Manchester United are, once again, a club in turmoil. The club sits 18th in the Premier League, manager Michael Carrick is under mounting pressure and the fans’ anger at both the Glazer family and INEOS is more vociferous than ever.

Inevitably, stories regarding a potential sale of the club have begun to circulate. ESPN reported last month that the Glazer family were waiting for the ideal moment to sell their majority stake, whilst Paul Scholes has publicly backed a David Beckham-led bid to take control of the club.

These reports beg the question – how much would Manchester United be worth and who, realistically, would want to buy the club?

Price is, in some ways, the simpler question. INEOS purchased a 25% stake in the club in February 2024 for approximately £1.2 billion, giving the club an implied valuation of £4.8 billion.

Revenue in the year immediately prior to Ratcliffe’s investment was £648.4m, meaning the transaction applied a revenue multiple of roughly 7.4x. This is largely in line with the revenue multiples applied for the Chelsea and Liverpool transactions which occurred earlier this year.

Applying that 7.4x revenue multiple to United’s most recent reported revenue figures – £677.6m in 2025/26 – gives a total valuation of roughly £5 billion. Of course, the club will likely argue that the revenue figure used to calculate the valuation should be the projected revenue figure for 2026/27, which will likely be more than £700m due to the return of Champions League football.

But given the club’s poor start to the campaign, the chances of Champions League football remaining at Old Trafford next season appear slim. Any purchaser will therefore likely push for the revenues of this season to be treated as an anomaly.

The club is not therefore, by conventional metrics, significantly more valuable than when the INEOS group took a minority stake in 2024. The expectation would be that it transacts at a value somewhere between £5 billion and £5.5 billion.

Who would buy the club is less straightforward. There are, broadly, three groups which could conceivably do so.

The first, and most obvious, is INEOS. Ratcliffe’s company already owns almost 29% of United and has run the club’s football operations since 2024. Reports have indicated that the club’s financing arrangements – under which certain loans can be repaid early from June 2029 without penalties being incurred – imply that 2029 may be the year Ratcliffe’s group looks to take full control of the club.

An extension of their commitment to Manchester United would however be contrary to INEOS’ current strategy of retreating from football investments. The company has put its Swiss Super League team Lausanne-Sport up for sale. It has also been seeking to sell OGC Nice for over a year, having drastically cut the original €250m asking price for the Ligue 1 side. Taking full control of Manchester United – and committing to underwrite any future losses of the club – would be surprising given Ratcliffe’s seeming retrenchment from professional football clubs.

An alternative potential purchaser would be one of the groups from the Middle East that have long held an interest in the club. Qatari royal Sheikh Jassim sought to buy the club in 2023, whilst reports have suggested that groups from Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the UAE have all enquired more recently about a potential deal.

Again however, there are indications that capital is not flowing as freely from the Middle East into Western sports projects as it once did. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund have scaled back their investment in Newcastle United, whilst also pulling out entirely of the LIV Golf project. With tensions and violence escalating in the Middle East, it may be that the Saudis and other potential Middle Eastern investors deem that their attention would be better spent elsewhere rather than in attempting to revive Manchester United’s fortunes.

The final – and perhaps most likely option – is a consortium backed by American private capital and fronted by former players of the club. The Jeff Bezos-backed consortium which agreed to buy a minority stake in Liverpool earlier this year indicates that there is serious interest amongst wealthy American families in owning a share of Europe’s biggest football clubs. Paul Scholes has already suggested that such a bid could be fronted by David Beckham, who is by now well versed in football club ownership having been a co-owner of Inter Miami since 2014.

Of course, the Glazers do not have to sell at all. The last sale process in 2023 ended not with a sale of the whole club, but with Ratcliffe acquiring a minority stake. Former United midfielder Nicky Butt has suggested that the family values the club at around £8 billion, and they have made it clear in previous processes that they will not be pushed unwillingly to a valuation they do not agree with.

Regardless, if the Glazers do decide to sell, they are unlikely to find a bidding war. The more likely scenario is a narrow field of buyers in no hurry to commit, and therefore the family may have to weigh up whether they would accept a price closer to £5 billion.