Roberto Mancini's dismissal for missing targets shows the ruthless nature in the business of holistic ideals

In Roberto Mancini's Guardian interview with Daniel Taylor in February, the Manchester City manager was comfortable enough to wave away speculation he would be replaced, to criticise his players and emphasise his direct line to the club's owner in Abu Dhabi. "Txiki and Ferran? They are not above me," he said of Begiristain and Soriano, City's director of football and chief executive respectively. "Above me there is only Khaldoon [al-Mubarak, the chairman] and Sheikh Mansour." That was true, on a strict reading of where the power lies at the new Manchester City.

Three months later, it was Al Mubarak who returned from an underwhelming Wembley performance to the Arabian gulf and agreed with Mansour that they should sack the Italian. The Abu Dhabi sheikh, who has invested £1bn into City and been to watch them once, does hold ultimate power at the club.

The worldwide passion for football means that City are the most visible, watched, pored-over projection of Abu Dhabi's image, but the regime have organised the club in accordance with their approach to all major business projects. Mansour, of the Al Nahyan family, dynastic rulers of the emirate for centuries, has provided the money from his share of the oil fortunes which gushed into Abu Dhabi from the 1960s. The rulers set the task to be achieved – broadly, to modernise the country from desert land to sustainable developed state, and in this case, take a mid-table Premier League football club and build it into a winner, up with the best in Europe.

Among Al Mubarak's senior business and political roles, he is the chairman of Abu Dhabi's executive affairs authority, which advises on the country's strategy and "brand", reporting to the crown prince, Mansour's older brother, Sheikh Mohammed. They have always emphasised that City was Mansour's own private equity purchase. It was only after the emirate's rulers experienced the tidal wave of publicity football generates, that Al Mubarak was brought in to shape the project.

So City, for so long written up as the authentic Manchester alternative to corporate United, became a vehicle for the promotion of Abu Dhabi; broadcasting the name of Etihad, the country's tourist authority, ("Travellers Welcome") to a global audience on the hoardings round the pitch. Al Mubarak, US-university educated, is tasked with a 10-year plan, to make the investment worth more than the £1bn Mansour has already spent. The chairman has other duties, including running the multi-billion pound Mubadala Development Company, which looks for businesses to generate returns for Abu Dhabi's great sovereign wealth.

Beneath Mansour and Al Mubarak is a senior board of six. The board meets on flying visits; in Manchester, or in Abu Dhabi, or, as before the FA Cup final, in London, and receive progress reports from the senior management team appointed to oversee day-to-day the transformation of City from the creaking infrastructure they bought in 2008.

They quickly implemented a director of football structure, having observed that the modern Premier League football operation is too multi-faceted for the manager alone to oversee. The role ensures smooth running and improvement, from recruiting children to the academy, through the medical staff, performance analysis, player care, to negotiating Yaya Touré's £10m salary. They consider that Brian Marwood, criticised by Mancini for not buying him the A-list players he wanted, did a good job, and that he is making progress in his new role of academy director.

Mancini's demanding approach, his criticism of players and of Marwood, essentially because City did not sign Robin van Persie, were all tolerated while the team made progress. It is not true that Malaga's Manuel Pellegrini was being lined up as soon as Begiristain arrived in October, but as the season stalled, the review awaiting Mancini looked more ominous. In lining up Mancini to replace Mark Hughes in December 2009, they showed they were not prepared to be without a manager, so Begiristain had to be ready with an alternative. His error was to meet Pellegrini's agent in public, starting all the rumours that reached a painful pitch the morning Mancini led his team out in the Wembley drizzle. A rousing Cup final performance may have persuaded Al Mubarak that Mancini could keep the team progressing, but the listlessness from last season's stalwarts such as Touré, sealed Mancini's fate.

No final decision was made until Al Mubarak returned to Abu Dhabi on Monday and met Mansour. With Mancini waiting at a London hotel, Al Mubarak called to tell him his stint in Manchester was over. The announcement came, at 10:25pm UK time, while United, Van Persie, and Sir Alex Ferguson after his 27 years of longevity, were winding down after their victory parade.

There was widespread guffawing at City's use of the word "holistic," although interestingly, not so much scoffing at the statement that "targets" had not been met, which prompted outrage when Hughes was sacked. Holistic is not just new age waffle; it does mean something: individual parts interconnected to make a functioning whole. The word also appears to have stood in obliquely for any criticism of Mancini, of his management style. Instead, he was thanked extensively for his contribution to the new Manchester City – thanks seen as empty when delivered in a public notice that he was peremptorily sacked.

