The Stunning Collapse of the Premier League’s Most Successful Club
Manchester United’s commercial empire turned the club into a winning machine. Now the club is losing money off the pitch and can hardly win a game on it.
3 min
There was a time in European soccer when Manchester United was known as one of the smartest spenders in the game.
The club’s massive commercial empire allowed it to pay sky-high salaries, outbid rivals for talent, and turn over its squad often enough and cleverly enough to build several different dynasties. The approach was costly, but the club left no doubt that it worked.
These days, United is learning the hard way that losing can be just as expensive.
The crisis at the club runs so deep that it’s taking emergency measures everywhere it can to cut costs, despite record investment. It was less than two years ago that British petrochemicals billionaire Jim Ratcliffe paid $1.3 billion for a 25% stake in United, which he has since increased to 29%, on top of a $300 million injection of cash.
Since then, results have only gone backwards. The club has continued a streak of losing money every year since 2019. The squad is so thin that a sudden rash of injuries has left it desperately short of senior players. And United currently languishes in 14th place in the English Premier League after a 1-1 draw against Arsenal.
A midseason coaching change cost United around $28 million to pull off, according to the club’s accounts. Some $13.5 million went to previous manager Erik ten Hag and his coaching staff in severance, while the cost of bringing in Ruben Amorim and his assistants from Sporting Lisbon hit $14.5 million.
And while money goes out for correcting course on the pitch, the club is trying to find ways to save cash away from it. Last month, United announced around 200 layoffs, beyond the 250 jobs it had already cut in 2024. The club also announced plans to close its staff cafeteria and ended its policy of serving free lunches to non-players at the practice facility.
“This cannot continue,” United CEO Omar Berrada said. “These hard choices are necessary to put the club back on a stable financial footing.”
The quickest way for a club of United’s standing to do that is to qualify for the richest annual event in club soccer, the Champions League. Simply showing up for the tournament this season was worth $20 million, with bonuses paid for each draw or victory. A trip to the quarterfinals adds another $25 million, while the team that wins the whole thing could rake in more than $80 million.
But United is nowhere near a Champions League qualifying berth for next season. Its only path back into the elite would be winning this season’s Europa League, which looks far-fetched—the club is currently tied in its round-of-16 matchup against Spain’s Real Sociedad.
“If you have a football team that is playing well and are winning games then, in a certain way, it’s easier for the fans and for everybody to feel those changes,” head coach Ruben Amorim said of the restructuring at United.
Things have devolved so far that one United supporters’ group is organizing a protest outside Old Trafford ahead of Sunday’s home game against Arsenal, because it believes the club is “slowly dying.”
“For everyone in our club, it is a tough moment,” Amorim said. “People have the right to protest.”
The last time United finished outside the top 10 in England’s top tier was the 1989-90 season. Back then the creaking club was also racked by injuries and lost more games than it won, but stood by its embattled manager while fans clamored for him to be fired. Only a narrow victory in the FA Cup kept him in place. If it’s any consolation to United supporters 35 years later, that manager’s name was Alex Ferguson. He went on to turn Manchester United into one of the most successful clubs of the modern era.
These days, however, the club seems farther away from a revival than ever. The club that prided itself on its relentless goal scoring under Ferguson has netted fewer goals than 14 other teams. It hasn’t won back-to-back games in the Premier League all season. And Amorim has openly questioned the effort of some of his players.
“You can’t be at 99% every day because then you lose games against the teams that are in the Premier League,” United defender Matthijs de Ligt said. “In a lot of games, we haven’t been good enough.”
What United doesn’t seem to know is how to fix it. Amorim has defended the team’s style of play and reshuffled his squad in the hopes that there is enough cash on hand to bring in reinforcements this summer.
“But sometimes it’s a lack of results and you have to win games,” Amorim said. “I know the consequences when you don’t win.”
Write to Joshua Robinson at Joshua.Robinson@wsj.com
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The federal budget has rattled property investors. But the biggest mistake isn’t the tax changes, it’s the conclusion many are drawing from them.
2 min
The recent budget has forced a reckoning for property investors.
Negative gearing now restricted to new residential builds, the CGT discount gone and on paper, the numbers look different.
And many investors are responding by pivoting toward yield, prioritising cash flow over capital growth in a way that property strategists say misses the point entirely.
“The debate has shifted to yield versus growth as if they are opposing forces,” says Abdullah Nouh, founder of Melbourne-based buyers’ agency Mecca Property Group. “But that framing is itself the mistake.”
Nouh, who works with high-net-worth families and investors on long-term acquisition strategy, argues that capital growth remains the primary driver of genuine wealth creation and that the post-budget environment has made quality assets more important, not less.
The numbers make his case plainly. An additional $500 per week in rental income is welcome. A prestige asset appreciating by $1 million over a market cycle is transformative.
These are not equivalent outcomes, and portfolios built around yield at the expense of location and land value tend to generate income while wealth stands largely still.
The more nuanced shift Nouh is seeing among sophisticated investors is a move toward assets where both outcomes can be engineered simultaneously – established homes on substantial land in quality locations, where the existing dwelling can be repositioned, rental returns improved, and the underlying land value compounds independent of what sits on it.
For investors with existing equity, commercial property is also entering the conversation in a more serious way.
Prestige industrial assets, medical centres and long-leased essential retail offer income profiles that residential property in most capital city markets cannot currently match: longer lease terms, tenants covering outgoings, and greater predictability than the residential tenancy cycle.
“The investors who build lasting wealth are rarely the ones who chased yield or growth exclusively,” says Nouh.
“They are the ones who built a strategy they could sustain – one that generated enough income to hold quality assets through multiple cycles while those assets compounded in value.”
The budget has changed the settings. It has not changed the fundamentals.
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