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The decade began for Manchester United in familiar surroundings. A 5-0 win over Wigan the day before New Year's Eve - a game featuring five different goal-scorers, put the Reds two points behind Carlo Ancelotti’s Chelsea, on course to defend the title that had sat in Manchester for the last three seasons.

History will tell us United did not - they had Joe Cole and a resilient Blackburn Rovers to thank for that - but nevertheless it was another good season for the club viewed through the lens of 2019, winners of the League Cup and Champions League quarter finalists to boot.

The only blot on the copybook was a third-round exit to Leeds in the FA Cup.

Goals. Frustrating draws. Controversial losses. Cup wins. Cup exits. Missing out on the title by a single point. These are things fans can understand. United’s financial results, published in October 2010, were not.

As the fifth year of Glazer ownership ticked over, the club - and the club’s accountants - were seeing first hand the effects of Glazer ownership on their profit and loss statement and balance sheet.

“These are very good results for the club with records here, there and everywhere, but they are complicated with non-cash items and exceptional once-off hits,” then chief executive officer David Gill explained.

United’s top-line continued in remarkable shape, thanks in part to Sir Alex Ferguson’s guiding hand - victories and trophies bring cash, of course - but also thanks to a price hike on tickets several years earlier.

In 2009/10, revenues were £286million, more than £100million higher than they were five seasons earlier. While broadcasting and commercial income continued to grow, the club was benefiting from a £30million a season rise in match-day revenues, as the Glazers cranked up the price of an Old Trafford seat early on in their tenure.

Meanwhile, the club’s wage bill was around £130million per season - high, of course, but well within the 70% recommendation now offered by UEFA for clubs to remain with Financial Fair Play regulations (these hadn’t been implemented at the time).

It’s below this line where things get murky and a degree in accounting becomes useful if not essential.

The club had all the usual costs eating away at revenues: cash ones like wages and utilities; non-cash ones like player amortisation (the writing off of a player’s paper value over the length of his contract); but there were also, as Gill attested, major charges and costs not typically associated with football clubs.

For a start, the club once again suffered from the remarkably high interest payments due on the debt forced on the club’s booked by the Glazers’ takeover in 2005. In 2009/10, interest payments were once again north of £40million.

By borrowing such large sums of money to complete his takeover of United, Malcolm Glazer had agreed to payment-in-kind loans with interest rates at a mammoth 16.25% in the early years of his ownership.

These payments, however, were included on the books of another United company.

This was just the beginning. The club incurred further costs, cash and non-cash, that gnawed away at revenues: United were forced into writing off £35million of something called goodwill; essentially, the intangible value of an acquired company measured by certain metrics.

In all, an £84million loss was reported by United’s then parent company, Red Football Limited, after £65million of exceptional costs linked to the debt load were taken into account, including such mind-bending accounting as interest rate swaps and unrealised foreign exchange. All roads led back to the debt.

And here was the answer to the question United fans had asked and asked, in big capital letters: Where was the Ronaldo money? This was a club that did not, as a rule, do transfer surplus, especially when around £80million had been deposited into the club’s bank account.

Ronaldo was replaced by Antonio Valencia, Gabriel Obertan and Michael Owen. Ferguson was forced to work his magic.

A DECADE ON

United - the largest club brand in the world, a business model that had no equal and could not be replicated; with hundreds of millions of ‘fans’ all desperate to hand over their hard earned for a chance to share in their successes.

The club made no attempts to disguise this notion. “Treating fans as customers,” was high on the club’s four-point strategy for growth back in 2009/10 and so it was, as merchandise flooded the world and new ventures sprung up in markets across the globe.

Five years after losing out to Chelsea in the Premier League race, United had gone backwards on the pitch but were still motoring ahead off of it.

Sir Alex was gone, replaced first by David Moyes and now by the enigmatic Dutchman Louis van Gaal. Titles picked up in 2011 and 2013 seemed a distant memory after the mediocrity that had bled onto the pitch at such an alarmingly fast rate post Fergie.

In the first season, 2013/14, the gap to leaders Manchester City was 24 points; this shrank to 17 in Van Gaal’s debut season but regaining a foothold at the top of table seemed a distant dream to those in Manchester red.

Missing out on European football in 2014 was the real killer blow, though. Losing out on titles was fine as long as Manchester United were still showing their face in Europe. But not being there at all? This was unthinkable to a club that had been a mainstay in the competition for two decades. Action was needed: this could not happen again.

A season away from Europe lit the blue touch paper in the Manchester boardroom, serving as the catalyst for the spending that continues to this day.

Out, it seemed, went strategy; in came possibly the largest Premier League panic buy in recent history, in the shape of the whip-thin Real Madrid winger Angel di Maria. He lasted a year before he left for Paris Saint-Germain, where he continues to sparkle to this day.

Add in Ander Herrera, Anthony Martial, Luke Shaw, Marcos Rojo, Daley Blind, Morgan Schneiderlin, Bastian Schweinsteiger, Matteo Darmian and the loan capture of Radamel Falcao in a window of around 15 months and the age of austerity at United was truly over.

(Image: 2014 Manchester United FC)

Such spending was possible because United were still the cash-generating machine they had always been. This was the brand that had enticed the Glazers in the first place, moving ahead at full steam.

In 2014/15, interest payments remained high but revenues had shot up, to around £400million, even without the added bonus of European football. The commercial machine was higher than ever, too, as Chevrolet appeared on jerseys for the first time and Adidas waited in the wings.

