Sir Jim Ratcliffe's Man United masterplan gets early stroke of luck that could pay off big time

The wheels of change are in motion at Manchester United right now.

Whether it be the renewed focus on football strategy through the links with the likes of Dan Ashworth and Jason Wilcox, or Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s plans to turn Old Trafford into a ‘Wembley of the North’, the needle appears to be moving in the right direction for the first time in a long time.

Ratcliffe’s £1.3bn deal to purchase 25 per cent of United on Christmas Eve has now been waved through by the Premier League, and while the British billionaire, founder of petrochemicals giant INEOS, won’t be the majority shareholder, that still being the deeply unpopular Glazer family, he has been handed football oversight as well as leading on shaping what happens with Old Trafford.

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That second part carries more weight than the first, for the absentee ownership of the Glazers over the years has allowed for Old Trafford, English football’s biggest football stadium aside from Wembley, and third biggest overall when Twickenham is included, has not kept pace with how owners of rival clubs have invested into the infrastructure, the bricks and mortar, that can be such a valuable revenue-generating tool.

United set a new bar for matchday revenue for the 2022/23 accounting period, with the £136million earned smashing the previous best of £112m. There was a reason for that, in having a 74,000-capacity stadium, 12,000 higher than the next largest, Tottenham Hotspur, and hosting an abnormally large number of home games, 33, due to good progress in domestic and