While few are willing to bet on the takeover as owners’ motives remain uncertain, most believe we are now in the endgamePurgatory spiced with speculation, hope blunted by stasis. So it goes for Manchester United supporters, for week after interminable week.It is nearly seven months since the Glazers put the club up for sale – the “anniversary” is Thursday. Yet the family remains in situ, still inflicting the sort of slow torture that would make Torquemada flinch, still desperate to make every last penny before they depart. If they depart. Continue reading...
United have an imbalanced squad and a muddled long-term strategy did not help a manager who was clearly strugglingManchester United are a club hooked on instant highs and short-term fixes, where memories are short and judgments are definitive, right up until the moment they aren’t. New episodes arrive twice a week. Redemption is – usually – only ever 90 minutes away.United’s 4-1 defeat at Watford on Saturday proved a watershed moment for Ole Gunnar Solskjær’s management, the final straw – except the humiliation against Manchester City was supposedly the final straw. So too the 5-0 trouncing at home to Liverpool. Or the time they conceded a goal to Istanbul Basaksehir without a single defender in their own half. Continue reading...
Owners’ style has long been to make the past fund the present but for all the spending on players oddities are creeping in“It’s a write-off.”“A write-off of what?” Continue reading...
Fans are right to protest but unless the game’s riches are better redistributed the super-rich benefactors are here to stay Whether you see in the demonstrations at Old Trafford last week an outrageous affront to law and decency or a legitimate mode of dissent, a public expression at last of long-held grievances, it is clear, perhaps for the first time in English football, that there is a real sense of militancy among fans. With the super-clubs in retreat, the possibility of change appears real – or at least more real than it has been for years. In which case fans should probably work out what they want.Already it is notable that the serious protests have been focused at the two...
Premier League waved through a debt-loading takeover of Manchester United from which the family make fortunesIn 2005, a generation ago now, when supporters were first protesting against the pending takeover of Manchester United by the Glazer family, the approach of the football authorities was mostly to brush off their concerns. There seemed to be a sense among the blazers in the Football Association and the Premier League suits that the fans just did not really understand the mystique of a corporate takeover, or the excitements of having “investors” from America. Related: Gary Neville and Roy Keane express support for United fans’ protests Continue reading...