Former Manchester United chairman Martin Edwards expects supporters to be furious with Avram Glazer’s comments on the club and has accused the owners of getting their priorities wrong.

The Athletic report that Glazer made a controversial point while speaking to financiers at Deutsche Bank’s inaugural Sports Investment Conference in London in September.

One of the owners of the Red Devils compared Manchester United to the New York Yankees and Dallas Cowboys as a brand that will remain commercially successful irrespective of how well they are performing on the pitch.

Edwards, who was chairman of Manchester United from 1980-2003, expects fans to react badly to that sentiment and has encouraged the current owners to train all their focus on improving the team.

‘I heard that this morning and I thought “By Jove, what’s the reaction going to be from the supporters?” Supporters don’t want to hear that!’ Edwards said on talkSPORT.

‘Supporters want to hear that you’re winning trophies. They’re not interested in profits or dividends or what people are taking out of the club. They want the club to be successful, they want the best players, they’d rather be spending money on the team than on the new stadium.’

Edwards accepts that running a club the size of Manchester United is a tricky business and owners must satisfy various stakeholders, but he feels the balance is currently off.

‘When I was running United, I always felt I had three responsibilities, really,’ he said. ‘One: in those days we were still developing the ground, so I had to build the ground and develop the ground. Look after the team, which is always the most important. But also, because we were public we had to pay dividends and keep the shareholders happy.

‘It’s a balance. Running a football club is a complete balance, from top to balance. It’s a question of whether you get it right or wrong.’

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He added: ‘I think it’s quite clear, in my eyes, that the team is the most important element at the moment. You’ve got to get the team right and forget new stadiums if you’re not going to fill them. Get the team winning again and get the supporters behind you. We’re not a united front at the moment.’

The landscape of top flight football has changed considerably since Edwards was in charge at Manchester United and he believes it has not all been for the better.

‘You’ve got owners now who don’t attend games. They put somebody in charge, whatever else,’ he said. ‘Existing owners now, they wouldn’t know who’s in the team.

‘It’s become big business and what you can get out of it. The game has changed and for the older ones of us it’s disappointing, really, the direction it’s gone.’

Looking back to the start of Manchester United’s decline as a title-challenging force in the Premier League, Edwards suggests it was the loss of Alex Ferguson and CEO David Gill in 2013 and Ed Woodward being named as Gill’s replacement.

‘Once Alec and David Gill decided to leave in 2013, that was a huge blow to the club and they’ve never really recovered from that,’ he said.

‘If you wanted to be critical you’d say right from the beginning when they replaced David Gill, they replaced him with not a football man, but a merchant banker.

‘If you’ve got the top of the football chain who’s not converse with football, that does make it difficult. I think that once the mistakes start, they multiply.

‘Recruitment has been a big problem. Look at the players they’ve bought, some of them haven’t been up to the standard. Generally it snowballs. That’s been the problem.

‘Also, have United spent enough money to be able to compete at the top? Manchester City have had a huge advantage in the short-term because they haven’t been sticking to the rules and other people have. That’s given them a huge advantage, so we probably couldn’t have competed with them, but we could certainly have competed with Liverpool and Arsenal and whatever else.’