sport news Gary Neville's damning verdict on The Glazers at Manchester United from his ... trends now

I have no qualms at all about Roman Abramovich being kicked out of this country and out of English football. The shame is that it took a war and the death of thousands of innocent people in Ukraine to expose 19 years of Russian money sloshing into the Premier League. No one cared at the time.

I wasn’t calling for Abramovich to be ejected from the game a year ago. Though Chelsea became a pain in my playing days, disrupting Manchester United’s dominance, as a pundit I enjoyed their rise and the journey under Abramovich. Almost all of us were guilty of turning a blind eye and not seeing the danger of what might come.

And here’s the irony. I’d love to say that I wouldn’t have wanted him at Manchester United. But if, in 2003, with the gift of foresight, you were offered the choice of Abramovich or the Glazers as owners, who would you take?

The Glazers’ takeover at United was as different to Abramovich’s at Chelsea as it was possible to be. They saw something no one else in US sports business could see in 2003, that their world of American football and basketball franchises was limited to North America and that the world was much bigger than that. Football, as the world’s most popular sport, and Manchester United, as arguably the biggest club, along with Real Madrid and Barcelona (clubs that weren’t for sale), was the perfect gateway to the revenues this new era of globalisation would bring.

As someone who is a capitalist and now a businessman, who lives in that world and who has debt in certain areas of his life and mortgages, I don’t think I can look at the Glazers and say they’ve done anything wrong in buying Manchester United. I wish they weren’t the owners. I wish United had better owners who were putting every penny back into the club and not taking dividends out or leveraging the club with debt. But they’ve not done anything that’s outside of the rules. In the last few years I’ve now eventually become convinced they’re not fit to own the club.

As players at the time, we were aware of the JP McManus–John Magnier and Glazer camps building up their stakes to about 29 per cent. But these were different times. We were aware in a passive way. It was very clear to us that we didn’t get involved in the business side of the club and what happens in the boardroom. That was a line you didn’t cross in Sir Alex Ferguson’s club.

In the year after the Glazers took full control, we signed Patrice Evra, Park Ji-sung, Nemanja Vidic and Edwin van der Sar. The following summer we signed Michael Carrick. We would win three successive Premier League titles from 2007 to 2009 and the Champions League in 2008 with the great Tevez, Ronaldo, Rooney team. We were back in charge of English football and everything seemed fine.

But there were warning signs that this might not be good. David Gill, the chief executive, had initially come out against the Glazers, saying we shouldn’t be putting all that debt on the club. Some fans were outraged and protested vehemently against the family and their model. Looking back, they were right. We’d met the challenge of Chelsea head on, had seen off Arsenal, who were in decline, and were back in charge. How bad could the owners really be?

I can sit here now and wish I had lived in different world, where social media had existed and players spoke up more; that I had paid more attention and not just dismissed it. After all, I had been a United fan since childhood and owners had always been unpopular with the fans, even when we were winning, whether it was Martin Edwards or later the plc board. It didn’t seem new to me or particularly worrisome that the fans didn’t like the owners. I just thought that was football.

And the truth is I didn’t have it in me to speak out. Footballers now have much more character and presence about them. We harp back to characters of old. But there’s more to character than playing on with a bloodied bandage around your head.

I maintain that players today are stronger willed and have more personality than players of 25 years ago. They consistently stand up for issues beyond football, as we’ve seen with Marcus Rashford on child poverty, Raheem Sterling and Tyrone Mings on racism. I was a strong-willed footballer, sometimes referred to as Red Nev. I was the union rep and had some basic business understanding at that young age. I was willing to take on the FA and threaten a strike. But at United, you didn’t cross the boundary into off-the-field issues. None of the strong personalities questioned it. And I could justify the Glazers’ game plan in my head. I believe in a free society, in capitalism, that you can buy something, that we have listed companies that can be bought and sold. I believe in debt, borrowing to grow.

I have debts, mortgages and loans. Loans aren’t necessarily bad. My biggest problem is lack of attention to the club and United’s decline under the Glazers’ ownership. I always knew that Sir Alex was a phenomenon, a genius. What I didn’t properly appreciate was that his presence covered up for the ineptitude of the Glazers. When Sir Alex left in 2013, David Gill, the chief executive, left at the same time and Ed Woodward became executive vice chairman with David Moyes as manager.

My first serious doubts about the character of the owners was really in 2014, when they sacked David Moyes after 10 months.

But some personal encounters at that time, I thought, showed the Glazers to be petty and small-minded. I had retired in 2011 and had immediately begun developing some business plans. I was working to open our hotel, Hotel Football, which is opposite Old Trafford and was a project backed by myself, my brother Phil, Paul Scholes, Ryan Giggs and Nicky Butt.

We had planning permission to

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