Manchester United are too big to fail forever and their Premier League clash with champions Liverpool at Anfield on Sunday will only serve as a reminder of what could happen if, or when, one of the world’s most powerful sporting brands finally gets it right.
Fenway Sports Group (FSG), Liverpool’s transformative American owners, celebrated 15 years in charge at Anfield this week, a period that’s seen the club win two Premier League titles and the UEFA Champions League while also building a formidable scouting and analytics network. That success, first under manager Jurgen Klopp and now Arne Slot, has put the club back at the summit of English football, but it only came after a 30-year period of prolonged failure, managerial upheaval and ownership battles, ironically endured during a long spell of United dominance under Sir Alex Ferguson.
The two clubs have now traded places and it is United who are suffering, but just like Liverpool, United will bounce back and reclaim their place alongside global heavyweights Real Madrid, Bayern Munich and Barcelona. Their in-built advantages make it an inevitability and simply a matter of time — a case of sporting gravity once again working in United’s favour.
“If football success could be compared to a game of dice, Manchester United only need to roll threes and fours to be successful because of their history, commercial strength and worldwide fanbase,” a former United executive told ESPN. “The problem is that they have been continually rolling ones and twos, while Liverpool and Manchester City have been on a run of fives and sixes.
“That is ultimately down to judgement, luck, stability and, in Liverpool’s case, having a genius like Mike Gordon (FSG president) making key decisions, but eventually, United will start rolling some threes and fours and then fives and sixes.
“They simply need to get the big decisions right. Once that happens, their commercial might will propel United back to the top.”
Despite results, they have the revenue
Challenging Liverpool for the biggest prizes, the Premier League and Champions League, seems a distant speck on the horizon right now for United, whose title drought stretches back to 2013, with their last Champions League crown being won in 2008. But it took Liverpool three years under FSG stewardship to challenge for the title, when Brendan Rodgers’ team finished second to Manchester City in 2013-14, and five years before they made they hired Klopp as coach in Oct 2015 — a decision that proved the catalyst for the success to follow.
United are still in a state of flux when it comes to managers and ownership. The club appears stuck in a doom-loop of failure: in addition to five fired managers since 2014, a succession of expensive flops in the transfer market, and their rivals Liverpool and Manchester City stacking up silverware at home and abroad, they’ve had turmoil off the field with unpopular co-owners, the Glazer family and Sir Jim Ratcliffe, overseeing deep cost-cutting measures and job cuts. But the publication of the club’s annual accounts last month shed light on just why they are a sleeping giant that will, eventually, wake from its slumber.
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United posted a loss of £33 million ($44.3m), largely due to over-paying for transfer fees and wages, but an annual revenue figure of £666.5m ($890m) was highest ever recorded by the club. Despite a disastrous 2024-25 season that saw United, who were absent from the Champions League, fire manager Erik ten Hag on the way to recording the team’s worst-ever Premier League finish — 15th place — under his successor Ruben Amorim, the club was still able to post a record revenue figure only previously eclipsed by Real Madrid (£910.8m / $1.216 billion), City (£730m / $974.4m) and Paris Saint-Germain (£702.1m / $937.3m).
All of the above teams are expected to significantly increased revenues in their next accounts due to the financial boost of participating in this summer’s FIFA Club World Cup, while Liverpool’s Premier League title win and Champions League campaign is likely to take their income for 2024-25 past the £700m ($934m) mark.
Liverpool received £174.9m ($233.5m) in Premier League prize money last season, £38.7m ($51.7m) more than United’s £136.2m ($181.9m) for finishing fifteenth. And the £82.73m ($110.5m) Slot’s team banked from their Champions League run the Round of 16 dwarfed the £30.7m ($41m) earned from reaching the Europa League final — the financial gains from being a better football team are obvious.
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But even after the club’s worst season since relegation from the old First Division in 1974, United continue to generate huge sums off the pitch, a testament to their latent ability to navigate a route back to the top.
“Can United bridge the gap and be successful again? Absolutely,” Casper Stylsvig, a former commercial executive at United, Barcelona, AC Milan and Chelsea told ESPN. “They have the strength of the brand and it is similar to Dallas Cowboys. They haven’t won the Super Bowl for many, many years [last win: 1995], but they’re still going from strength-to-strength as brand and I think United will get it right eventually.
