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18 Sep 2026 12:03:39
{Ed's Note - Kurtis has posted a new article entitled, United Under INEOS: Best in Class or Reactive?
1.) 18 Sep 2026 12:43:14
INEOS is £18 billion in Debt, they also only own 28.94% of the club. The Glazer family owns 48.9% and 67.9% of the overall voting rights, Public Shareholders own 22.2% of the club.
INEOS is an investment vehicle, they invested £1.54 billion, the company will have an obligation to turn a profit on that investment. The profit will come from the regeneration project.
We as fans really really need to get into our heads that the football club which means the fans will pay for this. The club will be run like a any other company within the confines of cash flow forecasts and projections that will take into account the regeneration project from a long term financial planning prospective.
We fans keep looking at this through a lens based on INEOS wanting what we want, footballing success. INEOS want financial success, their motivation is aligned with the objectives of the Glazers.
The clubs ownership structure means its highly unlikely any parties are putting their own cash in, the idea they would put their own cash in to pay off the debt is laughable.
The reality is this, the club will be run on a tight budget, they will try to use data models, like Brighton do to increase the odds of success. The question we need to ask is what does success look like? Well, if your objective is increasing profits and revenue, success is top 5 with a wage budged substantially below the top 5 teams.
We are currently the 6th highest wage bill in the prem, if we removed Rashford in the summer we'd of been 7th. We've significantly cut the wage bill for playing staff and Man United PLC wages/Salaries with the headcount reduction. All evidence points to significant cost cutting.
2.) 18 Sep 2026 13:22:06
Bang on there. INEOS have quickly shifted from best in class to best in budget. After last season, the question was could United push on to compete with City and Arsenal. The answer was an overwhelming no. They people running the club have calculated that the cost of competing is less profitable than being a club with the primary ambition of achieving Champions League.
3.) 18 Sep 2026 14:41:15
The debt, and the annual cost of servicing it is a serious impediment, particularly because the stadium still needs to be renovated or replaced. There's lots of speculation as to how the £2bn currently estimated will be raised, but clearly it will involve a large element of debt.
Meanwhile it's been reported that interest costs after the debt refinancing this summer could be around £60m a year (I think it will be a bit less). Never mind the outcry about dividends, that's where the most significant cost is, the equivalent of 2x £100k player on £200k a week. Paying dividends is an option if you're making profits, financing the debt is an obligation whether you are or not and United hasn't made any in 5 years.
The only meaningful way to bring the current debt load down is for the club to issue more shares, but, depending on the amount they want to raise, it would run the risk of Avram and Joel losing voting control. We talk of the Glazers as a single entity but there are 6 siblings and some might prefer to sell out completely, especially if the business is not profitable and not paying any dividends. So ni-omina control could fall apart if there was a family split.
Against that, the Glazers are traditionally a real estate concern, and clearly have a significant long term financial stake in regeneration of the area. So talk of rifts between them may be overstated. I know or have known a number of real estate investors in my time and the most successful ones have simply bought low and held on for extremely long periods of time. Kind of like McDonalds which is primarily a real estate holding company that finances its acquisitions through its food brand franchises.
I don't see any chance of them being able or wanting to raise capital by issuing stock, which means there's essentially no way out of the current debt bind other than gradual reduction through the retention of +ve cash flow from profitable trading. So, I agree with you they're going to try and make 2+2=5, hoping that somehow or other they can create a club that cheapskates its way into Europe every year, but failing that, even without Europe the club will remain profitable.
In other words we may as well just try to chill out and accept that for the foreseeable future we've become firmly cemented as the #2 team in Manchester, the whining, not remotely noisy neighbours. A team whose past glories are drifting out of memory or were never even known by new fans around the world. Liverpool had 30 years during which they didn't win the title. I don't see us faring any better. Berrada's words about winning the title by 2028 ring very hollow after the events of this summer. Clearly financial realities are taking precedence over doing what's necessary to win titles.
08 Sep 2026 14:37:41
Slightly different topic, but am I the only one who finds it ironic that United signed three midfielders this summer, yet so far it feels like we've failed to replace what Casemiro brought defensively?
Everyone is focusing on the defence, and I agree there are quality issues there. But I don't think we should underestimate the amount of protection Casemiro provided last season. Despite the criticism, he still put up 89 tackles, 30 interceptions and 137 recoveries in the league. That is a huge amount of defensive work being done in front of the back four.
The bigger concern for me is balance. Tielemans and Mainoo seem quite similar in the sense that both want to receive the ball, progress play and dictate possession. They're good footballers, but neither is naturally a destroyer screening the defence. As a result, the midfield can look a bit lightweight without the ball.
Last season we may have got away with some of the defence's shortcomings because Casemiro was doing so much of the ugly side of the game. Take that layer of protection away and suddenly defenders are defending larger spaces, facing more transitions and getting exposed far more often.
