

Le Red

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That’s not always down to the ownership.

As far as I see it LVG left a misfiring team, with a lot of money behind it and some fantastic young prospects.

Mourinho was backed with hundreds of millions, signed everyone he wanted including the world’s most expensive player and left us languishing.

Biggest mistake the club ever made.
Like the guys above already said, appointing the wrong managers is part of why the owners are to blame for the current state of affairs.
Of course, let's not forget about the lack of a DOF. A good DOF can prevent a lot of harm done by managers that don't fit, and we don't have one. Owners fault again.
 

DoomSlayer

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Which 5 transfer windows did you choose? Or did you go over last 5 years which would be 9 transfer windows?
I already said that it was about the last 5 transfer windows, so starting with the one where we got Sanchez for Mkhitaryan. @Josep Dowling gave the numbers for the last 5 years too and it's still not a great read for the people who think we will be spending hundreds of millions of pounds.
 

red thru&thru

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Alright, since you said you are a finance guy and the club is in great condition - how much do you reckon the club can spend in one summer? Is it realistic that we can sign Haaland in January and then buy Sancho + 2 CMs, 1 CAM and probably 1 LB? Because that is the expectations I see a lot of fans having and I'm almost certain they are all in for a huge disappointment.

We should be streets ahead of the likes of City but looks like they will pip us next year. How had Ed the great allowed this???

I don't understand how there are still Glazer apologists. We are dogshit as a football club right now and our hope is that Ole does a miracle, turning out to be some sort of a genius manager that makes us competitive again.
Nor me. I'm baffled at this. I'm beginning to think it's Ed and his family, and the Glazers siblings and their families, who are the one's on here sticking up for them.
 

DanClancy

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I m not a finance guru but it s quite clear why we didn't sign more players in summer - net spending was capped. Taking into consideration the sale of Lukaku, our net spend in summer was around 75 million gbp. - Not far from the figure mentioned by James Ducker of a max 100 million.
So we may presume that kitty available for January would be - remaining 25 m
+ Matic fee (if he goes)12m?
+ Smalling fee 18m?
That s around 55 m.
+ some funds from next summer - 20m.
Thats not far from the 72m January kitty that was mentioned a couple of weeks ago or so.

So forget all this talk about getting both Sancho and Haaland. :)
Good luck with that, can;t see us getting more than a few million if we're lucky for a player who's out of contract at the end of the season and is finished.
 

dev1l

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Good luck with that, can;t see us getting more than a few million if we're lucky for a player who's out of contract at the end of the season and is finished.
Yeah that true. I was over optimistic :)
 

Tom Cato

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Alright, since you said you are a finance guy and the club is in great condition - how much do you reckon the club can spend in one summer? Is it realistic that we can sign Haaland in January and then buy Sancho + 2 CMs, 1 CAM and probably 1 LB? Because that is the expectations I see a lot of fans having and I'm almost certain they are all in for a huge disappointment.

I don't understand how there are still Glazer apologists. We are dogshit as a football club right now and our hope is that Ole does a miracle, turning out to be some sort of a genius manager that makes us competitive again.
No club in football can do this and remain compliant with the FFP, so that's never going to be something that's on the table. Not for the price of the talent a club like Manchester United require. The FFP (I'll just relay what it is in case anyone reading this do not know yet - in very broad terms) is in place to ensure that the clubs do not spend more money than they earn within a budget framework. It's there to ensure that football clubs do not go into debt they can not manage, which may threaten the long term survival of the clubs. In short, the clubs needs to be able to carry their fiscal debt within their own budgetary framework. IF clubs go beyond their budgetary framework and attempt to spend outside it, UEFA can, and will sanction the clubs in question - with anything from fines, transfer bans to locking clubs from international competition.

Portsmouth is maybe the best example of a club that spent WELL beyond their means, resulting in the club finally being taken under administration to avoid liquidifcation. The same with Leeds.