Pellegrini is expected to sign up as soon as the Spanish season is over. Begiristain will work with him straight away on plans for the squad, although the principal job will be to ensure the current stars play better, together. Plans were revealed to build another 6,000 seats at the Etihad Stadium, potentially to include some cheaper tickets, an onward-and-upward message to the fans. There is a tour to the US, where Mansour also fancies buying an MLS team. By Thursday, Mancini's friend and assistant David Platt had left, and his five Italian coaching staff were gone. Patrick Vieira, who has worked for two years at City, was elevated to head of the under-21 team and youth development.

City fans are still coming to terms with the sacking of this most successful manager in generations. They admired Mancini's style and existential need to win, and loved him for delivering – just – that first league championship in 44 years. So many feel his treatment was too harsh and unnecessarily humiliating. For Abu Dhabi, and the new City culture, Mancini, who was not holistic enough, is gone, and they are all moving on.

David Conn's book, Richer Than God: Manchester City, Modern Football and Growing Up, is now out in paperback.

• Manchester City
• Roberto Mancini

Tottenham's income is dwarfed by Arsenal's and they will struggle to sustain their elite status unless they make top four

Should Arsène Wenger lose his formidable record of 15 straight seasons in the Champions League and be beaten to the fourth qualifying spot by Arsenal's north London rivals Tottenham Hotspur on Sunday , the hit will be tougher in football terms than financially.

For André Villas-Boas's side, if they beat Sunderland at home and Arsenal fail to beat Newcastle away, a return to the Champions League will make a greater financial difference. Extraordinary as it seems, Spurs make fully £100m less income than the club with whom their fans most closely wish to compare themselves. The booming cash from the Emirates Stadium's 60,000 seats and executive plushness, including the Champions League ties themselves, pushed Arsenal's matchday income to £95m in 2011-12, more than three times that of Spurs at still 36,534-capacity old White Hart Lane. Arsenal made £245m last year, including £85m from TV and broadcasting, which includes Champions League income. Spurs made £144m altogether, a huge gap.

Last season Uefa harvested a total £1.1bn from the worldwide broadcasting rights of this most seductive club competition, and from selling its platform of sponsorships to Adidas, Ford, Gazprom, Mastercard and the other corporations.

Uefa distributed £865m of that Champions League money to the participating clubs, 55% in fixed amounts for those in the tournament from the group stage. The other 45% is paid in proportion to the size of a club's national television market – how much their broadcasters contributed to the overall TV total. England is one of the biggest markets, so our clubs do well from this "pool" payment.

Arsenal qualified from the Champions League play-offs last season and made it to the round of 16, where they lost 4-3 to Milan on aggregate, having lost 4-0 away at San Siro. Their share of the Uefa Champions League income was £28m, less than half the £60m Chelsea earned from winning the trophy.

The five home matches played earned the Gunners healthy income on top of that, although the club's accounts do not break down how much they make from each match. So although as a proportion of the overall £245m income Arsenal would survive decently enough without Champions League participation, it would be a serious blow.

Spurs' Champions League run to quarter-final defeat in 2010-11 was a landmark boost to the club's football pride, and a financial one, too. They made £25m more from Uefa distributions that season than in 2011-12, when they played in the far less lucrative Europa League. Overall last year Spurs' income dropped 12% to £19m, from £163m to £144m.

This season Uefa estimated its gross Champions League income is £1.34bn, of which 75%, £1bn, will be shared among the clubs. With Arsenal and Manchester United knocked out in the round of 16, and Chelsea and Manchester City gone in the group stage, no English club will have earned dramatically this year as Chelsea did in 2011-12.

So, as Uefa itself argues, the financial benefits of playing in the competition can be exaggerated. As it accounts for around 10-15% of a Premier League club's income, that means 85%-90% of the rich clubs' earnings are made in domestic football, and that percentage will be even higher next season given the projected increase in the Premier League's own TV deals.

Nevertheless, the Champions League earnings are still significant, helping to take the top four clubs into a tier financially above those outside European competition. Spurs will have difficulty sustaining top-four status until they can make more money consistently, with the long-proposed new stadium integral to that plan. Arsenal's commercial success and filling of the Emirates has been based to some extent on their continuous qualification for the Champions League.

It raises a club's status, and its ability to keep its stars such as Gareth Bale and Jack Wilshere, when players are competing in the most prestigious of tournaments, and broadcasts their virtues around the world. For all these reasons, not just the money, they all very much want to be in it.

