Dave Ashurst

❗️🗣️| Roy Keane goes off on Manchester United’s owners on The Overlap “They bought a football club and turned it into a spreadsheet. The Glazers didn’t fall in love with the club. They looked at the numbers, saw the revenue, saw the global brand, and thought here’s a machine we can strip for parts. That’s not ownership. That’s asset management with a scarf on.” “I played for that club when it meant something. You walked through those doors and you felt the weight of it — the history, the people who’d bled for that name before you. Sir Matt Busby built something out of rubble after Munich. The fans carried it through the wilderness years. Alex Ferguson turned it into the biggest club in England, maybe the world” “None of that was about money. It was about identity. Then the Glazers came in with their leveraged buyout and loaded the club with debt to pay for their own purchase.” “Think about that. They used the club’s own money to buy the club. Every year since, the profits that should’ve gone into the pitch, into the academy, into keeping the best players, went to servicing that debt and paying dividends.” “Seventeen years of it. And when the fans finally had enough — when they broke into their own ground to say enough is enough — the Glazers didn’t listen. They just put the club up for sale like it was a house they were tired of. No apology. No accountability. Just a press release.” “Then along comes Sir Jim Ratcliffe. And I thought, finally, someone with football in his blood. Ineos. A serious operation. A man who’s won trophies in other sports. Surely he’ll understand what this club is.” “But what did we get? We got the same thing wearing a different badge. Ratcliffe came in talking about efficiency, about cutting costs, about restructuring. He started selling off pieces of the club’s soul — minority stakes, commercial rights, the very things that made United feel like United.” “He brought in his own people, his own culture, his Ineos way of doing things, as if a football club is a chemical plant that just needs better management. It’s not. It’s a living thing. It’s the fans, the history, the noise on a Saturday afternoon. You can’t spreadsheet that.” “And here’s the part that really gets me. The Glazers and Ratcliffe are two sides of the same coin. One group bought the club to extract money. The other bought in to run it like a business. Neither group asked the fans what they wanted.” “Neither group sat in the stands and felt what it’s like when United win. They talk about passion from boardrooms. They talk about the club’s future while making decisions that hollow it out from the inside. The Glazers took the money. Ratcliffe is taking the identity. And the fans are left holding the ticket stub for a club that doesn’t exist anymore.” “I don’t recognise this team. I don’t recognise this club. They’re chopping and changing and getting rid of everyone in the background which is fine, there’s a business side to it, we know that. But when we’re discussing Man United these days, it’s more like a business than a football club.”