But a spending bill of £200m is ABSOLUTELY within the realm of possibilities. You have to remember that MUFC is still earning money, we are very much cash positive and have been forever.

Most importantly, the deals can be structured over installments if the selling club is willing. The willingness often depends a lot on things like credit and the clubs immediate financial needs vs other bids with larger upfront payments. Manchester United of course have excellent credit standing.

But with regards to Glazer apologists.. Listen, I'm not a fan of the Glazers, not so much because they are the owners, but because the club is in massive debt thanks to their takeover. As for the Glazers being willing to let the club spend? well, they have gone above and beyond there for the most part. I am always surprised that fans somehow don't think the managers don't get financial backing.

In the last 10 years, Manchester United and Manchester City are the only clubs who have never posted a bigget net earning than net spend.

MCFC 10 y Net spend: £916 million
MCFC 5 y Net spend: £572m

MUFC 10 y Net spend: £714m
MUFC 5 y Net spend: £416m

THIRD ON THE LIST

Arsenal FC 5y Net spend: £250m

The Manchester clubs spend SO much more on transfers than any other club. Glazers get a lot of sh*t for the debt they put in the club, but they should not be blamed for not making money available, because we are SWIMMING in it. That being said, when the Glazers riddled the club with bank loan debt after their takeover, the annual turnover was somewhere in the £250-270m range. It is now over £600m. Operating revenue has more than doubled in 9 years.

Know what our actual problem is? The players we buy, end up having no re-sale value. Real Madrid, Barcelona, Chelsea, Liverpool, all have players that have been sold for a massvive chunk of money that helps them decrease their net spends. Having a HUGE net spend bill is not an achievement or a symptom of investment, its a symptom of something being inherently wrong if you invest and invest, and your investment ends up being worth almost nothing in terms of re-sale value.

Christiano Ronaldo, Angel Di Maria, Romelu Lukaku. These are the only players the club has ever sold that cost more than £35 million. Yeah we're not a selling club, but we don't get a good return on investment when we need to restructure and need to move on players. We've sold players with a high pricetag after 1-2-3 seasons, and received pennies on the investment because the players have not worked out.

But what is our spending power really? Well we have assets. A lot of assets. MUFC owns a total of £1.6bn in assets, of which about half is "intangible assets" ie. Players. The good news is that the club has more than £300 million pounds in the bank in cash. The good news is that the club is turning a profit, allowing that number to grow.

The challenge is: How much money does the club need to pay upfront for a transfer of a Haaland, a Sancho, or other? We can't afford to be a £100m+ net spend club every single season. Even Manchester City with their financial doping have run out of infinite money and have reduced their spending significantly compared to the previous 3 seasons before 18/19.

This puzzle is why transfers take so long to negotiate, there are a lot of what if considerations to take into account. Paul Pogba is going to be a massive headache going into the summer. Does he stay? Does he leave? Money we get for Pogba can be re-invested into new positions, but which? A lot of things to consider, especially with how young our squad is and emerging or developing players like McTominay, Williams, Greenwood, Rashford, AWB, Garner, Gomes, James. All of these players are under 22 and are still developing talent. Regardless of how long they have already played for the club. Very few talents peak at 22, so there's that to consider. Buying someone displaces someone. This isn't generally a problem, but we're developing talent as part of a rebuild project here. No doubt the staff will take that into consideration.

The club will go for Jadon Sancho, there is no dobut about that. Will they go for Haaland? Maybe. But he won't be sold for £80m, that valuation is too high.

The club can afford another year of a £150m spending bill, depending on what amount of cash if upfront. And another year. Honestly this entirely depends on how the debt is structured. As long as the transfer value don't overshadow our income, or our ability to manage the current transfer payments. The club needs a certain bank balance to be in compliance with their loan terms (I dont know what these are, but its common for banks to demand assets to be in compliance with loans. This is one of the ways equity dillution happens - (financial obligations, capital needs for wages/investments etc). But judging by the clubs debt I doubt its more than £100m. IF this is part of the loan terms.

