What is going on with Manchester United’s budget? Before the summer, the consensus was that United were broke and doomed to an even worse season than the last one.
Some of us were wise enough to see potential, but the consensus was that the team was in a real bind. If they wanted to buy anyone who could improve the team’s performance, they’d have to sell half their squad and look for loose change in the couches around Old Trafford.
Instead, over the summer, they spent hundreds of millions of pounds on several top-quality players. How did they do it?
In a word: review. INEOS, the new co-owners, reviewed every aspect of the United operation, and that diligence paid off.
It was a predictable enough result, if you were paying attention. INEOS operates at the highest level of business, and its leadership knows, as well as anyone, just how important a thorough review is to success.
The Case for Review
In my book, The Soccer of Success, I include “review” as one of the three steps in my system, the Hattrick of Success. After you (step one) plan and (step two) perform to that plan, you have to give yourself time to (step three) recover and review that performance. That’s how soccer players do it, and it’s how business works most efficiently.
Any review should be holistic. Assuming you set clear, targeted goals in the planning phase, every review should begin with those goals and assess how performance aligns with them. Let’s say you aimed to improve your sales figures by 10% this year. How close did you come to that goal? Did you get to 8%? 11%? 5%?
From there, you can review your process top to bottom with an aim of unpacking where things went right and where they went wrong. How did your new hires perform? Did they boost your sales numbers or drag them down? Was there a step in your funnel where you lost most of your potential customers? How much did the discounts you offered boost your figures?
Such reviews are time-consuming. They require not just those clear goals but targeted metrics and a lot of feedback. But if you put the work in, they’re always beneficial because that’s where you pick up the learnings that push you forward the next year or on the next project.
The United Way
United proves this point better than anyone. As soon as INEOS arrived, they initiated a comprehensive review of the team’s and the wider company’s financial operations. For months, they chipped away at their debts and the Profit and Sustainability Rules (PSR) hole the team had dug for itself over the past decade and more.
The results weren’t always pleasant. United underwent several rounds of layoffs and implemented numerous unpopular changes, including cutting perks for workers across the organization. But that clearly made a difference come this summer.
At the same time, they found some creative accounting solutions to reduce their debt burdens to comply with PSR requirements. They’ve also discovered new areas to generate advertising revenue, such as their recent deal with Coca-Cola.
This work wasn’t always pretty, but it’s been very effective. As a result of that thorough review, United put itself in a position to compete this season.
Of course, reviewing and improving accounting doesn’t guarantee results. Those signings may still struggle, and the team may ultimately fail. But that will only require another rigorous round of reviews down the road.
Clearly, the Red Devils have demonstrated that conducting a deeper review can offer significant upside. Let that be a lesson to every team and every business.
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