In July 2005, at Hong Kong’s national stadium, a seemingly ordinary American man stood uneasily by the pitch under the stadium’s partially closed roof.

This man was Bryan Glazer, recently involved in his family’s controversial, debt-financed takeover of Manchester United, and he was now being introduced to a group of English football journalists.

“I will talk to you about all of this,” he assured them, “just not today.”

“Another time, guys,” he added, as he moved past them in the humid air.

Nearly two decades later, the Manchester United fanbase and media are still waiting for any substantial communication from the Glazers. At times, it seems they follow the old Royal Family creed: never complain, never explain.

Throughout their troubled ownership of Old Trafford, the Glazers have appeared largely unaffected by the criticism directed at them. While this might be seen as resilience, it has also contributed to the perception that their primary interest in the club is financial gain.

That does not make them unusual among football owners but as the silence continues, the money that has seeped from the world’s most famous club into the pockets of the Americans is somewhere north of £1.2billion.

That figure grows in significance as time ticks on and the mediocrity of Manchester United shows few signs of abating. As United try to fund and build a new stadium, comparisons are often drawn with the magnificent facility that stands in north London and carries the name of Tottenham Hotspur.

The price tag? About £1.2bn. Look at what you could have had, Manchester United.

While Sir Alex Ferguson was manager, United carried the Glazer burden and somehow continued to accumulate titles and silverware. In the eight years between their 2005 buyout and Ferguson standing down in 2013, United won 10 major trophies, including five Premier Leagues and a Champions League.

Shorn of Ferguson’s genius, United have fished in a more modest pool – two FA Cups, two League Cups and Jose Mourinho’s Europa League success of 2017 – and are no longer even the most successful or profitable club in their own town.

Manchester is one of the hosts for Euro 2028, but at City’s Etihad Stadium. Old Trafford was not fit for the job.

‘Why would you wish to hold a major international here?’ says one current United employee. ‘I walk around the place every day. It’s out of date. Bits of it are falling down. The roof has had leaks. There are mice. It needs money spent on it and has done for ages. I am a United fan and I used to be proud to work here. Now I just feel embarrassed.’

Sir Jim Ratcliffe owns less than a third of the club but is in charge of football operations now. He has repaired some of the most obvious structural damage at the club he invested in almost two years ago. The last time it rained at a big game, the water didn’t pour through the roof. Progress.

Reputational damage has proved harder to patch up. A source across town at City tells Daily Mail Sport: ‘United are still our main rivals when it comes to our fans. But when we are in the room with companies and big business talking about commercial deals, it’s not United we worry about. It’s Liverpool. That’s the Glazer effect.

‘When we started out after our own takeover, we looked at what United did and what they had and copied much of it. We don’t do that now.’

It wasn’t always like this. Glazernomics worked for a while, at least for them. While Ferguson’s United won on the field, the club found a way to make money in new markets – with one of the Glazers’ own leading the charge.

Before his own departure in 2022, executive vice chairman Ed Woodward was the family’s man at Old Trafford. He was loved by Joel Glazer and detested by supporters because he was the man who helped raise the funds for the family to buy the club. By way of thanks, the family that made their billions from real estate and oil gave him a job.

Having left JP Morgan in 2005 for a powerful commercial role as United’s chief of staff, Woodward established a private office on the fifth floor at 50 Pall Mall in Mayfair, from which 100 sales staff raised millions by securing sponsors in everything from noodles and scooters to soft drinks and paint. Between 2005 and 2012, United’s commercial revenues more than doubled, from £48.7million to £117.6m.

The problem was that success on the balance sheet was not matched on the pitch. Jurgen Klopp felt the club’s priorities made it ‘an adult version of Disneyland’ when approached to replace Moyes in 2014, and Louis van Gaal was dismayed by Old Trafford’s obsession with commercial deals.

One sponsor launch for Aperol had the tagline ‘celebrate success’ – just after they’d lost 2-1 at home to Swansea in the FA Cup third round. A source surmised: ‘It felt tone deaf. There is never a sense check.’

