Glazer, Ratcliffe, Carrick and the Players: How Blame Is Shared for Manchester United's Disaster

Four goals conceded against Como. Just like that. Manchester United suffered their worst Champions League defeat since 1994 this week, a 4-1 loss that sums up the club's worst start to a season in 40 years far better than any speech could. The question hanging over Old Trafford isn't new, but it keeps getting heavier: who is actually to blame for this mess?

The uncomfortable answer is that there isn't just one culprit. There's an entire chain of responsibility running through the owners, the executives, the coach and the players. And every single one of them has something to answer for.

The Glazers, the root of the problem

Everything that's broken at United can be traced back to the Glazer family, who have owned the club since 2005 following a leveraged buyout that still draws resentment from fans to this day. They paid £790 million but borrowed £600 million, using the club itself as collateral. Overnight, a team that owed nothing was buried under debt that, two decades later, is still taking its toll: more than £1 billion has left the club in debt payments, interest, refinancing and shareholder dividends. On average, £50 million a year has gone out the door in costs with nothing to do with football under Glazer ownership, money that could easily have funded a signing or better wages to keep hold of top talent. The result is plain to see: an Old Trafford that keeps aging with no fix in sight and a squad built on improvisation. The Glazers are assigned 50 percent of the blame.

Ratcliffe, the savior who never quite arrived

When Sir Jim Ratcliffe bought 27.7 percent of the club in February 2024 and took control of football operations, plenty of people saw light at the end of the tunnel. He talked tough, said the club's data analysis department was "from the last century," and brought in fresh faces like Omar Berrada and Dan Ashworth. But he fired Ashworth after just six months, kept Erik ten Hag on after quietly exploring replacements, then sacked him anyway in October. Since then he's strung together one decision after another that raises more questions than it answers, including more than 500 job cuts justified with the warning that, without action, the club would "go bust by Christmas." This past summer, United spent less than half of what Chelsea or Tottenham did and barely a third of what Manchester City invested. Internal morale, according to sources close to the club, has taken a hit from the financial restrictions and unpopular moves like raising ticket prices. Ratcliffe is assigned 20 percent of the blame.

Berrada, for his part, pushed Jason Wilcox into the technical director role despite his limited experience in that kind of position, and he was also behind the move to bring in Ruben Amorim from Sporting, a gamble that ended in failure. That handling of affairs drew an open rebuke from Lisandro Martinez after the loss to Atletico Madrid the week before:

"I expect more investment, one hundred percent. I expect more from our technical director [Jason Wilcox]. You can't keep changing, changing, changing the coach. What about the other areas? I can't say more than that."Lisandro Martinez

That executive group, led by Berrada and Wilcox, carries an additional 10 percent of the responsibility.

Carrick, caught between the inheritance and the pressure

Michael Carrick took over the dugout in January and pulled off something nobody expected: getting the team into the Champions League by finishing third. That earned him a two-year contract despite his thin coaching resume, just three seasons at Middlesbrough. But the honeymoon is over. With no room to sign the players he wanted, Carrick was left with an unbalanced squad, and the poor start to the league season has cast doubt on his tactical choices. Captain Bruno Fernandes himself pointed the finger straight at the coaching staff after the collapse in Italy:

"It was a decision from the coaching staff not to press man to man and sometimes leave spaces behind. That's on the coach and the coaching staff to see, not on me."Bruno Fernandes

Carrick is assigned 5 percent of the blame.

A squad built by six different coaches

The current squad is, quite literally, a collage: players signed under six different managers over 12 years, from Luke Shaw's arrival in 2014 under Louis van Gaal to recent additions like Carlos Baleba, Youri Tielemans and Andrey Santos. Names like Shaw, Marcus Rashford, Diogo Dalot and Harry Maguire remain at the club more for lack of alternatives than for their performances. Carrick was blunt when responding to Bruno's criticism:

"Whatever the system, whatever the tactics, if you don't run, if you don't run forward and you don't run back, you're not going to win."Michael Carrick

The team's running statistics rank among the worst in the Premier League, and Bruno himself admitted that the weight of the club's history has become a burden: "There's too much focus on what was done in the past, but we're not those people anymore," he said in Como. The players are assigned 15 percent of the responsibility for a crisis that, as it turns out, doesn't have just one name attached to it, but many.