Saudi government official Turki Al-Sheikh claims a deal to \u2018sell\u2019 Manchester United \u2018to a new investor\u2019 is at \u2018an advanced stage\u201d as he aimed a dig at the Glazer family and Sir Jim Ratcliffe.<\/p>\n
Ratcliffe<\/a><\/strong> now holds a 29 per cent stake in United having taken control of football operations at Old Trafford in February 2024.<\/p>\n The Glazers remain the majority owners having rejected a takeover bid by Sheikh Jassim\u2019s Qatari consortium when they sold their shares to Ratcliffe for \u00a31.25bn last year.<\/p>\n READ MORE: Ruben Amorim has three weeks, not three years, to prove himself to Ratcliffe<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Al-Sheikh\u00a0is chairman of the General Entertainment Authority and having owned\u00a0Egyptian club Pyramids from 2018 to 2019 and Spanish club Almer\u00eda from 2019 to May 2025, is now responsible for bringing some of the highest-profile sporting events to Saudi Arabia.<\/p>\n He\u2019s currently in talks with United over their participation in\u00a0the Riyadh Season Cup, a three-way tournament against the capital\u2019s two biggest clubs, Cristiano Ronaldo\u2019s Al-Nassr and Al-Hilal, which featured Inter Miami in February.<\/p>\n And after those reported discussions he dropped a bombshell on X, hitting out at the Red Devils owners in the process.<\/p>\n He wrote: \u2018The best news I heard today is that Manchester United is now in an advanced stage of completing a deal to sell to a new investor \u2013 I hope he\u2019s better than the previous owners.\u2019<\/p>\n There\u2019s no other evidence of either the Glazers or Ratcliffe looking to sell their stakes despite the raft of mistakes Ratcliffe has been criticised for<\/a><\/strong> since he took charge of the football at Old Trafford,\u00a0including cutting jobs and ending free lunches for staff, which he insists were necessary in his bid to put United on a \u201cfirm financial footing\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cThe costs were just too high,\u201d Ratcliffe told The Business podcast<\/a><\/strong>. \u201cThere are some fantastic people at Manchester United, but there was also a level of mediocrity and it had become bloated. I got a lot of flak for the free lunches, but no-one\u2019s ever given me a free lunch.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are two halves to a football team \u2013 there is the business side and the sports side. The biggest correlation, like it or not, between results and any external factor \u2013 is profitability.<\/p>\n MORE MAN UTD COVERAGE ON F365\u2026<\/strong> \u201cThe more cash you have got, the better squad you can build. It\u2019s like a Formula One car \u2013 the better car you can build, the quicker you go. The better your squad, the better your football should be.<\/p>\n \u201cSo a lot of what we have done in the first year is spend an awful lot of time putting the club on a sustainable, healthy footing.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you look at our results for last year we have the highest revenues ever. Profitability, the second highest ever. We\u2019re not seeing all the benefits of the restructuring that we\u2019ve done in this set of results, and we were not in the Champions League.<\/p>\n \u201cThose numbers will get better. Manchester United will become the most profitable football club in the world, in my view, and from that will stem, I hope, a long-term, sustainable, high-level of football.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Saudi government official Turki Al-Sheikh claims a deal to \u2018sell\u2019 Manchester United \u2018to a new investor\u2019 is at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":110769,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[9,10,18,13,14,793,6,19,17,11,12,15,16,20,5,23071,7,8],"class_list":{"0":"post-110768","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-breaking-news","9":"tag-breakingnews","10":"tag-eire","11":"tag-featured-news","12":"tag-featurednews","13":"tag-front-page","14":"tag-headlines","15":"tag-ie","16":"tag-ireland","17":"tag-latest-news","18":"tag-latestnews","19":"tag-main-news","20":"tag-mainnews","21":"tag-manchester-united","22":"tag-news","23":"tag-sir-jim-ratcliffe","24":"tag-top-stories","25":"tag-topstories"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110768","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110768"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110768\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/110769"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110768"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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