Do you think they will get rid of his statue, too? They would save money on brass polish. Maybe take down the letters on his stand and flog them: you can get a decent price for scrap metal these days. Maybe smelt the replicas of the 13 Premier League trophies he won: ker-ching!
The Athletic’s revelation that Manchester United have cut Sir Alex Ferguson’s ambassadorial role with the club is not the worst thing about INEOS and Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s grand economy drive. Not by a long way.
Life after United will be far more difficult for the 250 ‘normal’ staff they have made/will make redundant. Ferguson, with a variety of other lucrative income streams, will not struggle to pay his electricity bill. Moving on those employees in the name of making the balance sheet look a bit nicer is morally abysmal.
This is merely naive. United have brought an end to Ferguson’s ambassadorial role to save money, having identified his £2.16million ($2.8m) salary as a cost they can no longer afford. He will always be welcome at Old Trafford, they say, which is good of them.
On the face of it, if your only consideration is numbers on a spreadsheet, they have a point. If you’re in austerity mode, then pruning your outgoings by a couple of million when you aren’t actually losing anything tangible might seem like a no-brainer of a decision.
But when your cost-cutting reaches the point where you’re cutting the man who invented the modern Manchester United, you have to ask whether it is really worth it. Is an economy drive worth it if it means distancing the man who won two Champions Leagues, 13 league titles, nurtured Eric Cantona, Roy Keane, David Beckham, Cristiano Ronaldo, Wayne Rooney and dozens of others? Who brought joy to millions of people, who built a super club where there was previously an underachieving shell. It feels like they have chosen to trim away some of their club’s soul.
Stuff like this might seem irrelevant, but it matters. It’s because of him that people still care about United, even over a decade after he left. Still having him involved with the club in a meaningful way reminds people of that. It’s easy for memories to be short, for people to forget why they remain one of the most significant cultural forces — not just significant football clubs, or even sporting institutions, but cultural forces — in the country. If Ferguson is no longer a true part of the club, it makes it easier still to forget all of that.
Those are all emotional arguments, but this is a hard-nosed football world where sentiment has a limited role. And the official line is that this was all done very amicably and that Ferguson is relaxed about it. Maybe that’s true and United retaining him as a non-executive director does at least protect them from the idea that they have cut ties with him completely.
But you still have to ask yourself if this is really worth it. For a start, regardless of how much they spin it, this will still be perceived as United sacking Ferguson before they sacked Erik ten Hag. It will look bad and for a relatively new group of decision-makers who are still trying to convince the fanbase they know what they are doing, it’s a risky move PR-wise.
Even if you accept that this is a worthwhile way of saving money, you have to ask whether they be trusted to spend the savings wisely.
Of all the ways United waste money, Ferguson’s remuneration isn’t nearly the most egregious. Admittedly, INEOS can’t do a huge amount about the millions the club pay in interest, a two-decade-and-counting legacy of the Glazers’ takeover, but they can do something about the cost of ill-advised signings, of recruiting a phalanx of new executives with very similar-sounding job titles, of potentially having to sack a manager and his staff in the coming weeks when they could/should have done so months ago at a much lower cost.
£2.16 million sounds like a huge amount of money, a number that whoever was charged with nipping here and tucking there in the accounts can sit back very happily and decide their job is well done.
And it is a huge amount of money — in the normal world. But it equates to 0.3 per cent of their £662million annual revenue. It works out at just under £40,000 a week. That is higher than the average annual salary in the UK, but in football terms, it’s relative peanuts. The sort of wage a club like United pays their third-choice goalkeeper. It’s 2.4 per cent of Antony’s transfer fee. Would it be harsh to say that an 82-year-old sitting in the stands has contributed more over the past two years?
If they absolutely had to save that money, is there really nowhere in the first-team squad they could have found those savings? If you purely look at it from a financial perspective, you could argue that even in retirement, the afterglow of the work that Ferguson did during his managerial career more than pays for itself.
There is the argument that this, in a roundabout way, stems from Ferguson’s own actions. There are plenty who point to his disputes with JP McManus and John Magnier, former United shareholders, over the racehorse Rock of Gibraltar as the catalyst for the Glazer takeover. Had he not argued about a horse, they might not have sold their shares in a leveraged buyout in which all the debt was placed on the club, they then wouldn’t have wasted so much money in interest payments, and they wouldn’t now need to cut costs. But that’s a bit of a reach. In any case, it wouldn’t make a difference to this decision.
Is this £2.16million really going to improve things? Will the tangible savings of these decisions balance out the intangible cost?
Ratcliffe will argue that tough decisions need to be made, that every saving adds up, from cutting free travel to the FA Cup final for employees right up to this. But will all of this really improve Manchester United? Will these incessant budget cuts make the people who work there feel better?
Will this really make Manchester United a better team? Will cutting this tie with the most significant figure in their history help Ten Hag or whichever unfortunate soul is drafted to replace him at some point? Will that sweet £2.16million really provide enough value to compensate for distancing the man who made this club?
Of course not. Still, there are a few scrap metal yards near Old Trafford, so if they get busy soon, there are even more savings to be made.
(Top photo: Michael Regan/Getty Images)
