Soft edges on hard decisions could ease owner troubles at Manchester United

When football clubs hit the back pages for the backroom decisions of their owners, something is generally very wrong.

Such is the case at Manchester United this week with news that up to 200 jobs will be made redundant over the coming three to four months. This follows the first wave of cost-cutting measures last year in which around 250 staff were made redundant, in total up to nearly 40% of its workforce prior to the cuts.

On the surface, the club’s problems are footballing and financial in nature.

On the pitch, it has never recovered since the end of the Sir Alex Ferguson dynasty. Now on its sixth permanent manager post-Ferguson, United are currently languishing 15th in the Premier League table, on course for their lowest ever finish since its inception.

Off the pitch, remarkably things may be even worse. Last week the club revealed quarterly losses of nearly £28m, taking their total losses to over £300m in the past three years. 

The club’s owners insist the cost-cutting measures being taken are for the good of the club and designed to “improve the club’s financial sustainability” in order to be able to invest in “football success and improved infrastructure.”

One could argue that the owners are simply performing an ugly yet necessary and long-overdue task in transforming the state of a club that has long lost it way. Prioritising the football and the fans, which as a core priority is difficult to argue with.

And yet they continue to get lambasted by the media, fans and employees. A scathing report last week from the Telegraph on Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s first year in charge since Ineos bought a third of the club catalogues a series of “extraordinary penny-pinching” measures. Angry fans confronted the part-owner at the club’s away match at Fulham, comparing him to the club’s majority owners the Glazers and calling him a four-letter word. Around Old Trafford, it is unclear which of the two is the worse insult. And staff morale is reportedly “on the floor” after the cost-cutting measures and the way team members have been treated.   

So what is going so badly wrong if the owners’ priorities are at their core, perfectly defendable?

Simply put, they are acting like they have no respect for people who are vital to the foundations of the club.

The way United is going about its changes appears to lack any empathy for how staff will feel. And as any senior comms professional will tell you, failing to anticipate and appreciate how your key stakeholders will feel about the decisions you make is a one-way ticket to bitterness, controversy and conflict.

Apart from the severity of the job cuts, reports have stated exited staff have felt a total lack of empathy and sensitivity in the manner in which they had been shown the door. Many of these people had been at the club for decades. 

The lack of sensitivity extends beyond hiring and firing. Two days after her death, the club phoned the next of kin of a much-loved receptionist Kath Phipps, who had worked at the club for more than 50 years, to enquire about the status of her two season tickets.

Portion sizes have been reduced in the staff canteen. The Christmas party was axed. Free bus travel to the FA Cup Final for staff was axed (while reportedly private chauffeured cars were paid for to transport Ineos executives to the game). The £50 match steward of the week bonus was axed. Even Sir Alex Ferguson is not safe, axed from his ambassadorial role for the club (though admittedly at £2m a year, it may not have represented value for money).

Staff were even made to return an order of Sellotape because it was not considered a necessity, surely a move that was only ever destined to cause more harm in ridicule than it would ever gain in finances.

Such cuts only look worse when juxtapositioned with the vast sums wasted on poor footballing and financial decisions such as paying £4.1m to fire sporting director Dan Ashworth after five months in the role; and £10.4m to fire manager Eric Ten Hag less than four months after triggering his contract extension. 

Ratcliffe has also demonstrated a lack of respect for the women’s football team, including not attending the women’s FA Cup final or organising a post-match party for the players in the event of a win (which they achieved).  Soon after arriving at the club, when on a tour of the women’s facilities, he also embarrassingly asked the then captain Katie Zelem, who had played over 150 games for the club, what her role was. At least the club remembered to mention the need to invest in the women’s team in its recent job cuts statement.

It feels very much like Sir Jim - a very wealthy and powerful man used to running a private company his way - and his senior team are ignoring the good advice they are surely getting. 

Prioritising footballing and financial success doesn’t mean you can disrespect the people behind the scenes. A football club is made up of many people and only 11 of them can step on the grass at one time. 

Fans care about these staff and how they are treated. Doubtless some players care about them too, spending a lot of their time not just with their team mates but also with those who help the club operate from the background. As such, these players are not impermeable to the feeling of dread and low morale. A lot has been made of cultural problems amongst playing staff in recent years, but culture is set from the top of the organisation and runs far beyond just footballers.

Businesses and their leaders are no longer judged merely by the difference they make to the balance sheet, or indeed – in the football world – success on the pitch (not that Ratcliffe’s Manchester United have yet seen either measure change for the better). They are also judged by how they behave, and a core part of that is how they treat people – particularly those most important to the fabric of the club.

Understanding this and introducing some soft edges to hard decisions would surely go some of the way to getting fans and staff behind the difficult choices the owners have to take, instead of making adversaries of those who should be their most loyal friends.