Manchester United’s pay structure needs reboot after wasted millions
Marcus Rashford, Casemiro, Jadon Sancho and Raphaël Varane would be the poster boys in any Jim Ratcliffe white paper examining how Manchester United’s flatlining squad could be moved to a more modest or even performance-related pay structure.
In the elite football world of hyper-inflated salaries performance-related pay is a pipe-dream but imagine if the United footballer’s lucrative base rate salary was slashed and generous incentives predicated on, for instance, goal ratio and minutes played, were built in.
Why? Because an uneasy truth for the United executive is that no right-minded judge this season could make a credible case for Rashford, the top earner on about £435,000 a week, Casemiro (£430,000), Sancho (£350,000) and Varane (£340,000) giving the club a bang for its over-generous buck. It is a trend that can be traced across the 11 years since Sir Alex Ferguson led the club to its most recent league title.
The factors range from the misfortune of serial injury and illness through loss of form to Sancho’s standoff with Erik ten Hag, culminating in his return on loan to Borussia Dortmund. All point to the financial policy regarding recruitment, contract length and pay requiring a reboot for United’s long-term financial health.
In the frame for the above quartet and copious others are Ten Hag, who as the manager holds a recruitment veto; his predecessor, Ole Gunnar Solskjær; the football director, John Murtough, whose department has the other veto; Ed Woodward and Richard Arnold, the past two chief executives; and the owners, the Glazers, who until Ratcliffe’s Christmas Eve arrival signed off every deal.
As Ratcliffe, the incoming new 25% shareholder, and his chief lieutenants, Dave Brailsford and Jean-Claude Blanc,
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