Manchester United have the perfect London blueprint for a new Old Trafford - but it isn't Wembley

Manchester United’s new minority owner, Sir Jim Ratcliffe, has plans for his £1 billion investment in the club.

Having acquired some 28 per cent of the Old Trafford side in December, a deal that still needs to clear the final hurdle in terms of being ratified — a mere formality — INEOS chief Ratcliffe, who also owns French side OGC Nice, has been handed oversight over football operations by the absent majority owners, the Glazer family. He is also the driving force behind what happens around United’s decaying Old Trafford home, a stadium that requires huge investment to bring it up to the world-class status of many of their rivals.

Do they stick with tradition or pursue a new vision, a purpose-built one akin to what Tottenham Hotspur did when they boldly chose to raze White Hart Lane to the ground and rebuild the 62,850 Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in its place, an ambition realised in 2019 when the doors opened on a new era at Spurs. The pursuit of the stadium wasn’t without some drawbacks, most notably the £1bn cost seeing some £800m-plus in debt accrued, and it has been seen by some as coming at the expense of investment into the thing that draws people to the stadium in the first place: the first team.

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But to be successful in the future you have to invest, and Spurs’ home stadium, designed to create value at every turn for the club, is operation all year round. Having a contract with the NFL to host the wildly popular regular season series they host in the UK, as well as the F1 Karting Experience that opened underneath the stadium this month, creates revenue streams that