Manchester United are importing a sinister US tactic: Public money for stadiums

The Guardian

2 days ago

In March, Manchester United officially unveiled images and plans for a new 100,000-seater stadium to replace their current aging home, Old Trafford. While the grandiosity of the circus-tent-like structure attracted widespread attention, something else did, too: as part of this project, United are planning to secure land not by paying for it themselves – but by having the UK government do it for them.
In order to clear the site that the club wants to use, a rail freight hub will need to be moved to out near St Helens, a town in between Manchester and Liverpool. The cost of moving the hub is estimated to be between £200m and 300m ($270-405m), but that may be an optimistic appraisal; in the past, the project budget was estimated at closer to a £1bn ($1.35bn).
Politicians supporting United's plan, like Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, have stressed that no public money will be used to build the stadium. But that appears to be a bit of verbal trickery: United's new stadium cannot be built as planned without moving the freight rail hub; if the government pays to move the hub, they save United from having to do so themselves. (Manchester United declined to respond to a request for comment.)
The plan's proponents back it by promising it would confer grand economic benefits to Greater Manchester – 92,000 new jobs! 17,000 new homes! 1.8 million additional tourists! – and would be worth over £7bn annually to the UK economy. Sebastian Coe, the chair of the Old Trafford Regeneration Taskforce and a key organizer behind the 2012 London Olympics, has said 'I don't think I'm overstating when I say this actually has the potential to be, not only a bigger project than London 2012 but, in terms of European scope and scale, probably the biggest thing that's ever really been undertaken.'
If United does secure hundreds of millions of pounds of public money as an ancillary part of its stadium project, the club, knowingly or otherwise, would be continuing a long and ignoble American tradition. In the UK, it's relatively rare for big sports teams to benefit from public money. In the US, however, it's such a common practice that the record for the largest public subsidy given to a team has been repeatedly shattered in recent years. The Las Vegas Raiders received $750m (£555m) in 2016. The Buffalo Bills got $850m (£629m) in 2022. The Washington Commanders are now in the process of landing over $1bn (£740m).
And all that has happened despite a consensus among American academics that massive injections of public money towards major stadium projects have not led to the widespread economic benefits they promised. 'That's the story they tell to get the public money, but it's the big lie' of the stadium funding debate, says Pat Garofalo of the American Economic Liberties Project, 'We [in the US] export a lot of problematic things. And I really hope that we don't export that big lie.'
Adds Geoffrey Propheter, a professor at the University of Colorado-Denver: 'In the US, my colleagues and I have the benefit of [decades] worth of examples. We have gotten to see how government intervention in sports facilities has evolved into this monster.' According to Propheter, out of the approximately 125 major league sports facilities across five major leagues – MLB, NBA, NHL, NFL, and MLS – only about ten percent do not or have not received public money in some form.
In the UK, West Ham and Manchester City play in stadiums built with public money, but in both cases the facilities were built for mass one-off sporting events (the London Olympics and the 2002 Commonwealth Games, respectively) and then repurposed. According to research by the University of Michigan professor Stefan Szymanski, smaller clubs lower down the pyramid – like Swansea City and Colchester United – have received some public money, but that spending was seen more as an investment into a community asset like a library or a school rather than as an economic generator.
'In the US it is almost taken as a given now that any new facility will receive taxpayer funding,' says Garofalo. 'It's the ones that don't that stand out as oddballs.'
The story that Manchester United is telling now is the same one that American sports owners have told, again and again, despite a voluminous and still-growing body of proof that the story isn't real.
'I stress to my friends in the UK – all the evidence here shows that it's not true,' Garofalo says. 'You are setting this money on fire. And you are doing this to support a massive private business that prints money.'
In 2024, the Portland Sea Dogs – a minor league baseball team in Portland, Maine – received a $2m tax break. While the sums of money and the size of the teams being discussed vary widely, there is a parallel between the Sea Dogs and Manchester United: both effectively disguised their solicitations for public money. Just like United isn't asking for hundreds of millions of pounds to go into their stadium construction budget, the Sea Dogs didn't ask for $2m to be put in their bank account. But by not having to pay $2m in taxes, that's effectively what the Sea Dogs got.
Maura Pillsbury of the Maine Center For Economic Policy was part of a network of locals and legislators who pushed back on the Sea Dogs' tax break, ultimately unsuccessfully. When imagining what she would share with folks in Manchester as they contemplated United's plan, she says, 'Everybody here loves the Sea Dogs and I'm sure everybody there loves Manchester United' (City fans aside, of course) 'so it's hard to say no to. But I would encourage them to think about what they're sacrificing. Other people are going to have to pay for that. Something is gonna get cut.'
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President Donald Trump recently signed into law a massive federal budget bill that will slash social programs across the US and directly impact vulnerable populations in Maine. Meanwhile, the Sea Dogs recently unveiled the results of the renovation paid for in part by their tax break. 'That was another dagger,' Pillsbury says. 'Giving the Sea Dogs $2m – that was a policy choice. Where could have this money gone instead? That's childcare subsidies, that's health care, that's food on kids' plates. The emotional, feelgood nature of these proposals belie the actual reality – there's a cost and a consequence to making these decisions.'
Propheter says that to 'get to where we are now' – where American pro teams are approaching the billion dollar mark in public money payouts – 'it took about 50 years of these stadium messes. I wonder if across the pond, folks are like, 'hey, we can get to where America is because we can learn from the NFL, MLB – we can get to ballooning subsidies even faster.''
One thing standing in the way of this dangerous precedent blossoming in the UK may be the agency of the fans. As United seeks to benefit from public money, will fans – imagining where else their tax dollars could go – push back?
American fans 'live in a world of fear,' says the University of Michigan's Stefan Syzmanski, 'because of what terrible thing might happen to them' – namely, their team being taken away.
When a team owner in the US asks for public money, there is the implicit or explicit threat of the owner moving the team if the municipality doesn't cough up the dough. 'As a matter of rote reflex,' Garofalo says, 'they threaten to move the team. They have all the leverage to demand these subsidies' lest they have to rip up the team and move away. 'The fans treat the team as a community asset and the owners treat it as a private business.'
But while American sports fans seem to respect team owners' legal right to manipulate them by threatening to leave, in the UK, Szymanski says, the thinking is different. Relocating your team is 'a borderline criminal activity.' And in general, fans don't think the owners of their teams should get to do whatever they want.
'Manchester United fans do not actually believe' that its proprietors, the Glazer family and Jim Ratcliffe, 'own Manchester United,' Szymanski says. 'That might be the legal position but the reality' is that they, the club's supporters, are 'the true owners' and that the Glazers and Ratcliffe are 'temporary stewards – and pretty shitty ones, at that.'