Tuesday, 27 October 2026

For want of a horse: Manchester United and the parasitism of the football oligarchy

 A crisis 21 years in the making

Manchester United is once again preparing to sack a manager. Sunday's 3-0 home defeat to Bournemouth, following a 4-1 thrashing by Como, has left Michael Carrick's position untenable barely months after he was handed the job permanently. He would become the eighth man to occupy the dugout since Sir Alex Ferguson retired in 2013. The club that dominated English football for two decades is now, in Wilson's words, a mid-table laughing stock under a stadium roof that leaks whenever it rains.

In a column published Monday, Wilson poses the obvious question. When a club burns through managers at this rate, is the manager really the problem? He points upward: to director of football Jason Wilcox, to chief executive Omar Berrada, to Sir Jim Ratcliffe, whom he describes accurately as a cost-cutting tax exile, and finally to the Glazer family, whose 2005 leveraged buyout plunged the club into debt.

Wilson then reaches for literature. United's story, he argues, has taken the form of a classical tragedy, in which a small, seemingly unrelated incident, swollen by pride, brings the whole edifice down. That incident was a horse called Rock of Gibraltar. The episode is worth recounting. It sheds a harsh light on the social layer that owns and runs modern football. But the conclusion Wilson draws from it, that a club was lost "for the want of a horse", obscures far more than it reveals.

Millionaires at the races

The affair began in 1999 at York racecourse. Irish bloodstock magnate John Magnier won the Gimcrack Stakes with a horse. Custom required the owner to address the Gimcrack Dinner. Magnier, who disliked public speaking, asked his friend Alex Ferguson to speak for him. The racing establishment refused.

To spite them, Magnier began registering horses in Ferguson's name. In 2001 one of them, Rock of Gibraltar, won the Gimcrack, and Ferguson duly gave his speech. Around the same time, Magnier and his business partner JP McManus began buying up shares in Manchester United, then a company listed on the London Stock Exchange.

The horse proved to be a champion, winning seven consecutive Group One races. The prize money ran to roughly £800,000. The real prize, however, lay in stud fees worth tens of millions. Ferguson claimed a verbal agreement entitled him to half of them. Magnier remembered the arrangement very differently.

Ferguson sued. What followed was a brawl fought by City methods. Questions about Ferguson's transfer dealings began to circulate. Magnier and McManus submitted a list of 99 questions to the United board, which the Daily Mail promptly ran. Ferguson settled for £2.5 million.

The two Irish financiers then decided to sell. A buyer was waiting: Malcolm Glazer, an American businessman who had been accumulating United shares. According to Wilson, Ferguson backed Glazer. In 2005, Magnier and McManus sold out for £260 million, a profit of close to £100 million.

It is a revealing detail that Ferguson, a former Govan shipyard apprentice who began adult life as a trade union shop steward and has long presented himself as a Labour man, ended up supporting the asset-stripper who bought his club with borrowed money—two decades of proximity to wealth had done its work. When the interests of the workers and fans who sustained the club collided with his own, he chose his side with little doubt.

The leveraged buyout: debt as a business model

The Glazer takeover, valued at around £790 million, was a classic leveraged buyout. Most of the purchase price was borrowed, and the club took on the debt. United, which had been profitable and debt-free, was made to pay for the privilege of being bought.

What followed was two decades of extraction. By most independent estimates, well over £1 billion has flowed out of the club in interest payments, banking fees and dividends since 2005. In 2012, the Glazers floated a minority of shares on the New York Stock Exchange, structured so that the family retained voting control. They used the money to refinance debt, not rebuild the team.

Ferguson's personal authority and an exceptional squad masked the rot for eight years. United won five more league titles and the 2008 Champions League. But once he retired, the club's sporting operation was revealed as hollow. Successive managers—David Moyes, Louis van Gaal, José Mourinho, Ole Gunnar Solskjær, Erik ten Hag, Ruben Amorim and now Carrick—were hired and discarded. The club spent hundreds of millions on players assembled with no coherent plan.

Meanwhile, Old Trafford, once the country's most admired stadium, was left to decay. Season ticket prices rose. The Glazers' contempt for the club's supporters peaked in April 2021, when they joined the abortive European Super League, a closed competition designed to guarantee revenue for a cartel of the richest clubs. Mass protests followed, and fans forced the postponement of a home match against Liverpool.

None of this deviated from the norm of English football. It was its logic carried through. The Premier League was founded in 1992 as a breakaway designed to capture television money for the top clubs. United had been floated on the stock market the year before. Football was being remade as an investment field, and every club became an asset to be bought, leveraged, and milked. 

Ratcliffe: austerity on the terraces

When Sir Jim Ratcliffe bought a minority stake in 2024 and took over football operations, sections of the media hailed him as a saviour. The billionaire owner of the Ineos petrochemicals empire, a Brexit supporter who moved his residence to Monaco, was presented as a hard-headed businessman who would sweep away the Glazers' incompetence.

Instead, he swept away jobs. The club made hundreds of staff redundant across two rounds of cuts. Concessionary tickets for children and pensioners were scrapped or curtailed. Prices for remaining matchday tickets were raised. Even small staff perks were withdrawn. The club's workers and its working-class supporters were made to pay for a crisis created entirely at the top.

Wilson notes the irony that, had Magnier and McManus held on to their shares until Ratcliffe came along, they would have pocketed roughly £1 billion more. The figure is telling. While the team declined and the stadium crumbled, the club's value as a financial asset soared. That is the essential contradiction. United's decline as a football club and its rise as a speculative property were not opposites. They were two sides of the same process.

Not a tragedy, but a social process

Wilson is one of the most thoughtful writers on football, and his account of the Rock of Gibraltar affair is valuable. But his framework is the liberal one of accident and personality. The club fell, in his telling, because of a quarrel between proud men over a horse.

This turns history upside down. Had Rock of Gibraltar never raced, United would still have been a publicly traded company in an industry flooded with television money. It would still have been circled by hedge funds, private equity and billionaires seeking an asset with a global brand. The horse determined which speculator acquired the club, and when. It did not determine that a speculator would.

Every major English club tells a version of the same story. A Russian oligarch bought Chelsea and sold it to a US private equity consortium. Gulf states own Manchester City and Newcastle United. American sports investment groups hold Liverpool, Arsenal and others. Lower down the pyramid, clubs such as Bury and Macclesfield Town have been driven out of existence by financial mismanagement. United's fate is not exceptional. It is the most visible expression of a general process.

That process mirrors capitalism's development over the past four decades. The leveraged buyout, the stripping of assets, the ballooning of share values alongside the decay of the real enterprise: the City and Wall Street perfected these methods before applying them to football. Under the Thatcher and Blair governments, they applied the same methods to industry, housing and public services. Football was simply another social institution handed over to the market.

Manchester United was born in 1878 as Newton Heath, a team of railway workers. For most of its history, it was a focus of collective identity for the working class of an industrial city. Today it is a ticker symbol. Those who sustain it, the staff in its offices and kitchens and the supporters in the stands, have no say in its direction.

The solution does not lie in finding a better billionaire, nor in the various schemes of "fan ownership" that leave the profit system intact. As long as football remains a commodity, capital will govern it. Restoring it to the people who love it requires bringing it, like every other major sphere of social life, under democratic public control. That task is bound up with the broader struggle of the working class against the financial oligarchy that dominates economic life. Rock of Gibraltar did not destroy Manchester United. Capitalism did.

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