From a safe distance in Florida, out of the line of fire, the Glazer family are happy for others to let it be known they are disenchanted with how they believe the British businessman who paid them £1.5billion for a minority share in Manchester United has mismanaged the club.

‘It’s a travesty and not what they expected or were promised,’ a source with a social connection to the family tells Daily Mail Sport of Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s disastrous custodianship. ‘They have never run the club this way.’ 

Another source told the US broadcaster ESPN this week that the Glazers believe Ratcliffe ‘couldn't have masterminded a worse situation’. His ‘downgrading in all departments’ at Old Trafford was ‘the opposite of what he said his strategy is’.

It would be unwise to characterise this Glazer concern as sentiment. Cash is the motivating factor, just as always. United are two points off the bottom of the Premier League ahead of Saturday’s trip to Chelsea and the $6bn (£4.5bn) valuation which the Glazers put on the club when seeking a buyer, four years ago, is looking more unrealistic than ever.

The Glazers control any sale. A clause in their deal with Ratcliffe, completed in 2024, lets them force him out of his 28 per cent stake – and out of the entire landscape – if they sell the club to a third party, without him having any say, unless he can match that offer and buy the entire club himself. Which is highly improbable.

Whatever displeasure they might feel, they can’t buy back Ratcliffe’s piece of the United pie. But from next February, Ratcliffe will be powerless to stop them selling the entire club for a price lower than the $33 (£25) a share he paid for his chunk. As of Thursday, the United share price was just $20.77 (£15.60).

Ratcliffe’s Ineos are cutting their losses in football. They put their Swiss club FC Lausanne-Sport up for sale this week and have slashed the asking price for their French club Nice. 

They could sell their chunk of United to someone else if at least two of Ineos’ three shareholders – Ratcliffe and company co-founders Andrew Currie and John Reece – agree to it. The Glazers, for their part, may want to see United’s new stadium built, hiking up the value, before selling. That might not be completed until 2035.

More than ever, the Glazers are absentee landlords. A family with far bigger fish to fry than their struggling Premier League asset where fans sing against them. A family who have been extremely active elsewhere while Old Trafford burns.

In February, Avram Glazer, one of the six siblings, bid $1.32bn (£1bn) for the Royal Challengers Bengaluru franchise in cricket's Indian Premier League, where the enormous market and broadcasting rights deals have seen stratospheric returns on investment. Only as the franchise’s valuation approached a prohibitive $2bn (£1.5bn) did Glazer withdraw. His bid for the Rajasthan Royals was also retracted.

And then there is the love of the Glazers’ lives – their Tampa Bay Buccaneers NFL franchise – where their active involvement provides a striking contrast to their loveless 21-year ownership of United. 

While the family have managed to go all these years without a single meaningful UK media interview about United – Avram Glazer hastily climbed into his Aston Martin and drove off when doorstepped by a Sky TV reporter in Florida, five years ago – a recent Amazon series about the Buccaneers provided a rare glimpse into the world of these billionaires.

Like so many such series, Raise the Flags is sanitised and glossy, with Ed Glazer, another of the siblings, one of its executive producers. But it paints a revealing picture of how the NFL-mad Glazers tried and failed for years to buy into the sport, which was intrinsic to the siblings’ childhoods, until the death of Bucs owner Hugh Culverhouse finally gave Malcolm Glazer, their father, his chance in 1995. 

They were seen as saviours at a franchise which was ridiculed for always losing and at risk of relocation to Baltimore, Maryland, 1,000 miles away. They transformed it, appointing rookie coach Tony Dungy and even changing the colours from garish neon orange to red and pewter grey.    

Joel Glazer, who last visited Old Trafford in 2019, becomes emotional as he tells filmmakers about the team’s legendary win under Dungy, against the San Francisco 49ers in 1997, which set them on the way from hapless also-rans to two-time Super Bowl winners. 

‘You know, you felt we’d turned the corner,’ he says, his voice breaking. There is an authenticity about this.

The Bucs, not Manchester United, is what gets these brothers out of bed in the morning. It’s what they spend their own money on – and that will include a $1bn (£750m) rebuild of the team’s Raymond James stadium – the ‘RayJay’ – which is old, dated and lacks the roof required for Tampa to host a lucrative Super Bowl. Within two months, the Glazers and the Bucs will outline plans for the overhaul, to conform with a deadline for a lease extension on the ground. 

