There was an air of resignation in Ruben Amorim's voice when he addressed reports of Manchester United's potential plans to jet off to Saudi Arabia in the middle of the season to play friendly games. The Portuguese is a coach that talks of the importance of focus, on having lots of training sessions, of being fully committed to the cause of reviving the club's fortunes. And exhibition tours fly in the face of all that.
But Amorim, albeit somewhat reluctantly, toed the party line and gave his backing to money-spinning trips around the world. "We have to do it," he said last Friday. "And you know, we knew that when we missed out on Europe, we have a lot of things to do. We have our fans, we have the budget, we have to compensate for a lot of things. So, we have to do it. We will do it. We want to be with our fans around the world. If you have to do it, you have to manage to find the space to do it."
Amorim's time at United has been the least successful period the club has known in half-a-century as well as an unprecedented moment in being a time when money has been kept tight (aside from in the transfer market) and no move has been ruled out if it can save or make a bit of extra cash. But traipsing around the world to play meaningless matches is the last thing United should be doing right now…
AFPDegrading experience
While Amorim is right that United will have a big hole in their budget by not qualifying for Europe and will have to forgo additional matchday revenue from not hosting mid-week games at Old Trafford, they are unlikely to come close to plugging the gaps with extra friendlies.
United's end-of-season tour of Asia was a degrading experience for the club, taking place just a few days after their defeat to Tottenham in the Europa League final. The six-day jaunt saw them play friendlies in Hong Kong and Malaysia while some players did a promotional visit to India. The team lost to ASEAN All-Stars and needed a comeback to beat a Hong Kong XI, while Amad Diallo and Alejandro Garnacho had unsavoury exchanges with locals.
All the while, reports about Bruno Fernandes being offered a lucrative move to Al-Hilal were rumbling about. While pre-season tours are the norm for all major clubs and a huge part of preparing for a campaign, post-season trips feel more like a travelling circus. And heading on a mid-season tour, sandwiching foreign trips in between vital Premier League games, would be even more undignified.
AdvertisementAFPNegligible amount of money
The whole ordeal in Asia netted United a reported £10 million. Not bad for a week's work, you might say. But it paled in comparison to the £100m they missed out on by failing to qualify for the Champions League. To make up the gap entirely, they would have to make 10 such trips, playing 20 games. That would be completely unworkable, and in all likelihood the club would make just one trip.
And even if they could match what they made in May in Asia and pocket another £10m, it is still a negligible amount of money. A drop in the ocean in the context of the £666m in total revenue they earned last season, even without Champions League football.
They could have saved that amount of money, if not more, by being just a little more prudent in the transfer market. For example, keeping Rasmus Hojlund rather than negotiating his exit for half the price they paid for him, while bringing in Benjamin Sesko for £74m despite him also being at a similar stage in his career and with no Premier League experience.
Getty Images SportFriendlies could block Champions League hopes
Earning £10m here and there will not significantly help United tackle their rising debt. As the club have acknowledged privately and publicly, the only way for United to become financially sustainable and stop the six-year trend of losing money is for them to get back to finishing near the top of the Premier League and qualify consistently for the Champions League.
And going on mid-season trips to other continents and time zones could directly impact that goal. Although United were nowhere near it, there was an extremely close race to qualify for the Champions League, with just one point in the end separating Nottingham Forest in seventh and Newcastle United, who finished fifth and nabbed the last ticket to Europe's top competition. Aston Villa missed out on the lucrative revenues of Champions League football on goal difference.
Every point counts in the race to finish in the top five or top four (depending on whether English football teams perform well in Europe and earn one of the two extra places on offer). So, imagine that United missed out on the Champions League by a couple of points and had earlier in the season drawn or lost their next game after an eight-hour flight back from Riyadh or a 15-hour journey back from Tokyo.
Getty Images SportEvery league position counts
Even the best United side in recent memory paid a price in results for a mid-season friendly in Saudi Arabia. The great United side containing Cristiano Ronaldo, Wayne Rooney, Carlos Tevez et al played against Al-Hilal in late January 2008. They won their next game against Portsmouth but not long after they only scraped a 1-1 draw at Tottenham and a week later lost 2-1 at home to a Manchester City side two years before their lucrative takeover.
It should also not be forgotten that European qualification is not the only route to earning more money on the pitch. The Premier League offers extra motivation for finishing higher up the table in the form of merit payments, which consist of combined earnings from both domestic and international television broadcast deals and are distributed on a sliding scale from 1st to 20th.
The Red Devils' combined merit payment for finishing 15th last season was £15.9m. West Ham, who finished 14th, earned £18.6m, a difference of £2.7m for one point. Brentford pocketed £29.1m by virtue of finishing 10th. Had United finished eighth – as they did in Erik ten Hag's second season – they would have taken home £34.5m. That's a difference of £18.5m, worth only marginally less than two post-season trips to Asia.