I'm hoping Baleba can make a difference. He's much more of a natural ball winning midfielder and on paper, he looks much closer to the type of player needed to balance the midfield than another possession focused midfielder.
I'm not going into transfer window shortcomings. The defence does need replacing, but I also think we've overlooked how much Casemiro was masking those issues.
1.) 08 Sep 2026 16:23:32
Kurtis
I spent the summer saying we should buy Alex Scott, who I thought would be the right fit in front of our back four. But what do I know...
2.) 08 Sep 2026 17:13:05
Totally agree, it is a major miss and I think Baleba is completely the replacement for Casemiro. Seemingly, he is getting close to fitness and hopefully can provide the cover needed by the defence.
I do think Santos is also a player who can play the position, but needs more experience. I watched all of the pre season games and he was probably the best player of the tour.
He was poor against Hull, but that was pretty much the case for everyone, except Lammens. Seemingly, based on that one game, there are those questioning his signing.
Indeed, it was said that all the midfield signings have not delivered.
Let's not forget there was pretty much universal acceptance that the midfield signings were of a decent standard and should achieve the level of control we have been looking to achieve. Things have not changed significantly in the space of a couple of weeks.
To reach any kind of judgement based upon the games played, levels of fitness at present, and the lack of familiarity with each other, is surely, at best, rather foolish.
A bit more time is needed for all the parts to bed in!
3.) 08 Sep 2026 23:39:03
Santos was excellent pre season. Don't get why he hasn't been given a run of games.
{Ed0666's Note - I honestly thought Santos was a real coup for you. Judge him in a few months say.
17 Sep 2026 08:52:20
People are surprised we haven't kicked on when we have replaced players with the class of Casemiro with second string players in Tielemans and Santos.
Then you look at the coaching set up of, Carrick, Woodgate and Jonny Evans and wonder why we aren't competing.
22 Jun 2026 09:27:59
Wesley Sneijder coming out of retirement and signing would be more believable.
16 Sep 2026 16:49:49
Why would a player his age actually want to stay at United? He was only two or three years old the last time we won the Premier League. He grew up watching clubs like Manchester City, Liverpool, Chelsea, and Arsenal dominate domestic football while United became a shadow of its former self.
It is easy for those of us who are older posters to think he should stay because we are emotionally attached to the club's history. But kids these days simply aren't drawn to United the way we were from the 1990s to the early 2000s. Unfortunately, there are now much more successful, bigger, and better run teams out there to strive for.
We are probably only just starting to see the effects of this filter down to the academy level. It will likely get worse as our glory years are lost to the archives and better-run clubs continue to write new history. It is the unfortunate, long term consequence of years of terrible ownership.
15 Sep 2026 16:43:35
Not sure if that was aimed at me, but I've supported and posted about the club for years, so the "troll" accusation is a bit off.
I want what's best for United, but I can absolutely assure you that if it came down to choosing between what's best for my child and what's best for a football club, my child wins every single time.
That's not trolling, that's being a parent.
Feel free to disagree with my opinion on the club, but don't confuse that with a lack of support.
15 Sep 2026 15:52:12
Great decision by him and his father. If I were a parent of an academy player, having watched Sunday's display and seen the direction the club appears to be heading in, I'd be thinking twice about wanting my child involved as well.
He'll become a free agent and, if he's as highly rated as people say, he'll be snapped up by a club like Barcelona or somewhere else that's moving forward rather than backwards. Unless, of course, he ends up at Spurs.
14 Sep 2026 17:52:50
IWOTB, I'm well aware of what we paid for him. I was clearly talking about the £85m combined outlay on Santos and Tielemans. But thanks for volunteering to fact-check the sentence you misunderstood.
14 Sep 2026 16:34:53
We had the chance to buy Elliot Anderson and were very much in the race. The simple reality is that we didn't want to spend the £100m it would have taken to get him at the time.
Instead, we spent £85m on Santos, who couldn't even get off the bench yesterday, and Tielemans, who is okay. That's it, just okay.
The old saying couldn't be more true: if you buy cheap, you buy twice. The "best in class" people running the club are replacing our players by gambling on cheaper, slightly worse alternatives, rather than going after the top-quality talent that's actually needed to compete.
It's been said before, but just look at INEOS' record at Nice.
Their transfer policy shifted away from heavy spending towards a more value-driven recruitment model based on lower individual transfer fees and finding bargains. How did that work out? A slow decline season after season, narrowly surviving relegation last year, and now sitting 19th on two points.
I'm saying it now: things will only get worse under INEOS. This idea that you can continuously replace quality with "good value" signings is fine if your ambition is survival. If your ambition is competing for titles, eventually the drop in quality catches up with you. At the current rate, we'll be fighting to survive long before we're fighting for a title.