Gary Neville has once again criticised the handling of Manchester United by the Glazer family but has proposed a five-point solution this time around.
Neville has been the biggest critic of the American billionaire family who have owned Manchester United for the past 17 years. The former Manchester United fullback has talked down on their transfer market business, investment in the club and commercialisation of the club while ignoring the football aspect.
He has also led calls for the Glazers to sell the club and return it to the fans or to sell it to a more willing sports investor.
In a recent segment on his show, The Overlap, hosted on Sky Sports, Neville called once again for the Glazers to sell the club, while offering an alternative.
The former Valencia manager listed out five major areas which the Glazers need to work on in order to get Manchester United back to the top of English and European football, while also asking them to sell if they cannot work on those areas.
Neville said during his show that the Super League fiasco from 2020 was a turning point in his and the fans’ relationship with United’s owners. However, he believes the changes he is proposing will help repair that strained relationship.
“I’m really worried at this moment in time. I’d never gone for the Glazer family whilst I was at the club. I saw no reason to – we were successful,” he said on The Overlap.
“The Super League was a moment for me where all those owners demonstrated complete and utter greed and disdain for English football. They were willing to ruin it on behalf of their own interests.
“In terms of the Glazer family, post that Super League they said they were going to communicate, they said they were going to change things. They’ve not changed anything.
“My view is there is a problem right at the very top. They’ve had 10 years to prove they can be good football operators beyond Sir Alex Ferguson and David Gill (former chief executive), and they’ve proven they can’t do it.”
Neville lists five-point plan for Glazers to ‘reset’ Man Utd
The defender made it clear that the Glazers’ time at United is up, but also conceded that it will be difficult to get them to sell.
“The first thing that should happen is they should sell the club, because of the Super League, because of their 10 years of failure without Ferguson and that team that he had,” he said.
He then went on to suggest five areas of the club they must fix in order to get things running again at the club. “But if they really want to stay – because you can never force the Glazer family to sell – then they’ve got to do four or five things.
“Number one, they’ve got to stop taking the dividends out of the club if they want to reset the culture. When the owners are pulling money out of the club at the expense of a successful team, it’s a bad message from the very top.
“Number two, they’ve got to pay off that debt and they can do that by selling £500m worth of shares to the fans. They can then rebuild that stadium with a billion quid. It does probably need knocking down to be fair.
“That doesn’t need renovation, it needs a new stadium, and that money can be funded from a 20-year contract with a sponsor at £60m, £70m a year. Call it ‘something Old Trafford’ and we have a brand new stadium that resets the culture of Manchester United, where we have the best stadium in the world. That needs to happen.
“They then need to build a new training ground. Me and Roy (Keane) were part of the squad when we moved 22 years ago. We were devastated to leave The Cliff, but we’ve now got a training ground that’s behind the other training grounds.
“They then need to go and put £100m, £150m a year into a proper sporting project, along with those four things, and then you can say ‘the Glazer family have reset the culture of the club’. The fans are on the edge again.”
