– Life along the Slaney

With almost a complete lack of Premier League football being played in the past week, the media seem to have changed their focus to off the field activities.
United’s impending implosion is making for many column inches in the national press and the blogosphere but for me, an ordinary United supporter, talks of bond issues and spiralling debt is not what is worrying me.
I realise that the Glazer’s came in and bought the club with a 100percent mortgage and are using club profits to pay off the interest on that loan. I realise the £48million profits announced on Monday include Ronaldo’s transfer fee – why wouldn’t it? Surely there would be more questions asked if the accountant doing the accounts left such an amount out of the figures.
In an ideal world the club would belong to the supporters in the same way Barcelona belongs to the Catalan fans of the club. This however is not an ideal world and the Glazers are the best of a bad lot in my opinion.
Consider having the Hick-Gillett alliance running you club. Not only do the pair hate each other, they have consistently failed to provide Rafa with funds in the transfer market – although this could be more to do with the Spaniard’s lack of success in said market.
Fergie has consistently maintained that anytime he has gone looking for money to buy a player he has seen his palm crossed with silver by the American family.
Only this week have we seen Tom Hicks Jr. step down from the board of Liverpool FC for calling fan Stephen Horner an ‘idiot’ and ‘f**kface’. While I may have some empathy with the views expressed by Hicks Jr., sending these messages to a fan of the club you run is not exactly clever.
Across the city at the Council House the Abu Dhabi United Group signalled their intentions early on when they made up to eight ridiculous bids to lure the world’s best players to the club on the last day of last January’s transfer window.
The fact that Robinho signed says as much about his loyalty as it does about the interfering nature of the City owners. Mark Hughes was not in charge of transfers then and he is certainly not in charge now.
So while United’s model is far from ideal, it is United’s on-field performances that should be worrying United supporters – but the less said about that the better.