So depending on how the payments are structured we can probably get both Haaland and Sancho and a midfielder.

A common thing that gets neglected is that when you refer to our "awful" £80m net spend bill this season. One thing that conveniently does not get mentioned is our significant push to land Paulo Dybala and Mario Mandzukic at the end of the transfer window AND Sean Longstaff. The Dybala transfer was valued at Lukakus fee, in this contex £80m (I havent checked so dont arrest me if its £65 or something), + potential add-on for Mandzukic AND our rejected £30m bid for Sean Longstaff.

So in grand total last season, the MUFC brass tried their very best to spend nearly £180 million pounds in the transfer window. We couldn't get the Dybala deal done, so Lukaku was sold to Inter instead.

I don't really understand why these things go unnoticed or not even unacknowledged, maybe its negativity confirmation bias. But fact of the matter is that the club DID try to spend. We know this because Tier1 reporters like Simon Stone reported on it heavily, so we know the information to be true.

So if OGS says there are funds for the right player available in January, there is funds available in january.
 
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DoomSlayer

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Thank you for the elaborate reply. I sincerely hope you are correct in your assessment of the financial stability of the club, because the recent trends have been very alarming to me and our lack of success is bound to catch up with us. The problem is not that we are not growing our revenues, the problem, at least in my opinion, is that our competitors do the same but with a much higher rate and efficiency due to being consistently competitive and making the right decisions.

On the Glazer topic - the spending hasn't been the main issue, at least not in the era after Sir Alex retired. However, part of the problem is exactly the fact that the owners allowed the team to stagnate to an extreme and never took the proper initiative to invest adequately after the departure of Ronaldo. And when it comes to the recent times, the responsibility of the transfer failures have to ultimately go back to them as they have never put pressure on their people in the boardroom and haven't made the likes of Woodward and co. accountable for the countless bad decisions that they made. Any other club would have restructured every department and put new people in place so that we can try and get back on track. Believing that the current people in charge will get it right this time is absolutely idiotic, unless the true intentions of the Glazers is to milk this club until it's no longer possible, for which Woodward must be the best man for the job.
 
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Crashoutcassius

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Our EBITDA is about 200m less taxes (variable) and interest (25m) so usually comes to about 150m a year, that is what we can sustainably spend without running into bother

Taking net profit in one single year as what we can spend is ridiculous as it is impacted in how we amortize previous payments, how we deal with tax etc
 

Crashoutcassius

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Thank you for the elaborate reply. I sincerely hope you are correct in your assessment of the financial stability of the club, because the recent trends have been very alarming to me and our lack of success is bound to catch up with us. The problem is not that we are not growing our revenues, the problem, at least in my opinion, is that our competitors do the same but with a much higher rate and efficiency due to being consistently competitive and making the right decisions.

On the Glazer issue - the spending hasn't been the main issue, at least not in the era after Sir Alex retired. However, part of the problem is exactly the fact that the owners allowed the team to stagnate to an extreme and never took the proper initiative to invest adequately after the departure of Ronaldo. And when it comes to the recent times, the responsibility of the transfer failures have to ultimately go back to them as they have never put pressure on their people in the boardroom and haven't made the likes of Woodward and co. accountable for the countless bad decisions that they made. Any other club would have restructured every department and put new people in place so that we can try and get back on track. Believing that the current people in charge will get it right this time is absolutely idiotic, unless the true intentions of the Glazers is to milk this club until it's no longer possible, for which Woodward must be the best man for the job.
the trends haven't been alarming, the alarmists in here and in the media have just tricked you & others
 

Tom Cato

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Our EBITDA is about 200m less taxes (variable) and interest (25m) so usually comes to about 150m a year, that is what we can sustainably spend without running into bother

