Old Trafford plans are a game-changer for Manchester United - and this is how they can stay on track

Nobody could accuse Sir Jim Ratcliffe of not dreaming big since he got his foot in the door at Manchester United. Plenty of the billionaire's decisions have gone down badly with supporters, but Ratcliffe has now put a timeframe on the team winning the league and the club building a new stadium.

In Ratcliffe's dreams, a title-winning United side will be playing in a 100,000-capacity new Old Trafford maybe as soon as the 2030/31 season. It sounds ambitious, but so does winning the title by 2028, and Ratcliffe hasn't got to where he is by showing a lack of ambition.

It has been estimated that a new stadium will cost £2bn to fund, and finding the money for the build will be a challenge. Ratcliffe and architect Lord Norman Foster have spoken of the advantages the Manchester Ship Canal offers in terms of logistics, potentially halving the usual build timetable, but finding the cash to deliver on the plans is a major hurdle.

The unveiling of the grand plan for a new stadium comes a day after Ratcliffe said the club would have run out of cash by Christmas without his cost-cutting interventions over the last 12 months, so this isn't a club likely to find a couple of billion down the back of the sofa.

Funds could be generated through sponsors, and United have already opened the door to naming rights for a stadium if it is a new build. The value of that deal could be astronomical.

Something that supporters - and Ruben Amorim - will be keen to avoid is what happened to Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur during the funding of ambitious new stadiums. Both tightened their belts when it came to spending in the transfer market and opened the Emirates and the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium when the team had been neglected on the pitch.

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