United Thread - 2023/24

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SebastianBlue said:
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.
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Ed Woodward was an investment banker, employed by the Glazers prior to the take over. He was running the club from 2012 - 2022. All of the players that don't want to leave the club, are a direct result of the bumper contracts that Ed Woodward gave them. Not only do they not want to leave, no other clubs can match their wages. They were only able to ship out Mata, Jones, De Gea, Pogba and Lingard because their contracts had expired. They've still got Van De Beek, Maguire, Martial, Bailly and McTominay that won't leave. If you combined all of the salaries of these deadwood (or Ed Wood) players, you'd easily be looking at 100m per season.

That's money that should be invested into the squad on an annual basis. Instead of dipping into all of the money made from fans & sponsorship. On paper, they should be a very profitable club. They made a profit of 1.5bn over the the term of Glazer ownership, but they squandered it on debt repayments, and poor decisions on player recruitment. They also lined their own pockets taking dividends out of these profits.

This rumour that they value the club at double what they were offered, only highlights how out of touch from reality they really are. The Glazer siblings are like an episode of succession. None of them have any talent or business acumen, they are squabbling with each other, trying to milk dry the investments that their father made for them. Not one of them is brave enough to come out and make a statement or have any sort of dialogue with the fans. It's all middle men and consultants.

And riddle me this. If you have an asset that is valued at 5bn. And you run it into the ground for a further 2 years, not investing or improving the value. Why would you think it could be worth 10bn in 2025???
What do they know that everybody else doesn't?
 
gordondaviesmoustache said:
I’m not even sure (and I could be wrong) that they’ve got a statutory duty to be impartial. If GB News can get away with it, then why can’t Sky Sports?!
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Probably not, and even more so as this is just an opinion; just not sure that he should be left completely unchallenged on it, given the control he seems to have over a lot of United fans thinking.
 
Ardnaree said:
And riddle me this. If you have an asset that is valued at 5bn. And you run it into the ground for a further 2 years, not investing or improving the value. Why would you think it could be worth 10bn in 2025???
What do they know that everybody else doesn't?
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I think if your business is struggling (and I think, on balance, their wider business has to be) then hope will usually trump cold logic.

I think it’s likely they need that sum, or something resembling it, to clear the decks from their ailing mall business and have enough left over. I simply can’t see that arm of their empire being anything other than a huge millstone round their necks in the current market place.
 
gordondaviesmoustache said:
I’m not even sure (and I could be wrong) that they’ve got a statutory duty to be impartial. If GB News can get away with it, then why can’t Sky Sports?!
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There’s no obligation for any commercial media outlet to be impartial. Sky could run daily Glazer Out broadcasts if they wanted to.

Only time there’s a requirement for impartiality/increased sensitivity is during elections (but that’s pretty much ignored these days anyway when you look at the mail or mirror in the run up to a GE)
 
chris85mcfc said:
Probably not, and even more so as this is just an opinion; just not sure that he should be left completely unchallenged on it, given the control he seems to have over a lot of United fans thinking.
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Completely agree. The lack of any counterpoint is at best completely unprofessional
 
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