Taking net profit in one single year as what we can spend is ridiculous as it is impacted in how we amortize previous payments, how we deal with tax etc
I like how you took the contents of my paragraph long comment and boiled it down to this easy to read summary sentence. Kudos
 

Wumminator

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Who appointed Mourinho? Which genius decided to give him full power in transfer dealings? Which financial mastermind was so smart that fell for the old Jorge Mendes trick of "X club is interested in player/manager" at mid-season in order to get a new fat contract?
And who appointed those managers? Cannot just blame everything on managers when we are run by incompetent people.
Like the guys above already said, appointing the wrong managers is part of why the owners are to blame for the current state of affairs.
Of course, let's not forget about the lack of a DOF. A good DOF can prevent a lot of harm done by managers that don't fit, and we don't have one. Owners fault again.
Obviously whoever appointed Jose was at fault, but it was a fault that I can accept. It feels like all the none football experts asked for it, whereas others could see the inevitability. A lot of people were fooled by him. Shame it was the most costly decision we’ve made.
 

DoomSlayer

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what trends off the field in the last six years worry you?
We're kind of going in circles here, don't you think? You say that appointing Mourinho was the biggest mistake ever made by the club, yet at the same time you are ready to accept that? And when you add the fact the same person gave him an extension over some planted PSG rumours in the media, it shows what kind of circus we have at the top of the club.

Look, if the Glazers restructure the whole boardroom and get rid of the likes of Woodward, I'd see that as a big positive and a sign that we truly have ambitions to be back at the top. At the moment we are just doing the same things over and over again, hoping that a new Sir Alex emerges out of nowhere and saves the falling giant.
 

ICHM

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At the moment we have enough money or the next two windows to buy 2 first team players. Let that sink in. We can sell some of the deadwood of course, maybe we'll get another player there. If and it is a big if, we sell Pogba for £100M+, we will have done good business and can buy another 2 players.
 

Catt

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At the moment we have enough money or the next two windows to buy 2 first team players. Let that sink in. We can sell some of the deadwood of course, maybe we'll get another player there. If and it is a big if, we sell Pogba for £100M+, we will have done good business and can buy another 2 players.
Where does it say that?
 

Coolcal

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I'm afraid Tom Cato is wrong. Cash at the end of September was £140M. 2019/20 EBITDA is forecast to be £155/165M. The September 2019 interim statement which will detail the numbers isn't available yet, however we will still owe more on transfers than we are owed. Also, if there's no Champions' League next season Adidas income will fall and the Chevrolet deal expires in 2021. Against this background it wouldn't be easy to obtain more debt and I doubt the Glazers would support a share issue to raise funds given the present share price. Thanks to Woodward's incompetence I can't see us spending more than £100M net across the next two transfer windows (unless selling clubs accept deferred payments as Tom Cato suggests) unless the club is sold to someone with very deep pockets.
 

manc4red

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The ironic thing is that if we were onfield really successful currently most of us (even myself as an accountant) wouldnt really care.

success brings more revenue. More sponsors. The whole idea of the ship will right itself

However we find ourselves in a situation that we are grasping at our history and brandpower so needing to throw money around and pay superstars wages that are aligned with our ‘status’ but the truth is that our income has been hampered by the poor form we have been for the past few years

Sad days really
 

freeurmind

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Nothing to see here. Give Ed a 10 year contract extension and build the Glazers a statue outside OT.
 

DanClancy

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I won't be surprised to see the club borrow more money, the cash position doesn't look as attractive as it did the last few years and its not like we've spend huge money the last 2 summers although they managed to sneak in the AWB signing into the 18/19 accounts. Without it and failure to make next seasons CL and I can't see United spending much next summer, going to rely on selling Pogba and a few others to generate funds.

Don't know if there able to renegotiate better terms as I think Spurs appeared to attract a considerably lower interest rate on their loan/bond.
 

macheda14

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The Glazers are good owners of a company.
The Glazers are not good owners of a football team.