The prestige of the brands suffered over time. It was Audi to Chevrolet, Turkish Airlines to Aeroflot. It went from prestigious to… who’s paying?

The operation was a closely guarded secret, nicknamed ‘The Black Box’ by Woodward. No other clubs were doing these deals. From that point of view, Woodward was ahead of his time and ahead of the game.

He had full-size replicas of the Premier League and Champions League trophies placed outside the lifts in the Pall Mall building and, seeing that all the elevator buttons lit up in blue, he had the one to the United floor changed to red at a cost of a few thousand pounds.

It was when Woodward took over the running of the club in July 2013 that he was exposed as a money man with a limited football brain. This was a turning point in the wrong direction for United.

For the best part of the next decade, Woodward and the Glazers oversaw a period of sporting chaos and disjointed thinking and led United, in part, to where they are now – a shadow of the club that bestrode global football.

On taking the big job, Woodward had been led to believe that he would have at least a year to work with Ferguson. The Scot put him straight on that issue a few minutes into a lunch at Scott’s in Mayfair.

‘It was a horrific start,’ a source close to Woodward says now. ‘Ed may not even have taken the job had he known that was coming. Two hours into that lunch, Fergie told him he was off and he was floored by it.’

United insiders report that as United tried to steer a steady course post-Ferguson, that Woodward and Joel would speak ‘four or five times a day’, and it wasn’t always about the football.

‘The family are obsessed with money,’ explains one source. ‘Of course they are. That’s why they bought United in the first place.

‘So they would penny-pinch like you wouldn’t believe. We know about the Ineos redundancies and all the rest. But nobody cuts corners like the Glazers, and Ed couldn’t do a thing without them wanting to know about it.

‘We used to joke that he would call Joel in Florida every time a toilet roll needed replacing, to check it was OK to do so. At least we think it was a joke.’

Many on the football side doubted Woodward’s football acumen and perhaps with good reason. They felt he did not like confrontation and that the endless Paul Pogba controversies would have been better dealt with by telling the player some home truths.

Woodward was, many felt, a bit of a ‘star f***er’. He loved the ‘top players’ and, to some degree, the publicity. He was pleased that his phone was viewable on a table when a call from a well-known agent came in at one social gathering.

Woodward was admired by many as an incredible commercial operator – who tightened such granular details as customer telephone wait times, which he felt was costing United money as fans hung up. His personable nature saw improved relations with the Manchester United Supporters Trust and progress in safe standing at Old Trafford.

He was good with the United beat reporters, too, and would hold a Christmas drinks event where he’d talk off the record and then see, days later, his information reported anonymously – and less than subtly – across the back pages and websites. It was all miles away from the Ferguson/Gill creed of United keeping their business to themselves.

Many United insiders simply saw him as someone who should have stayed in his lane on the commercial side and appointed an expert in football. It always felt he liked the limelight and the association with celebrities a little bit too much to take that step.

‘You could get the CEO of Starbucks taking over as CEO at BMW and it would probably work because while one business is coffee and the other is cars, the same principles apply,’ one executive says. ‘That just isn’t the case in football. It isn’t like any other business.’

The Glazers have rarely cared for what is said and written about them but Woodward would often bemoan negative press. Traditionally, at the East Stand staff entrance, newspapers would be laid out each morning with the back pages facing up. They subsequently started disappearing, often the day after a poor result.

Historically, United would circulate to executives a summary of press stories featuring the club, but the list of recipients was slimmed down dramatically – on the basis that the headlines were so depressing they were setting everyone off on the wrong foot as they began their working days.

There were times when Woodward could surely have helped himself. He managed to alienate pretty much the whole of the Class of ’92. ‘Edward Woodward has an awful lot to prove that he’s good enough at his job,’ said Paul Scholes, without expectation of evidence forthcoming.

Ridiculed for citing a 12-fold increase in Google searches for Angel Di Maria on his arrival in 2014 and ‘a 10-times increase’ in Radamel Falcao searches on the day he signed that September, Woodward never learned. He referenced a 72 per cent increase in Daley Blind’s Twitter following as evidence that United were on the up. All three players failed at Old Trafford.

