Falling giant

Failures on the pitch and rising debts off it have left Manchester United in a spiral of decline

By JONATHAN O’BRIEN

Manchester United’s season is not quite dead on arrival – there’s still the FA Cup and, more fancifully, the Champions League – but it feels that way. With the first leaves yet to fall from the trees, their spluttering start to the season has already seen them fall ten points behind Manchester City.

Entering the international break, United had won just twice in all competitions in 2026-27, at home to Ipswich and Sabah from Azerbaijan. Michael Carrick, appointed manager in May after briefly turning the team’s fortunes around as caretaker last season, is finding out that this is a place where reputations go to die, killed by an ingrained culture of on-field failure and a millstone of debt that feels increasingly permanent in nature.

Carrick’s summer signings were aimed at strengthening a weak midfield, but Youri Tielemans and Andrey Santos have so far contributed little, while the injured Carlos Baleba is still a bystander for now. Meanwhile, the shoehorning of Marcus Rashford into the attack has seen Matheus Cunha having to play as the main striker, with incoherent results: Rashford has yet to score or create a goal.

Among Rashford’s activities since returning to the club has been his reported “mentoring” of youth team starlets Shea Lacey and JJ Gabriel. When Gabriel abruptly announced his intention to leave in mid-September, it was one more stink bomb hurled into the malodorous mix. Already a serial club-hopper at 15, the striker had been nowhere near the first team, but the episode did nothing to dispel the bad vibes swirling around United.

Co-owner Jim Ratcliffe, whose cost-cutting drives have seen more than 400 club employees lose their jobs since 2024, then somehow managed to suck even more air out of the room. Saddling up one of his favourite hobby-horses, the Ineos chairman told the press that “nobody’s tough enough to deal with [Britain’s] immigration problem”, prompting Gary Lineker to call him “an unpleasant human being” and United “a shambles of a club”. Well, where’s the lie?

All this means the relationship between the club and the support base is now shrouded in ill feeling

A little-noticed news story back in June had already hinted it was going to be a trying season for United: they had swallowed a large interest rate rise (from 3.79 per cent to 5.36 per cent) while renegotiating their £1.3 billion debt, thus raising the annual loan interest to £70 million. Within weeks, a club initiative targeting ticket touts descended into a PR nightmare, with 685 fans being stripped of their season tickets on often doubtful pretexts and another 464 receiving lesser sanctions. As fan groups such as The 1958 voiced opposition to the aggressive clampdown, a protest was held outside Old Trafford before the clash with Manchester City, which United lost in anaemic fashion.

How many more derbies will the famous old stadium witness? If Ratcliffe has his way, not many. The proposed 100,000-seat New Trafford is earmarked for a location 350m north-west of the current ground, with 25 acres of land already secured for £63.5m. The grand opening is scheduled for summer 2035, but what kind of United team will be gracing its lush greensward is anyone’s guess. The odds suggest Carrick will be long gone by then, along with whoever succeeded him.

All this means the relationship between the club and the support base is now shrouded in ill feeling. The doomloop will be difficult to break. Without success on the pitch, revenue can only reach a certain level, with much of it going towards servicing that debt. And if the revenue doesn’t go up, United can’t compete for top-class players, effectively removing them from contention for the league and Europe. Buying the useful but unexceptional Tielemans and Baleba indicated the reduced circumstances in which United do their shopping these days: even newly promoted Ipswich and Hull spent more in the summer window. The club’s latest financial results, released on September 23, confirmed record revenues of £677.6m – but overall losses rose by £10m to £33m. For now, there will no more of the spending splurges for which the former executive vice-chairman Ed Woodward became famous.

As an entity, Manchester United still matter: almost every home fixture is sold out, TV ratings are higher than anyone else’s, and they generate breathless media coverage like no other club in the world not named Real Madrid. (The Gabriel controversy, a story about a little-known youth player, made headlines for several days.) But for how much longer can they retain that gilded status? Something will ultimately have to give. Perhaps sooner than people imagine.