Flexing the financial muscles.
There’s one thing you can’t accuse Manchester United of being and that’s parsimonious. Since Alex Ferguson retired in 2013, the club has splurged over £600m on 22 players, including marquee signings like Paul Pogba, Romelu Lukaku, Anthony Martial and Angel Di Maria.
It has brought some success without catapulting the club back to the Premier League’s summit. With Ed Woodward’s business acumen, the club continues to build a commercial portfolio that generates revenue and allows the hierarchy to pump money into the first-team.
Under Jose Mourinho, United have really started to flex their financial muscles and, while they continue to lag behind Manchester City in terms of what they’re producing on the pitch, they look set to continue apace with their spendthrift ways.
According to the Daily Mail, United’s outlay this coming summer will be significant, with the club scrapping plans to revamp Old Trafford in favour of backing Mourinho once again in the transfer market.
United had planned to increase the capacity of Old Trafford from 75,000 to 88,000 but, according to the Mail’s report, the priority is to ensure Mourinho has the funds necessary to improve his squad.
The rationale behind the stadium expansion proposal was based around a determination to improve the atmosphere. Earlier this season, Mourinho criticised United’s fans for being too quiet during home games, while the Manchester United Supporters Trust recently complained that the large corporate sections hurt the overall atmosphere inside the ground.
But it sounds like it's up to Ibra https://t.co/j4h60V4p0r
— SportsJOE (@SportsJOEdotie) March 2, 2018
While there were plans to add a tier to the Bobby Charlton Stand, which would have put Old Trafford behind only Wembley and the Camp Nou as Europe’s biggest, the priority now seems to be ensuring that Mourinho has a squad worthy of challenging Manchester City’s supremacy at the top of the table.
At the time of writing, United are 16 points behind Pep Guardiola’s pacesetters and, assuming that their rivals will undergo their own extravagant recruitment drive this summer, United feel they are left with no option but to build.
Speaking in December, Mourinho said that the £300m that has been spent since he was appointed United boss two summers ago is ‘not enough’ to return the red side of Manchester to Premier League glory.
“We are in the second year of trying to rebuild a football team that is not one of the best teams in the world. Manchester City buy full-backs for the price of strikers. When you speak about big football clubs, you are speaking about the history of the club.”
“It is not enough. And the price for the big clubs, the price for the big clubs is different from the other clubs. So the big, historical clubs are normally punished in the market for that history.
“When you tell [describe] a club like Manchester United, do you think Milan is not as big as us? You think they are not as big as we are? Do you think Real Madrid are not as big as we are? You think Inter Milan is not as big as we are? There are many big clubs and you say big clubs, I know what is a big club.”