United, meanwhile, tried to sign Gareth Bale four times, including the summers of 2013 and 2015, but the sheer state of uncertainty at Old Trafford put him off on at least one occasion. In terms of managers, Mauricio Pochettino was available three times during the Woodward years, but United never pressed the button.

Though he denies it, at no stage did it seem Woodward wanted to relinquish football control to a technical or football director. Transfer dealings were ponderous partly because Joel Glazer wanted to rubber stamp them all from his office in Maryland.

For a family of venture capitalists with no knowledge of football or English sport and who have chosen never to engage with the supporters of the club they own, the Glazers have shown themselves to be the very wrong kind of micro-managers.

Joel Glazer – despite having no background in football – has often expressed firm ideas on the kind of player United should sign. Often the profile would be linked to the spread of social media engagement it would farm.

Jose Mourinho’s expressed desire to get rid of the dismal Anthony Martial, meanwhile, lost all momentum once the message reached Florida. ‘Joel likes him,’ Mourinho was told.

Those who claim to know the Glazers – including their fawning biographer Tehsin Nayani – insist they are good people who care about the club. Few who have witnessed United’s fall from prominence would agree.

The Glazers’ obsession with the small details made the life of one staffer a misery on a Van Gaal summer tour of America in 2014. Having announced that they would join the tour in Detroit, family members insisted at short notice on having a specific kind of bed linen in their hotel rooms.

‘The stress of it all actually made that person cry,’ Daily Mail Sport was told.

There was some detail the Glazers have been happy to ignore, however. It didn’t seem to matter that the club’s in-house TV station – the first of its kind when launched in 1998 – was told its presenters could no longer travel to away games.

Nor were the family perturbed at how it looked when the club paid for seats and carpets to be upgraded in the directors’ box at the same time that the rest of the stadium was screaming out for basic repairs.

‘It’s always been about the bottom line for the Glazers,’ says one source. ‘Optics just don’t matter to them. They are blind to all of that.’

Part of the attraction when the Glazers bought United was the sheer size and might of the club, and it is largely this that has sustained it post-Ferguson. United have got so much wrong in the past decade. But the Glazers know the value of the asset front and centre of their portfolio. They don’t wish to let go.

The most memorable of the many protests against their ownership came in 2021. A green and gold crowd of United fans broke in to Old Trafford, postponing a game against Liverpool in the Premier League that was due to kick off a couple of hours later.

Woodward felt the brunt of some of this, too. His four-year-old daughter was knocked over in a melee. His wife suffered rape and death threats on social media. One night a gang came to his house.

‘It’s not right but it’s part of the job,’ Woodward told friends. ‘When you have an ownership and a fan group that are not aligned and you don’t have Sir Alex’s team as a buffer, that makes things harder.

‘But I don’t overthink the security thing. I told the players that when they get annihilated on social media, it’s not the people on the Stretford End. It’s people sitting in basements at their mums’ houses.’

Even without trophies – even against the backdrop of unprecedented modern failure on the field – United continue to make money. They may have fallen behind City, but they recently announced record revenues of £666.5m for the 2024-25 financial year. United’s legacy and fanbase across the world is still enormous.

The narrative recently tends to be one centred around Ratcliffe’s own uncertain stewardship. It has been a story of brutal cutbacks, redundancies and cold realities.

The Glazers hold the football club and its future in their hands, however. The task of building a new stadium is Ratcliffe’s but the profits – when they come – will be funnelled as always to Florida. It is on Ratcliffe to find the right manager and build a winning team once again. If it happens, United’s value will head north once again.

Against this background, why would the Glazers ever truly relinquish control? Why would they sell? Now Ratcliffe is involved, he gets all the hate. The Glazers kick back and hoover up the cash.

Woodward, and to a degree Arnold who followed, were always acutely aware of how United looked to the world. Hence Woodward taking a photograph of the scoreboard as Moyes’ United lost meekly at Olympiacos in spring 2014.

He wanted a reference point of how bad things got for him to look at when they got better in the future.

Woodward had no idea that United were only at the start of their long and ignominious descent. It’s a train that keeps rolling south but the Glazers are still onboard.