In reality, although the Glazers are shite owners for United (creating a wholly unsustainable setup for the long term) and for the league as a whole (trying to Americanise the competition to ensure they can suck even more value from their investment), they aren’t the reason the Rags are absolute shite on the pitch.
They’ve spent plenty on player and staff recruitment (it’s just been via loans and equity deals that are unsustainable) and invested in other parts of the club related to match performance. The issue is the former outlay has been largely squandered on either the wrong (decent) players (which are made horrible by the move to a dysfunctional team) or just plain poor quality players that not only add nothing to the team but actually make it worse. And the latter outlay was arguably investment in all the wrong things for long term success.
If the Glazers were the major decision makers in all of it that then they should be blamed for the state United are in. But by all accounts, most of player and staff acquisitions have come from the executive and management level, and the other off-pitch investments from the executive level, largely on the basis of optimising commercial potential, rather than maximising sporting competitiveness.
That strategy can work to grow revenue in the short term, but ultimately the football club is an entertainment product, and as the quality of that product deteriorates, so does potential commercial opportunity, thus hitting the bottom line hard. And that—as it does in other industries—can begin the vicious death spiral of lower net revenue, which leads to being able to invest less in product quality, that causes quality to decline, which leads to less sales and higher liability costs from all areas of the business, which leads to less net revenue, and so on.
Really the executives and the mid-level staff below the Glazers are most to blame for the shambles that shite club is in, many of which they inherited.
But the fans don’t want to really acknowledge that because it would mean acknowledging that their mostly British-origin in-house “talent” have been woefully incompetent, that the structure of the club is severely flawed, and the recruitment, in turn, will continue to be laughable, regardless of whether they get new owners. The amount of change and restructuring needed to right the ship is colossal and—as in other types of businesses—it’s easier to find singular scapegoats than to face the real monumental task of burning it all down to the foundation and rebuilding.
In other industries this is the equivalent of pushing out the chairman of the board or hastily replacing the CEO: if the company structure and culture is shite, this only kicks the can down the road, until you eventually hit a towering, flaming mountain of tin.
Rag supporters cannot bare the idea that they will have to suffer far more before they have a chance of experiencing true glory again.
So it’s yellow and green scarves and #GlazersOut.
Because the fantasy is almost always better than the reality when you are suffering.
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TL;DR
The Rags are fucked in the near term, new owners or not, their fans just don’t want to face reality.
