Bad news for Marcus Rashford, who was described by Ruben Amorim last week as being so poor in training that he would rather play his goalkeeping coach. Great news, on the other hand, for new 63-year-old wide forward Jorge Vital, now weighing up a number of offers from Serie A and Saudi Pro League clubs, and whom Manchester United are hopeful of shifting from the wage bill before the end of the transfer window.
For this cash-strapped theatre of ghosts, trying to build its new cast of dreams on the bones of the old, perhaps every pound helps. Corporate box guests at Old Trafford no longer get a free match programme each and are instead invited to download the dictated thoughts of Amorim via a QR code. Free cereal bars for matchday stewards were cut at the beginning of the season. The annual £100 staff Christmas bonus was replaced by a £40 M&S voucher. Concessionary tickets for children and the senior citizens were temporarily withdrawn.
This is Austerity United, after all, and we’re all theoretically in this together. Losses of £313m in the past three years have put the club on the brink of breaching profit and sustainability rules (PSR). According to the most recent accounts, they still owe £410m in outstanding transfer fees to other clubs. “If we do not act now,” the club wrote in a letter to fans last week, “we are in danger of … significantly impacting our ability to compete on the pitch.”
Doubtless it will not have escaped your attention that United’s ability to compete on the pitch has been significantly impacted for a while now, and for reasons only tangentially connected to finance. Or that many of the same people now mandating mass redundancies and ticket price rises also approved the £21.4m cost of sacking Erik ten Hag and replacing him with Amorim. Or the total package of around £100m in fees and wages for the struggling Matthijs de Ligt. Or the cost of hiring Dan Ashworth for five months. Still: got to get those cereal bars off the ledger.
In the meantime, the fourth-richest club in the world is somehow sitting 12th in its own domestic league. What does it take to get this side back to, say, top-three level? Maybe seven new players – a goalkeeper, two wing-backs, a centre-half, another passing midfielder, a striker and another winger/No 10 to play behind the striker. Let’s also say you get lucky and a teenager like Ayden Heaven or Chido Obi-Martin makes the leap to the first team. So maybe you need six new signings who are available, would choose United over other clubs, and offer an immediate upgrade on what you already have.
Even if you can find them, in the new age of parsimony you no longer have nine-figure sums lying around the place. So you also need to get rid of players you want to sell. Victor Lindelöf, Tyrell Malacia, Harry Maguire, Christian Eriksen, Casemiro and Antony could all be lost without too much heartache. But of course these are distressed assets unlikely to command much value in a crowded market. At which point you need to pull the other lever: getting rid of players you don’t want to sell.
It is now eight months since Alejandro Garnacho and Kobbie Mainoo stalked the Wembley turf in golden sunshine, the two academy teenagers who had just won United the FA Cup. Now the club have made it clear they are prepared to listen to offers for both. Garnacho could even leave for Chelsea before the transfer deadline on Monday night, for a fee of between £50m and £60m. Mainoo – so impressive in a more advanced role against FCSB on Thursday – looks to be staying, but will now know he too is expendable.
Painted on the stairs at Carrington are the words “Youth, Courage, Success”. It is a reminder of the club’s heritage, the proud record of more than 4,000 consecutive games in which a United academy player has featured in the match-day squad. In the current climate, however, the slogan takes on a slightly different meaning. Revenue generated from selling academy products counts as “pure profit” under PSR. And for clubs with the courage to cut loose their best young players, youth can provide an entirely different route to success.
The model United are seeking to emulate here is Chelsea, who for most of the past couple of decades have made little secret of the fact they regard their academy as a revenue farm, a place where talent is nurtured, fattened and sold on. In the past few years, as the new ownership consortium has skirted around breaking PSR, Cobham graduates like Conor Gallagher, Mason Mount, Ruben Loftus-Cheek, Callum Hudson-Odoi, Ian Maatsen, Lewis Hall and Billy Gilmour have all been profitably moved on. Three seasons ago under Thomas Tuchel, Chelsea gave 25% of their league minutes to academy graduates. This season, it’s just 12%, most of those to Levi Colwill.
At the time Chelsea’s strategy generated a certain tension within the fanbase. For many local supporters with emotional ties to the region as well as the club the sale of academy products was almost a kind of betrayal: a severing of the link between the club and its roots. For most international fans, largely untethered by geography or history, this mattered less. What mattered more was the splendour of the current product, and if selling academy gems allowed them to invest more heavily in their replacements, then this was simply the nature of doing business.
These days, with Chelsea challenging for the top three, you’d struggle to find many fans pining for the old pin-ups. Few Chelsea supporters would now swap out Moises Caicedo for Gallagher, or Cole Palmer for Mount. Perhaps this is the kind of collective amnesia United’s hierarchy are also banking on: that an increasingly globalised fanbase will prefer the endorphin rush of new signings over the pull of heritage. That like the stalwart Scott McTominay, sold to Napoli last summer, the respective services of Garnacho, Rashford, even Mainoo, will be mourned lightly, briefly and then not at all.
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Since purchasing a stake in the club, Jim Ratcliffe has leaned heavily on his Mancunian heritage. This week, a video emerged of United fans at Craven Cottage haranguing him over ticket prices. “We’re northerners, come on, mate,” one fan beseeches him. “Oh, come on,” Ratcliffe mutters as he winds his car window up, almost disgusted by the audacity of the attempt at kinship. Northerner, United fan, slash-and-burn capitalist … but not necessarily in that order!
Perhaps it should not surprise anyone that a man so attached to north-west England that he lives in Monaco, so invested in the wider resonance of football that he has ordered big cuts to the club’s charitable foundation, should also regard the lineage and inheritance of the academy in such bleak, transactional terms. Manchester is just a word on a shirt, a handy gimmick, something to sell the tourists. And there are no people here, just product: cells on a spreadsheet that can be cut and copied at will.
A few months ago a photograph started doing the rounds online. It’s a screengrab from Google Street View, taken in Wythenshawe in 2009, showing an 11-year-old kid standing at the side of the road. He’s in his football kit, waiting for a lift to training at the United academy. We’re encouraged to think it’s Rashford.
Certainly it would make a lovely story. But, of course, we don’t know for sure. The face is blurred out, the outline hazy. Taken out of context, it’s just a pile of red pixels. In reality it could be anybody, going anywhere.
