How We Got Here

Back in 2023, there was a scuffle to purchase Manchester United, the frontrunners were that of Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad Al Thani, from Qatar, and Sir Jim Ratcliffe of INEOS (to clarify, INEOS is his petrochemical company, but SJR and those he brought onboard after purchasing United are colloquially referred to as "INEOS" among United supporters).

The race had been going on for many, many months and at the time, there were many fans concerned with "getting in bed" with Qatar, especially relatively soon after the World Cup where we saw how Qatar exploited slave labor to build the stadiums for the competition - it had nothing to do with xenophobia as much as it had to do with human rights violations. Many were trying to dismiss the Sheikh's connection with those practices, but many supporters were still vocal in their contempt for the association. The remaining "obvious" choice then was SJR. The big caveat with this bargain deal is that INEOS would buy a minority stake in the club, while the Glazers maintained the majority with a rumored plan to buy a majority from them in the coming years. Going the route of Qatar would have resulted in the clearing of debt and a new stadium near instantaneously, allegedly - maybe that situation would have changed once the takeover was completed.

Alas, the Glazers chose SJR and the rest is history...until now.

Current Situation (Anniversary)

Most fans know and understand the current situation we are in, there's really no escaping that fact. For many months, Erik ten Hag was blamed for not implementing his system or changing the identity of the squad to replicate the style of his previous Ajax squad. As he stated, the players simply couldn't play that system or meet the demands of it, so he succumbed to the players' inability to adapt and instead focused on a system that benefited them, but only to a point, even then the players struggled much of the time. Now we are seeing flashbacks of that era under Amorim with the players once more unable to play the system. However, the difference now is that Amorim has not foreited his principles to appease the players and is instead pushing through, regardless of the results.
As we have seen in the past, the manager is the smallest issue at the club and the players need to be held accountable for the performances they display every week - the manager only has so much control of how to set up the team, but it's still on the players to execute the plan and at the very least (and I cannot stress that enough!) put in a shift. Too often we have seen heads drop and levels never reached, either because the effort isn't there or the ceilings are too low, neither of which are acceptable.

In his first 10 matches, we have lost 5, drawn 1, and won 4. Is that the end of the world? No, however, you expect to see some degree of consistency and arguably, we never saw a bounce. You could argue that there was no bounce because the system change was radical and yet players are failing to do the basics, consistently.

There is a shrinking area of which the players can run and hide to because with every match and every poor performance, it's becoming increasingly obvious, even to the less intelligent pundits and supporters out there (sorry, not sorry) that the players are the biggest issue at the club.

Examining the club off the field also reveals that we are in about $1b of debt currently that is really hurting our ability to invest heavily in the transfer windows without sacrificing the ability to pay that down responsibly and in a timely manner. That debt is crushing us and needs to go as soon as possible.

Short Term

So what's my short term solution in my blueprint for what INEOS must to do be successful?
WARNING: A lot of what's to come is oversimplified and ignores a lot of the complexity and nuances around achieving it, but in the most ruthless, extreme method, my blueprint includes the following.

The answer is "simple": fire sell the players.
"But that's absurd," I hear you say!
Nonesense. Most of these players are on significant wages and while a club might not be willing to pay a significant fee and those wages, they may be more inclined to put in an offer for the player at a cut price if it offset the wages, with the idea that they might be able to make some of those wages back, depending on the player in question.

I have 14 players I would be comfortable selling immediately, as early as January (and yes, that magical number is very helpful for obvious reasons).
In no particular order, these are the players on my shortlist to sell:
Bruno
Rashford
Garnacho
Zirkzee
Mount
Antony
Shaw
Lindelof
Maguire
Eriksen
Casemiro
Dalot
Malacia
Onana

You may or may not agree with this list for one reason or another, and that's perfectly okay, but this is my list and even if we could end up averaging around $15-20 million for each (I'll discount 1 in case there's one we can't move or Amorim can't live without for a total of 13) then we would be looking at a sale of between $195-260 million.
So then what? Next, we recruit the cheaper, younger talent that many teams bring in who are sitting around the bottom of the table, or even mid-table. We have seen teams historically recruit and purchase players that fly under the radar for most large clubs, yet with time and experience eventually make it to the top flight and cost exponentially more.
If we could bring in 13 of these players for around $5-15 million, you are looking to invest $65-195 million. However you look at it we either break even at worst or make a small profit at best. Meanwhile, this is still buying players in bulk for less than what we spent this past summer for just a few players. Additionally, this is such a significant shift in players that it should dislogdge this toxic culture that's been festering in the dressing room for many years now. We need a cultural reset and a radical change would enable us to do so, while slow turnover will only invite new faces to become infected before we can cauterize the source.

Mid Term

Congratulations, you have largely changed the face of the squad and it's now time to build. I said this for ETH and I will say the same for Amorim, it realistically should take between 3-5 years for us to really get our footing. We have already seen the "idea" and the style Amorim is looking to achieve, so that's already a massive improvement, but in order to turn that into consistent performances and predictability on the pitch, it's going to take intelligent recruitment and patience.

With that being said, my blueprint revolves around churn and turning United into a pump and dump business model for the mid term, such that every 3-5 years, we should be looking to sell these players we have recruited for cheap and upselling them to other clubs in Europe. Long gone are the days of losing players to the likes of Real Madrid, Inter, PSG, etc. We should be getting the most out of any player that walks through our doors and we currently are not, and haven't been doing so for many years now.

By shifting our culture for the mid term, at the club level and with supporter buy-in, we can develop the youth and sell them for a profit while clearing the debt. Using the same figures before, but trimming it down to say 11 players conservatively over a 3 year period, even if we averaged $30 million in sales for 11 players, we are looking at selling them for $330 million, but remember we bought them for, at most, $15 million per player, which is $165. The profit now being $165 million. Rinse and repeat. Every 3 years you are looking at chipping away the debt by a significant amount if we did nothing by take the profit to pay it down, while keeping that same investment money for the next crop of players, right? That means $165 million re-invested into fresh, new players and $165 million towards the debt.

Long Term

All of this while not factoring in other business deals done elsewhere, such as naming rights, sponsors, etc. and let's not forget, we're slashing weekly wages for much more modest ones - no longer would be be paying $2.7 million for the likes of Rashford, Shaw, Mount, Bruno, Casemiro, Maguire, Eriksen, Lindelof, Garnacho, Zirkzee, Malacia, Onana and Antony, but instead could be looking at a wage bill of around $1 million for the same number of players, but on an average of $80k/week. There are 52 weeks in a year, that's an "immediate" savings of $52 million every year. Put that towards the debt too, now you're looking at about $200 million every 3 years towards the debt. Again, without any sort of other deals or aggressive payments from INEOS towards that, you are looking at 15 years. I think more realistically we could get that down to 10 years.

This model, while it may be painful at times having to pass up "world class" players that other big teams are signing, it will be a fiscally responsible way of clearing the debt under INEOS, the only way they seem capable of doing so, and jumpstarting a culture shift in the dressing room that is energetic and enthusiastic to play under Amorim's system and subscribe to his vision.

This is the way forward. Anything else is just folly.