An extended version of this special investigation first appeared in Issue 33 of MUNDIAL. Become a print subscriber today to read it in full.
This is about two teams. 39 League titles, 21 FA Cups, 19 European trophies, 16 League Cups, and a handful of Super Cups, Club World Cups, and Cup Winners Cups, totalling in at 135 combined major honours. Numbers, numbers, numbers. These accolades lead to other equally telling figures: 416 million social media followers and 47 global commercial partners ranging from Malaysia Airlines to Estée Lauder, noodle sellers to treadmill manufacturers. Today, Manchester United and Liverpool aren’t just two of the world’s oldest football clubs— they’re multinational corporations operating by the same principles as Microsoft and Pepsi. Some more numbers: the €3.5 billion ‘infrastructure grant’ that both teams were entitled to a part of as one of the fifteen founding members of the European Super League, and a €200–300 million ‘welcome bonus’ courtesy of J.P. Morgan.
Those numbers are all very important. Cast your mind back a little to the spring of 2021. Manchester United’s and Liverpool’s owners—eager to recoup losses from a COVID-enforced ban of spectators in the stands and to extract maximum value from a sport that still, in their eyes, had multi-billion pound scalability—rushed to agree to be part of a breakaway league comprised of European football’s elites. The plans, once revealed, caused an uproar across the continent. But the white-hot pokers of rage were most keenly felt in Manchester.