INEOS’s termination of Sir Alex Ferguson’s ambassadorial role saves Man Utd money but also damages the club’s soul

Do you think they will get rid of his statue too? You would save money on brass polish. Maybe take the letters off his stand and whip them out: you can get a decent price for scrap metal these days. Maybe he smelled the replicas of the 13 Premier League trophies he won: Ker-ching!

The athleteManchester United’s revelation that Sir Alex Ferguson has axed the club’s ambassador role is not the worst thing about INEOS and Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s major economic offensive. Not by a long shot.

Life after United will be far more difficult for the 250 “regular” employees they have laid off or will lay off. Ferguson, who has a variety of other lucrative sources of income, will have no trouble paying his electric bill. Laying off these employees just to make the balance sheet a little nicer is morally miserable.

That’s just naive. United have ended Ferguson’s ambassadorial role to save money as his £2.16 million ($2.8 million) salary was identified as a cost they can no longer afford. They say he will always be welcome at Old Trafford. Which is good of them.

On the face of it, if your only consideration is the numbers in a spreadsheet, you’re absolutely right. When you’re in savings mode, cutting your spending by a few million seems like a natural decision, even though you’re not actually losing anything tangible.

But when your cost-cutting gets to the point where you cut the man who invented modern Manchester United, you have to ask yourself whether it’s really worth it. Is austerity worth it if it means distancing the man who brought you two Champions League titles and 13 league titles and nurtured Eric Cantona, Roy Keane, David Beckham, Cristiano Ronaldo, Wayne Rooney and dozens of others? Who brought joy to millions of people, who built a super club where previously there was an underperforming club. It feels like they have decided to cut off part of United’s soul.

Such things may seem irrelevant, but they are important. It is to Ferguson’s credit that people still care about United more than a decade after he stepped down as manager. The fact that he is still connected to the club in a meaningful way reminds people of that. It’s easy for memories to grow short and people to forget why United remains one of the most significant cultural forces – not just major football clubs or even sporting institutions, but cultural forces – in the country. When Ferguson is no longer a real part of the club, it’s all even easier to forget.

These are all emotional arguments, but this is a stubborn football world where emotions play only a limited role. And the official line is that this was all very amicable and that Ferguson was relaxed about it. Perhaps that is true, and United retaining him as a non-executive director at least protects them from the idea that they have severed ties with him completely.

But you still have to ask yourself whether it’s really worth it.

First of all, no matter how much they do, this will still be perceived as United sacking Ferguson before they sacked Erik ten Hag. It will look bad, and for a relatively new group of decision-makers still trying to convince the fan base that they know what they’re doing, it’s a risky move from a PR perspective.

Even if you accept that this is a worthwhile way to save money, you have to ask yourself whether they can be trusted to spend the savings wisely.

Of all the ways United waste money, Ferguson’s remuneration is far from the most egregious. Admittedly, INEOS can’t do much about the millions the club is paying in interest, a legacy of the Glazers’ two-decade-plus takeover, but it can do something about the costs of ill-advised signings and recruiting a phalanx of new executives with very similar-sounding job titles , who may have to lay off a manager and his employees in the coming weeks, even though they could/should have done so months ago at a much lower cost.

That £2.16 million sounds like a huge sum of money. Whoever was tasked with adding a little here and there to the bill can very happily sit back and decide that their job is well done.

And it’s a huge amount of money – in the normal world. But it represents 0.3 per cent of United’s annual turnover of £662m. That equates to just under £40,000 a week. That’s higher than the average annual salary in the UK, but when it comes to football it’s relative peanuts. That’s the kind of salary a club of United’s stature will pay its third-choice goalkeeper. For example, it’s 2.4 percent of Antony’s transfer fee. Would it be harsh to say that an 82-year-old sitting in the stands has contributed more to United than Antony over the last two years?

If they absolutely had to save that money, is there really nowhere in the first team squad environment where they could have found it? Looking at this purely from a financial perspective, one could argue that the legacy of the work Ferguson put in during his managerial career will continue to more than pay off in retirement.

It is argued that this was, in a roundabout way, due to Ferguson’s own actions.

There are many who point to his disputes with JP McManus and John Magnier, former United shareholders, over the racehorse Rock of Gibraltar as the catalyst for the Glazer takeover. Had he not been arguing over a horse, they might not have sold their shares in a leveraged buyout in which all the debt would have been placed on the club. United wouldn’t have wasted so much money on interest payments back then, and they wouldn’t have to cut costs now.

But that’s a bit far-fetched. In any case, it wouldn’t make any difference to this decision.

Will this £2.16 million really improve things? Will the tangible savings of these decisions offset the intangible costs? Ratcliffe will argue that difficult decisions need to be made and that all the little savings add up, from cutting free travel for club staff to last season’s FA Cup final against Manchester City to this move.

But will all of this really improve United? Will these incessant budget cuts make the people who work there feel better? Does this really make United a better team? Will it help Ten Hag to cut ties with the most important figure in her history, or whatever unfortunate soul is destined to eventually take his place? Will that sweet £2.16 million really provide enough value to compensate for the distancing of the man who founded this club?

Of course not.

However, there are a few scrapyards near Old Trafford, so there will be even more savings to be made if they are up and running soon.

(Top photo: Michael Regan/Getty Images)