INEOS continue to put off Manchester United fans by stadium naming rights up for grabs
According to a recent report from The Athletic, Manchester United’s new sporting owners INEOS are open to selling the naming rights for the club’s home ground.
Whether the United home ground would remain Old Trafford—albeit a refurbished one—or a new stadium altogether remains to be decided, with the new owners actively looking for a solution to do away with the current decrepit and under-maintained venue the Red Devils call home.
The revelation of this decision arrives on the back of a fair few poor decisions INEOS have made to sour the United fanbase. Not off to a good start, one could say.
Great job INEOS, good process
A lot was made about Qatari sportswashing when the Sheikh Jassim-led bid was in pole position to acquire United. Few at the time bothered to point out that Sir Jim Ratcliffe, a man famous in the corporate world for his inclination towards fracking and union busting, was also in this for laundering his reputation.
After all, the benevolent billionaire also tried to buy Chelsea after Roman Abramovich’s exit, so you would think INEOS would want to keep the fans on their side, especially Man United fans, who for nearly two decades have been yearning for an ownership that would not use their club as a cash cow and care about both the institution and the community to some degree.
That was the promise INEOS made, anyway, at the start, and the football side of things does look promising. A new CEO and technical director, with a director of football set to arrive at some point, hints that this new regime is at least willing to have football-savvy people on board.
But the off-pitch decisions INEOS have been making in recent weeks have done nothing to please the fans or even the employees at the club. Be it Ratcliffe cancelling the club’s traditional end-of-season awards, which is not just about the men’s first team but also about the people in the rest of the organisation, moving the senior women’s team to portable buildings so the men’s team can use their setup while Carrington is revamped, to now this, doing away with “Old Trafford”, the hallowed name of the Theatre of Dreams that has seen it all, INEOS are not exactly doing a good job of getting the fans on side.
Yes, title sponsorships of stadiums are very common these days, but every time a club at the top end of the pyramid, especially one presenting itself as an institution of virtue, falls to the corporate sword, they lose a considerable amount of respect; just look at Barcelona, now residing at the Spotify Camp Nou.
Conclusion
There was understandable jubilation at the prospect of some semblance of change at the ownership level of Manchester United.
While there have been early signs of promise, there have also been early signs of what some in the fanbase were dreading. Putting United’s home ground’s naming rights up for sale demonstrates the latter to an extent no fan at United would ever want for any money in the world.
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Some things are too sacred to tamper with. How much of Man United can you sell before they stop being Man United?