• Champions League
• Arsenal
• Tottenham Hotspur
• Finances
• Business

• Premier League chief accused of 'unduly interfering'
• Solidarity payments the issue in light of parachute payments

The Premier League has been accused of heavy-handedness with Football League clubs in the tortuous negotiations about how much of its forthcoming TV billions it will share with the rest of football. In a stormy Football League meeting at Walsall on Wednesday, some clubs accused the Premier League's chief executive, Richard Scudamore, of unjust interference with the Football League's freedom to run itself.

The row broke out over the Football League's proposals to close the financial gap in the Championship. With the Premier League's 2013-16 TV deals expected to reap £5.5bn, clubs relegated to the Championship will be paid substantially increased parachute payments to £59m over four years.

That vastly exceeds the money paid to other Championship clubs competing with them, from the league's own TV deal, which is £195m a year from 2012-15, just 3.5% of the Premier League's deal. Each championship club receives £2m a year from that Football League TV deal. Three years ago, the Premier League began to make a payment to the Football League in an attempt to narrow the gap slightly, so the clubs who do not receive parachute payments receive £2m in "solidarity".

Because parachute payments are due to go up by around 45% from the last deal, the Football League proposed two ways in which the financial gap with clubs in the championship might be eased. The first was that relegated Premier League clubs would no longer receive their £2m a year share of the Football League's own TV money, and instead that would be redistributed to the other clubs in the Championship. The second was a proposed salary cap, limiting spending on wages to £16m for relegated clubs in the first year, then reducing to £10m in 2014-15, and £8m in 2015-16.

Greg Clarke, the Football League chairman, had informed Scudamore of these proposals and asked for his view of them. At 9:30am, before the meeting was due to start at 11am, Scudamore emailed Clarke to say that if either proposal was implemented he would withdraw the current offer of "solidarity" money and review it – Scudamore was saying he would pull the money the Premier League pays to the Football League if the Championship clubs voted for the proposals.

Several clubs are understood to have objected to this, arguing that Scudamore was unduly interfering with their right to decide how to share money. A majority of clubs voted in favour of a motion that they would have passed the two proposals had Scudamore not threatened to withdraw the offer. However, as they faced losing the "solidarity" money, they withdrew the proposals.

The Football League declined to comment when asked about the meeting. A Premier League spokesman said of Scudamore's position: "A generous solidarity offer has been made to the Football League; however if the basis on which that original offer was made materially changes, then it is reasonable to review it."

• Premier League
• Football League
• Football politics
• Finances
• Business

• After doctors and plumbers, taxman targets coaches
• HMRC working with FA to seek out undeclared income

Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs has opened a new front in the battle to collect the £32bn in tax it estimates goes unpaid in Britain every year – pursuing football coaches. HMRC has written to 3,300 coaches understood to have a Uefa level qualification – the more professional end of the game – calling on them to disclose and pay any outstanding tax or face possible criminal charges. The Football Association, which was under a legal obligation to co-operate, has supplied the names and addresses of the 3,300 licensed coaches.

In HMRC's letter, seen by the Guardian, the 3,300 people, which will include some well-qualified coaches working part-time at semi-professional level, up to the biggest clubs, are urged to come forward "or face more than a red card".

The letter suggests that some coaches, many of whom work odd hours at different clubs, are not declaring some or all of the money they make, and that tax will be owing. "I am sharing with you the fact that we have received extensive data about coaches from sources in the football community," the letter says. It calls on coaches to declare unpaid tax, "Before we complete our risk assessment of that data". HMRC warns: "We don't want to catch you offside when we risk assess our data."

The focus on football coaches follows similar campaigns aimed at specific occupations where HMRC believes earnings go undeclared, including doctors and dentists, plumbers and electricians. Those who come forward to declare previous earnings will have to pay the outstanding tax, any interest due if it is late, and a penalty of around 10% of the tax owing. HMRC's position is that if people do not come forward voluntarily, and are later found to have undeclared earnings and unpaid tax, they will have to pay the tax, interest, a penalty of up to 100% and face a possible criminal investigation.

"Most football coaches pay the tax they owe, but any coach who has not told HMRC about all of their income should do so now before we come to them," a spokesman said. "This is a chance for football coaches to get onside with their tax affairs."