“There has been a big turnaround at United and it was probably needed to some extent, but they have the brand and the following, all the fan engagement is high and some of the biggest in the world, so yes, they certainly will come back.”
United’s shirt sponsorship deal with tech company Snapdragon is worth £60m ($80.1m) a year until 2029 — the same figure earned by Real Madrid (Emirates), Barcelona (Spotify) and PSG (Qatar Airways), but their kit partnership deal with Adidas, £90m ($120m) a year until 2033, is less lucrative than those of Barcelona (Nike £127m / $170m), City (Puma, £100m / $133.5m) and Real Madrid (Adidas £95m / $128m). Despite their title success and recent success, Liverpool only secured a £60m-a-year ($80.1m) deal with Adidas earlier this year.
“United is still a massive club,” Stylsvig said. “The fact that probably one of the very biggest buyers in the world of sport, Adidas, is renewing for £90m just shows the power of United. Adidas wouldn’t spend £90m a year for United if they didn’t see there was potential.”
United’s fall from grace as a club capable of winning the Premier League and Champions League has impacted on their earnings, however, as highlighted by Liverpool’s on-field success generating £257.63m ($344m) last season compared to United’s £166.9m ($222.9m).
If United get it right on the pitch, they could expect to boost their earnings by approximately £100m ($133.6m) a year, with success then likely to make them more attractive to star players and potential sponsors. Edward Freedman, a sports branding expert credited with transforming United’s commercial earnings in the 1990s before launching the sports memorabilia company Icons, says that the players on the pitch are as important as the commercial team off it.
“The commercial situation is very tied up with the performance on the field,” Freedman told ESPN. “And United haven’t had a very good run on the field at all, so that will negatively impact their commercial income.
“United have long-term contracts with their major sponsors, but once those contracts run out, no one’s going to go back in and pay the same prices that they paid before because they’re not top of the league. They’ve let Marcus Rashford and some of their best players go and brought in players that haven’t got the same charisma and are not particularly commercially valuable, so that’s a problem that United must address.”
Former United commercial director Richard Arnold once said that the club didn’t buy players to boost brand recognition because the team had “25 George Clooneys – they are all massive stars.” United are clearly no longer that, of course, but despite concerns about the lack of success and their allure to star players, Freedman admits that United can still tap into an increasingly lucrative commercial market.
“Lots of clubs have caught up with United commercially,” Freedman said. “But it’s not a shrinking pool because there is now a lot more people throwing money at the game.
“It’s still a massive market. If you think about China and the United States, football is growing and growing and the bubble shouldn’t burst, but if United are to capitalise, they need to hire somebody who really knows the commercial market and also sign a star player, because what happens on the pitch goes hand in hand with what happens off it.”
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‘United will eventually get it right’
United have challenges ahead, notably the plans to build a new stadium that could cost as much as £2 billion ($2.67bn), but sources have said that they could command a naming rights deals of least £25m ($33.4m) to sponsor the new ground, which would also significantly increase United’s current matchday income of £5m ($6.7m) a game.
Sources have said that the prospect of lucrative direct-to-consumer broadcasting packages within 5-7 years would also be a huge financial earner for United and Liverpool due to their vast global fanbases, but while Liverpool have a slick machine on and off the pitch at Anfield — “Liverpool have had a rising tide of perfection,” the former United executive said — United still need to get both arms of the operation working together at Old Trafford.
“United maybe didn’t renew themselves and innovate properly in recent years, with too much reluctance to change,” Stylsvig, who was this week appointed as executive director of the Hong Kong Jockey Club, said. “But the sheer scale of the numbers that they can produce and the way they run things is just phenomenal. It is a very, very big club, truly one of the big ones.
“The last time United won a Premier League was in 2013, but they just kept increasing revenues, even though they weren’t successful on the pitch. They could attract the best talent and you can always argue did they have the right team and right manager and so on, but the reality is United they went from strength to strength from a commercial point of view, even though the results on the pitch were not there.
“Having results off the pitch buys you the opportunity to get better players and invest more in the team, so United will eventually get it right.”
United’s next throw of the dice is against Liverpool this Sunday, and it would be the perfect time to roll a six.
