Manchester United’s potential new owners line up to offer bare minimum

Manchester United takeover stories aren’t what they once were. Time was when they were all about glittering, outlandish promises made by “characters”. Michael Knighton juggling footballs before a half-rapturous, half-bemused Stretford End for example, promising to spend £10m (ask your grandad what that meant in 1989 money) on doing up the ground. Admittedly Knighton’s bid failed and he slunk off to Carlisle, where he had fun sort-of claiming he had seen a UFO and falling out spectacularly with local media and fans.

Knighton got a few mentions in passing when Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s interest in the club first began being talked up last summer, the former claiming to have started the ball rolling by touting his own putative “consortium” to rid United of the Glazer family. Lo and behold, Ratcliffe is now a frontrunner in the race to succeed the reviled American debt-manufacturers at the Old Trafford helm, which will take another step forward with Friday’s “soft deadline” for bids. But unlike Knighton’s glitzy if implausible promises, Ratcliffe is centring his bid on what he’s not going to do. So low is the bar under the Glazers that the most important promise a potential owner has to make is to not do bad things, rather than do anything good.

Thus it was that Ratcliffe stressed above all on Thursday that he would not burden the club with debt if his bid succeeds, and there would be none of the leveraged buyout jiggery-pokery that so besmirched the Glazers’ takeover. “The pain will stop” rather than “let’s have more shiny things” being the essential message. On a similar note, rival bidders Qatar will doubtless be along soon to stress that they are absolutely definitely not directly connected to a reactionary government accused