HMRC would not say how much money its sources suggested has been paid to football coaches and not declared as income. It says its campaign to reclaim unpaid tax from a series of occupations under its "tax catch up plan" has so far yielded £547m from voluntary disclosures, and £140m claimed after investigations. Thirteen criminal investigations are under way, with five convictions secured, including a Surrey plumber sentenced to 12 months in prison in July for evading £50,000 income tax on five years working without declaring his earnings.

The FA at first worked with HMRC on an information initiative to encourage coaches to come forward voluntarily and disclose any tax owing. That scheme closed in the summer, then in December the FA contacted coaches again, in co-operation with HMRC, to clarify that they should disclose any tax owing.

HMRC clearly believes football coaching involves significant earnings, perhaps by coaches moonlighting or working at several different clubs, which are not declared. Yet the best-paid coaches with full-time jobs are unlikely to be vulnerable because they will be on salaries with the tax paid by clubs via PAYE.

There has been criticism of HMRC, including by the tax campaign UK Uncut, for focussing on specific occupations, some modestly paid and for relatively minor sums of money, while major multinational companies avoid what HMRC has estimated at £32bn in tax due.

• Finances
• Business

Audio versions of a selection of articles from the Guardian newspaper and website

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In this week's edition:

• Ohio kidnapping: What makes men take women and children prisoner? by Paul Harris and Ed Pilkington. Click here to read article.

• Murder of an Italian paparazzo: a tale of bunga bunga, blackmail and organised crime by Tobias Jones. Click here to read article.

• How the Russians came to Hogwarts by Luke Harding. Click here to read article.

• 1963: from the Stones to Dr Strangelove, a year of social and cultural upheaval by Tariq Ali. Click here to read article.

* Sir Alex Ferguson hands over control of relentless red empire he built by David Conn. Click here to read article.

And in our audiobook review we turn to life writing, with Simon Armitage's Walking Home and Julian Barnes's Levels of Life.

The Guardian Audio Edition is supported by Audible.co.uk. To listen to the audiobooks reviewed in this week's edition go to audible.co.uk/guardianaudio.

• Audiobooks

Manchester City's owners did not want to sack the Italian but his lack of progression this season left them with little choice

Manchester City's hierarchy did not want to be ending this season sacking Roberto Mancini, the absolute proof of that is in the five-year contract they gave him last summer, which now looks unwise or over-optimistic, depending on your perspective.

Their late-night statement, clinical as it seems, with that characteristic, lethal line that "targets" were missed this season, did tell the truth. They were intending to review Mancini's performance at the end of the season, but given the shape it was taking, the public meeting with Manuel Pellegrini's agent sounding out the potential successor, then the FA Cup final washout, it became impossible to keep Mancini for two more games.

That would have repeated the "dead man walking" humiliation of Mark Hughes, sent out to manage City at home to Sunderland in December 2009 with the decision already taken to sack him after the match and Mancini lined up as his replacement.

Although City's director of football, Txiki Begiristain, has talked to Pellegrini in detail, there were still shades of grey before the weekend. Had City torn into Wigan Athletic, the players observably giving everything for the manager, Mancini might have been salvaged. If City had beaten Wigan, one of the targets, to win a domestic trophy, would have been fulfilled. Instead, for the chairman, Khaldoon al-Mubarak, the pallid Wembley performance and defeat by Wigan's skill and greater desire sealed a season that fell below expectation.

"Despite everyone's best efforts, the club has failed to achieve any of its stated targets this year," went the statement's killer line, "with the exception of qualification for next season's Uefa Champions League."

The targets included at least qualifying from the Champions League group stage this season, not finishing a resounding bottom, a crucial disappointment. The same line about targets unfulfilled was in the statement announcing the end of Hughes, to whom, like Mancini, Sheikh Mansour and Mubarak will argue they gave total backing in money, resources and encouragement.

Outside of City, where the supporters almost unanimously welcomed Sheikh Mansour, his oil millions and the club's transformation, the takeover has been widely reviled. Hans-Joachim Watzke, the chief executive of Borussia Dortmund, City's conquerors in the Champions League group and finalists at Wembley on 25 May, has sneered at the idea of sheikhs taking over a city's club, saying his supporters, who control their club, would never entertain it.

English football freely allows its historic clubs to be bought and sold, permitting buyers with no previous connection to pump money in and chase success. City in 2008 were the Premier League project for which Sheikh Mansour had been waiting and Mubarak, a senior political operator in Abu Dhabi, has wrapped the Manchester club into marketing a glamorous, modern image of success for the dynastic desert emirate. Having spent more than £1bn they do not expect to be at Wembley ashen-faced, watching a limp defeat in front of a global audience.