Back in 2012, the club had conducted an initial public offering (IPO): that is, a select group of club shares became publicly tradable once more, this time on the New York Stock Exchange, after Malcolm Glazer had moved to delist the club (take it private) following his takeover in 2005.

The move saw a combination of the club and the Glazer family offload a little under 17 million shares and raise around $230million; some of this money went straight in Glazer pockets, some - nowhere near enough - to paying down the huge debt load at Old Trafford.

Fundamentally, the class of shares sold were those carrying only a tenth of the voting power held by the Glazer family, meaning they remained very much in charge even after selling some of their stock.

But what of the debt? At the close of the 2014/15 season, debt was north of £400million at the gross level; around £250million once it was weighed against United’s cash reserves.

As 2014/15 drew to a close, United once again trophyless but with golden ticket of a fourth-placed finish, agreed to refinance its debt load. Repayment dates were kicked far into the future, relatively speaking, and interest rates were cut, although the principal amount owed, of course, shot up.

If happiness after a decade of Glazer ownership was not abundant in the stands then it was certainly was in the boardroom: the board (the Glazers) moved to allow dividend payments to shareholders (also, largely, the Glazers) beginning in 2015.

Every year, £15million or so would land in the pockets of these six siblings, rather than on infrastructure or players.

DECLINE AND FALL

Who is the person most associated with United post Fergie? It’s not a manager. It’s not a player. Ask most United fans who is the symbol of the club after 27 years of Sir Alex Ferguson and they will most likely point to the club’s executive vice-chairman, Ed Woodward.

Woodward stepped into the role as Fergie exited stage left in 2013, replacing David Gill as chief executive officer in all but name.

The former investment banker had impressed the top brass at Old Trafford with a seeming knack of acquiring sizeable commercial deals in his former life running United’s commercial and media operations.

But his tenure as executive vice-chairman got off to an inauspicious start with a nightmare transfer window in 2013/14, when the club overpaid to bring in Marouane Fellaini after missing out on Luka Modric and Cesc Fabregas.

As the seasons ticked by, and the ‘Good Old Days’ failed to return, it is Woodward who has stood above the rest, signing off on transfer after transfer - first with Moyes, then van Gaal, Jose Mourinho and now Ole Gunnar Solskjaer - in a bid to get the club back to the very top.

For spending and failing where it really matters has been the essence of United in the second half of the decade.

Before the 2016/17 season, United’s bulletin board of record transfers was topped by Angel di Maria, Anthony Martial and Juan Mata, all signed between January 2014 and September 2015.

In the four years since, seven names have been added to the list: Victor Lindelof, Nemanja Matic, Fred, Aaron Wan-Bissaka, Romelu Lukaku, Harry Maguire and Paul Pogba. Alexis Sanchez, another huge investment but part of a swap deal with Henrikh Mkhitaryan, is not included.

These ten players, all signed in a little over five years by four different managers, set the club back around £540million. A Europa League, an EFL League Cup and an FA Cup - all won between 2016 and 2017 - is what they have to show.

Where are the world class players in that astounding five-year investment? Where are the game changers? The icons? Argue amongst yourselves, but for many United fans the answer is clearly, for the money spent, ‘There aren’t enough.’

On the flip-side of this is that United have not solved their problem of raising significant funds from player sales, watching on as Chelsea, Liverpool and Arsenal turned enormous profits on players they had bought and developed.

The club’s top 10 list of outgoings still has David Beckham in fourth place; and also features the likes of Jaap Stam and Juan Sebastian Veron, players sold before Malcolm Glazer had bought his first share in the club. Money was actually lost on the sales of di Maria and Lukaku.

(Image: Man Utd via Getty Images)

The bottom line of all this is that despite this level of spending United continue to make more money than any other side in the league, setting records with their vast earnings thanks to the ghosts of Munich 1999, the Class of ’92, Ronaldo and Ferguson himself.

Last season - a season that once again resulted in a failure to qualify for the Champions League - revenues smashed through the £600million barrier, more than £100million higher than in 2015/16, allowing the club to turn a profit even as wages soared above £300million for the season.

But as a ten-year bridge opens up on the club’s 5-0 victory over Wigan at the very end of 2009, United know they have a fight on their hands as Liverpool and Manchester City close in on their crown.

Revenues for 2019/20 will drop as low as £560million, the club believes, as the club counts the cost of missing out once again on Champions League qualification.

Triggers are in place by Adidas that will see a 30% cut in earnings should United sit the competition out for two seasons or more in a row, putting more pressure on the current season, which has not started well.

(Image: 2017 Chris Brunskill Ltd)

Compounding matters, reports in recents weeks suggest Chevrolet are considering whether to nix their agreement with the club after seeing the value of the brand decline in the second half of the 2010s. That deal was controversial from day one, with the man at the US car giant who brokered the deal losing his job as the papers were being signed.

What is United’s financial legacy this decade? Some would argue it's hundreds of millions spent on debt, dividends, sacked managers and players; it’s failing to make money back from transfers while their rivals post world-record profits because of this; it’s a share price that is only around $3 higher than it was when the club debuted its shares back in 2012; it’s dogged rumours of a takeover from Saudi Arabia and Glazer discontent.

Yet it’s also the biggest commercial empire in British football, a business that has almost always turned a profit in a league where over the half the clubs don’t, a packed out Old Trafford every other weekend, record-breaking revenues: in short, a host of things better than or equal to 99% of every other club. A nice problem to have but a problem all the same.

The so-called Big Six was created because United fell out of the so-called Top Four. Now they are clinging to even that. As the 2010s becomes the 2020s, the club must ensure they translate their remarkable off-field empire into on-field success if they are to remain at the financial top.