United have their own stadium plans, of course. But the Glazers didn’t even attend the event at Old Trafford in March 2025, at which architect Sir Norman Foster’s proposals, with their distinctive, canopy-like roof, were presented.

While United are a globally recognised brand and the Bucs are a franchise little known beyond the US, there is no doubt which of these two Glazer sports businesses holds most financial value. 

The wild expectation that United would fetch $6bn was born of the values of NFL franchises such as Washington Commanders, on the market for $8bn (£6bn) at the time they put United up for sale. The Commanders were eventually sold for $6.05bn (£4.45bn) to a consortium led by Josh Harris, who also has a big chunk of Crystal Palace. There was no offer anywhere in that vicinity for United.

In part, NFL teams have become so valuable because of a US tax break which allows owners to claim tax deductions on things their teams own or pay for and shrink the amount of profit they pay tax on. It means billionaire owners like the Glazers can end up paying a lower percentage of their income in tax than the workers who keep the stadium running.

In the NFL, the Seattle Seahawks were sold in early September for $9.6bn (£7.2bn), a world record for a sports franchise that lasted just a few days until basketball’s LA Lakers changed hands for $12.5bn (£9.3bn) – more than double United’s industry valuation. 

With a precious NFL asset to protect and build, United, whose football operations have been ceded to Ratcliffe, are a minor consideration.

Though the Amazon series is PR-friendly and soft focus, it offers an intriguing insight into what active Glazer involvement can look like. When the first draft under their ownership takes place, some of the brothers are in the Buccaneers ‘War Room’ witnessing the squad being built. 

When Coach Dungy struggles with no wins in five in his second season and faces a critique like the one Michael Carrick is now encountering, the Glazers call him in for lunch. Rather than tell him he is fired – as he expects – they talk things over for four hours and put him at ease. Dungy’s testimony corroborates the notion that they helped him.

Joel Glazer was often seen as a meddling man of interference at United, prior to Ratcliffe moving in. He would ask for higher fees and drive harder deals when executive chairman Ed Woodward or others were trying to negotiate. 

The family never wanted an Amazon documentary about United and only now, under Ratcliffe, has the streaming business got into the corridors of the club. The Glazers’ key United manoeuvres, still very much going on, take place behind closed doors.

The evidence of the past year points to them continuing to use the club as collateral to secure huge loans which helps them invest in other parts of their business empire, according to a study by the respected football finance expert Paul Quinn, popularly known as ‘The Esk’.

Quinn highlights a UK Companies House filing from February, ‘Charge 0018’, through which United took out a Bank of America mortgage against land near Old Trafford, and other club assets, to potentially generate cash for the Glazers. The loan arrangement, taking United’s maximum credit facility up to £400m, came a few weeks before Avram Glazer submitted his huge bids for an IPL franchise. 

There is no evidence that the new borrowing secured by Charge 0018 funded an IPL bid, or that Manchester United’s money was used to finance one.

More than ever, it is the Glazers’ own elusive cash that the club need. That new £2billion stadium won’t build itself and though there are plenty of ways of finding the money, the Financial Times has pointed out while listing them that they will ‘not come cheap’.

Tapping into the bond market as Barcelona did to finance their $1.5bn upgrade of Camp Nou would leave the club more exposed to global interest rates. Private equity funds would want a major pay-back when the stadium is built, limiting United’s capacity to earn from the new structure.

The Tampa Bay Buccaneers play Atlanta Falcons at the RayJay on Sunday and there can be no doubt that some of the Glazer brothers will be there. Bryan, Joel and Avram were in the team locker room after last weekend’s win at the Carolina Panthers, by all accounts smiling and clapping as coach Todd Bowles spoke. 

They hardly ever watch United these days and will certainly not be at Stamford Bridge to see Carrick fighting for his future. Their Premier League asset is an inconvenience, loaded down with debt payments, running up losses for the past seven years and, on Ratcliffe’s watch, reduced to selling clumps of Old Trafford turf for £125. 

Where are the Glazers? More than 4,000 miles away from all that.