What do Manchester United and western economies have in common? Both are ungovernable right now.
This week will mark a year since the British businessman Jim Ratcliffe bought a stake in the 20-time champions of English football. This also gave him the right to take over all football operations from the Glazer family, who remain majority owners, a move that fans were excited about after more than a decade of being unable to compete with their biggest rivals for major trophies.
The optimism that greeted the Ratcliffe era has since faded. An inability to quickly turn around their underwhelming performances on the pitch has been compounded by a strategy aimed at bolstering the club’s financial situation, which has become a string of PR own goals.
More belt-tightening is on the way, with the BBC reporting last week that further redundancies at the club are being considered as an antidote to the loss of close to $400 million over the past three years – described by insiders as an “unsustainable” situation. Meanwhile, manager Erik ten Hag was dismissed mid-season and Ruben Amorim was brought in.
Amorim is the sixth permanent first-team manager since the serial-winner Alex Ferguson left in 2013. It is also worth noting that before Ferguson, his predecessors since the 1890s number less than 20.
Recent instability at the non-performing football club shouldn’t be surprising, and the failure to meet expectations on the pitch has over time been matched by falling standards away from it, including ageing infrastructure and falling revenue. Debt stands at almost $1 billion. Nearly $2 billion has been spent over the past decade on player transfers.
Fans had lost patience with the Glazer family’s record and Mr Ratcliffe was seen as the very opposite of his American partners. Originally from the Manchester area, he built the chemical maker Ineos into a British industrial champion. While Mr Ratcliffe is not the first to find that football can humble even the most successful people from other walks of life, he was not new to the game or sport in general, owning the French Ligue 1 club Nice and having steered cycling’s Team Sky to success at the Tour de France. So why has he struggled to find solid ground at Manchester United?
Partly, it is the nature of football and the club, one of the most followed worldwide, that the sheer volume of noise around it drives the narrative. Is it really that bad at United these days or have the former players, pundits and content creators who have made careers out of commentating about the malaise at Manchester United made it so (thanks to the clips of their hot takes and rants viewed millions of times on social media platforms such as YouTube)? Either way, the consensus is that the club has reached a low point in its history.
Meanwhile, the economic performances of key western nations have been about as impressive as Manchester United’s has over the past 10-15 years. Data from the International Monetary Fund shows that the US, the UK and Italy have debt levels that are at ratios above 100 per cent compared to the gross domestic product of these respective countries; France is at over 90 per cent while Germany and Canada are at levels below 50 per cent. Japan is at more than 200 per cent.
In short, these countries are failing economically. And because they are failing economically, they are also failing politically. The political failure is a result of an inability to quickly put in place policies that electorates can be convinced will effectively meet their needs.
Immigration policy paralysis, a stalled economy and a cost-of-living crisis dominate as Germany goes to the polls this weekend, for example. The centre-right Christian Democratic Union is expected to come out on top, but with the far-right Alternative fur Deutschland predicted to place second. The noise around the latter has been amplified by Elon Musk’s public narrative about the weaknesses of Germany and Europe at large.
In the UK, the Labour government is not that new. Yet it has not found its footing and is unable to get its agenda going as events elsewhere keep catching them out. France, meanwhile, has had three different prime ministers in the past 14 months, with President Emmanuel Macron finding his second term far more difficult that his first.
There are two realities that the political classes of these countries have been unable or unwilling to get to grips with, with denial making it far harder for politicians to govern them.
The first is the emergence of giant technology companies that are the equivalent of shadow governments, with their actions reaching beyond borders and their impact being felt by almost every individual on Earth. Governments had spent previous decades ceding different parts of their economies to the private sector, as an act of wealth transference to their populations, only to find that it has all been taken over by Big Tech.
The second reality is a consequence of the 2008 financial crisis. If there was a moment to pinpoint when it all changed for western economies, that was it. That was their equivalent of Ferguson leaving Manchester United more than a decade ago. Following the financial crisis, the governments of developed countries have become prisoners of the bond markets, unable to increase investment in services and spending to improve the quality of life for voters amid technological and climactic trends.
What does all this mean now? Expect political instability and revolving governments to be as much a feature of this period as the changing faces of the managers in the dugout at Old Trafford.
