£1 9 BILLION! The Manchester United Debt Loophole Explained

Manchester United's debt has been a controversial subject ever since the Glazer takeover in 2005 — but what happens now that the Premier League has introduced new financial sustainability rules? In this video, I look at Manchester United's debt from the Glazer takeover, the hundreds of millions of pounds of borrowing that followed, and the wider liabilities that have taken the club's total amount owed beyond £1 billion. But there's a new element to the Premier League's financial rules that I think deserves far more attention. Everyone is talking about the Squad Cost Ratio, but the new Sustainability and Systemic Resilience (SSR) system also contains a Positive Equity Test, which looks at a club's liabilities compared with its adjusted assets. For 2026/27, the threshold is 90%, falling to 85% in 2027/28 and 80% from 2028/29. So I decided to take publicly available figures and do my own illustrative calculation to see where Manchester United could potentially sit under this system — and how much additional liability the club could theoretically carry before reaching the threshold. This is my calculation, not the Premier League's official calculation, and the purpose is to explain how the rules work and ask a bigger question: Are the new financial sustainability rules actually strong enough to prevent football clubs from carrying enormous levels of debt? I'm a Newcastle fan, so this isn't Manchester United versus Manchester City. I'm simply looking at the numbers and asking whether the system is doing what it's supposed to do. Let me know what you think in the comments. contact me at twoforjoytv@outlook.com