How a racehorse and a boardroom row are traced to Manchester United’s decline
On Sunday Manchester United suffered a 3-0 home defeat to Bournemouth at Old Trafford, a result that followed last week’s 4-1 reverse against Como and has intensified talk that the club will sack manager Michael Carrick after his permanent appointment. Jonathan Wilson links that immediate crisis to a much older, seemingly peripheral episode involving a racehorse and Sir Alex Ferguson.
Wilson begins by questioning whether the club’s problems can be pinned solely on managers after United have cycled through a long list of them in 13 years, noting that responsibility might also lie with figures who shape sporting direction. He explicitly names director of football Jason Wilcox and chief executive Omar Berrada, and raises the role of Sir Jim Ratcliffe and the club’s owners, the Glazer family. The Glazers’ leveraged buyout in 2005 is presented as a turning point that left United saddled with debt and repeatedly making poor choices, while Wilson adds a symbolic note that the club’s roof now leaks.
The article traces the chain of events to 1999, when Mull of Kintyre, a horse owned by Irish millionaire John Magnier, won the Gimcrack Stakes at York. Tradition required the winning owner to speak at the Gimcrack Dinner; Magnier, who disliked public speaking, asked Ferguson to deliver the speech but racing authorities insisted the owner must speak. To outmaneuver them, Magnier registered Ferguson as owner of another horse, Juniper.
Juniper was narrowly beaten in the 2000 Gimcrack, so Magnier later made Ferguson the named owner of Rock of Gibraltar, which had won its first three races; Rock of Gibraltar then won the Gimcrack comfortably and Ferguson gave the speech. Wilson records that Magnier partly acted out of mischief and friendship, that the association benefited both men, and that Ferguson did not get on well with United chairman Martin Edwards and saw football clubs as potential investments.
Magnier and his associate JP McManus subsequently bought shares in Manchester United, a development Wilson says is examined in full by journalist David Walsh. Rock of Gibraltar proved an exceptional racehorse, winning seven Group One races consecutively and generating stud fees Wilson describes as worth tens of millions of pounds. Ferguson believed a verbal agreement entitled him to either 50% of the prize money—about £800,000—or 50% of the stud fees and chose the latter; Magnier’s version of events, Wilson writes, was that Ferguson was to receive 5% of the prize money or one stud nomination a year.
Ferguson sued; Wilson notes that with Ferguson’s name on ownership documents he probably would have prevailed at trial. The dispute spilled into public view: paid actors at United’s annual general meeting raised awkward questions, Magnier and McManus sent 99 questions to the United board that ended up in the Daily Mail, and fans protested against Magnier and McManus at race meetings. A settlement followed with Ferguson paid £2.5m to drop the action, but Magnier and McManus decided to sell their United shares and Malcolm Glazer completed a leveraged buyout.
Wilson records that Magnier and McManus sold in 2005 for £260m, a profit of a little under £100m, and adds that had they held until Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s 2024 purchase of a similar stake they would have received roughly £1bn more. He argues the aftermath of the sale left United burdened by debt and subject to two decades of poor footballing decisions; while Ferguson’s side still won five league titles and a Champions League after the takeover, Wilson says once Ferguson’s influence ended the club lacked a coherent foundation.
Wilson concludes that Michael Carrick is the latest casualty of a crisis “21 years in the making,” closing the piece with the line, “For the want of a horse a club was lost.” The article is published as an extract from Soccer Desk, a Guardian US newsletter.