25-02-2025
My open letter to Manchester United's ‘Jim Reaper'
Dear Sir Jim,
You do like a snappy catchphrase at Ineos don't you? Hot on the heels of 'Project 21' and 'Project 1', you have served us up another: 'The Transformation Plan'. Well, it sounds ambitious, that. Like a Dr Who retread. As if it presages an overarching scheme that, by its insistent genius, will turn a flailing institution into serial champions. That it will somehow make a bunch of hapless misfits into matchwinners, maybe show Rasmus Hojlund how to score a goal. Or even just help him to trap the ball. Transformation indeed.
But in truth, as plans go this is less transformational than the kind of cunning plan that Blackadder would associate with his hapless sidekick Baldrick.
On Monday afternoon, in an announcement full of wearisome self-justification, your inner circle revealed that the Old Trafford staff canteen would no longer serve hot food, that fruit will be the only source of lunchtime tuck for those working at the training ground in Carrington, and that another 200 jobs will be shed across the organisation to add to the 250 already dispensed with. Oh and you will be gutting the commercial office in London. Wow, that is some transformation. At Anfield, the Emirates and the Etihad they will surely look at it and think we are in trouble here: United are back. Completely transformed.
But you know as well as anyone that yet another round of deckchair re-arrangement even as the ship heads towards the iceberg, will do absolutely nothing to alleviate the insistent financial problems dogging the club.
To do that you have to address the very subject you prefer not to speak of in public: the debt. As you know full well, the club is not in the mire not because the workers get a nice pasty for lunch. Nor indeed because the former Chief Executive Ed Woodward opened up a pricey Mayfair office. Sure, there may have been some extravagance about the old regime, a lack of budgetary control, a complacent assumption that they knew what they were doing when clearly they hadn't the first clue. But your approach to resolving it has been full of sound and fury, signifying absolutely nothing. You have already done things like putting up the prices for loyal customers and getting rid of the long-serving stewards and replacing them with cheaper agency staff, a move which has done nothing but make getting into the ground an increasingly arduous operation.
Such penny pinching, as you must know, has barely touched the surface of the issue. What is bringing the club to its knees is debt. Until 20 years ago, this was an operation without a hint of borrowing. It didn't need it, under Sir Alex Ferguson's stewardship the place printed its own cash. Then a huge debt was parked on its books. Not to enable it to build a state of the art new stadium, or purchase the best players in the world. But simply to enable the Glazer family to take control and siphon off the profits. And since then, over a billion pounds has been extracted from the bottom line to pay the interest on a loan that still squats there, like a malevolent toad, unpaid, unnecessary and unheeded.
But then, given you employed much the same process of reverse takeovers when building up your Ineos organisation, I suppose it would be a tad hypocritical to rail against the debt-wielding methodology of your majority owners. Even if it would take about 400 year's worth of hot lunches to pay off a month's interest on the debt they foisted on the place.
Still, when it comes to cutting costs, it would be nice to read even a smidgen of acknowledgement of your own profligacy. A recognition that if you hadn't spent nigh on £15 million paying off Erik ten Hag and his backroom team after giving them a renewed contract barely three months earlier, then forking out a further £4.1 million on saying goodbye to Dan Ashworth, who you recruited from Newcastle saying was the best man for the job then decided he wasn't before he had had time to put his feet under the desk, you might have enough cash to buy a reasonable right back. Though given the £200 million you allowed ten Hag to waste on the second rate in the summer transfer window, it is unlikely you would know a good value recruit if he kicked a ball into your face.
Because this is the problem, Sir Jim. For all the talk of your consigliere Sir Dave Brailsford and his marginal gains, for all the Transformational Plans and projects this and that, everything you touch in sport seems to turn to ashes. In Formula One, yachting and rugby, the only trophies you have accumulated are lawsuits left right and centre. In your cycling operation there's a sense of relentless decline. At Nice, the football is not exactly going places. Now at United, in your refusal to address the pile of elephant dung that is the Glazer legacy of debt, you appear simply to be presiding over another addition to your growing catalogue of failure. Because surely even you cannot think that dispensing with the Carrington canteen and making the staff trek a couple of miles to the nearest cafe for lunch, will make the slightest difference.
Yours,
Jim White
