Man Utd bombshell 'sale to new investor' at 'advanced stage'

Saudi government official Turki Al-Sheikh claims a deal to ‘sell’ Manchester United ‘to a new investor’ is at ‘an advanced stage” as he aimed a dig at the Glazer family and Sir Jim Ratcliffe.

Ratcliffe now holds a 29 per cent stake in United having taken control of football operations at Old Trafford in February 2024.

The Glazers remain the majority owners having rejected a takeover bid by Sheikh Jassim’s Qatari consortium when they sold their shares to Ratcliffe for £1.25bn last year.

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Al-Sheikh is chairman of the General Entertainment Authority and having owned Egyptian club Pyramids from 2018 to 2019 and Spanish club Almería from 2019 to May 2025, is now responsible for bringing some of the highest-profile sporting events to Saudi Arabia.

He’s currently in talks with United over their participation in the Riyadh Season Cup, a three-way tournament against the capital’s two biggest clubs, Cristiano Ronaldo’s Al-Nassr and Al-Hilal, which featured Inter Miami in February.

And after those reported discussions he dropped a bombshell on X, hitting out at the Red Devils owners in the process.

He wrote: ‘The best news I heard today is that Manchester United is now in an advanced stage of completing a deal to sell to a new investor – I hope he’s better than the previous owners.’

There’s no other evidence of either the Glazers or Ratcliffe looking to sell their stakes despite the raft of mistakes Ratcliffe has been criticised for since he took charge of the football at Old Trafford, including cutting jobs and ending free lunches for staff, which he insists were necessary in his bid to put United on a “firm financial footing”.

“The costs were just too high,” Ratcliffe told The Business podcast. “There are some fantastic people at Manchester United, but there was also a level of mediocrity and it had become bloated. I got a lot of flak for the free lunches, but no-one’s ever given me a free lunch.

“There are two halves to a football team – there is the business side and the sports side. The biggest correlation, like it or not, between results and any external factor – is profitability.

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“The more cash you have got, the better squad you can build. It’s like a Formula One car – the better car you can build, the quicker you go. The better your squad, the better your football should be.

“So a lot of what we have done in the first year is spend an awful lot of time putting the club on a sustainable, healthy footing.

“If you look at our results for last year we have the highest revenues ever. Profitability, the second highest ever. We’re not seeing all the benefits of the restructuring that we’ve done in this set of results, and we were not in the Champions League.

“Those numbers will get better. Manchester United will become the most profitable football club in the world, in my view, and from that will stem, I hope, a long-term, sustainable, high-level of football.”

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