They work to targets and plans and are used to their money ensuring their projects are completed. At City they have a 10-year plan; to become a top-ranking European club by 2018 and be sustainable, financially and in football terms, the £140m academy "campus" being built near the Etihad Stadium producing dividends. On the way are shorter-term targets and, the Premier League narrowly won, this season's was to do better, not go backwards.

Mancini has not greatly helped himself by complaining so publicly about his lot, despite the great resources bestowed on him. He has blamed players repeatedly, Brian Marwood and, bizarrely after the Cup final defeat, Vicky Kloss, the club's head of communications, for not scotching the true stories that her own bosses were considering his future.

Marwood has been a loyal and trusted servant of the Abu Dhabi regime. They decided from the beginning they wanted a director of football-style structure to run the sprawling modern operation, from academy children to signing star players, leaving Hughes, then Mancini, to concentrate on the first team.

Marwood was recruited for the role and he sealed the deals for the players who won the Premier League last season. Mancini criticised Marwood for last summer's transfer activity, when City lost out to Manchester United for Robin van Persie, but the striker said he chose United not for money but to be where he ultimately was when Mancini was sacked, dancing a jig with the Premier League trophy. Mancini's complaints might have been more credible had he not already been provided with Sergio Agüero for £38m, Edin Dzeko for £27m and Mancini's own protege Mario Balotelli for £24m, to combine with Carlos Tevez, signed in 2009 for £45m.

The players who were bought, albeit in an end-of-window flurry, Maicon, Javi García, Matija Nastasic, Scott Sinclair and Jack Rodwell, were all on Mancini's approved list, club sources say, if lower down than his most wanted targets.

When Marwood's role was taken over by Txiki Begiristain, the former Barcelona director of football, the assumption was that Marwood had been moved sideways for these transfer failures. City have always said this was not so. The academy had become a job in itself, they say, and Marwood opted to do that, working on developing young players.

City landed the former Barcelona chief executive, Ferran Soriano, and many thought the two former Barça men's recruitment looked a threat to the Italian, especially with Pep Guardiola on sabbatical and looming over any potential vacancies at Europe's top clubs. But Mancini had the backing of Mansour and Mubarak, who gave him that five-year contract after Agüero won the title for City with his 94th-minute winner in last season's final game against Queens Park Rangers.

Mancini took care to say publicly he did not work for Begiristain and Soriano, that he had a direct line to Mubarak, which was true. Yet Mancini, so appealing a football man in so many ways and whom City's fans have embraced, has gradually been judged not to have progressed since last season, then blamed other people for his team's shortcomings.

Criticising players openly, notably Samir Nasri, and falling out with others, including the talismanic captain, Vincent Kompany, has created a fractious atmosphere. The coveted stars of modern football do not want to work like that. Last season's long stand-off with Tevez, through which the owners backed Mancini completely, was nevertheless spectacularly disruptive and devoured large portions of everybody's time.

Ultimately, as Mubarak said of Hughes's tenure, they wanted it to work. These businessmen finally act when they believe it is not working as well as it should and there is no great prospect of things improving. They do not intend to be without a manager, hence the discussions with Pellegrini. They argue that this happens routinely in football, except they were caught out because Begiristain met Pellegrini's agent in public.

City's owners and board believe sacking Hughes has been vindicated and that Mancini took them to a new level. This season, difficult and ruthless as it looks, they concluded Mancini's limitations have been terminally exposed. Now they are eyeing a new man, with an excellent record in Europe, who might take them on to their next set of targets.

• Manchester City
• Roberto Mancini
• Sheikh Mansour

For so long Manchester United's ruthless emperor, Sir Alex Ferguson suddenly looked vulnerable as he said farewell

One of the many banners at a sentiment-soaked Old Trafford, red paint on a white sheet, said simply: "Sir Alex: Immortal." Football, and Manchester United in particular, does immortalise its legends, with statues, histories, the naming of stands, yet throughout this long, celebratory farewell, Sir Alex Ferguson looked very human, even a little vulnerable. There he was at the centre of this huge, red empire he worked that relentless 27 years to build: just one elderly man, in his overcoat, retiring for his wife after the death of her sister.

The speech he gave on the pitch at the end was unscripted and so not crafted by any spin doctor to perfectly frame the themes of this great modern football leave-taking. Instead, alone in front of 76,000 supporters waving Champions flags in the steepling stands, and the Premier League's millions watching around the world, he kept it simple, as, in some ways, he has throughout his time at the heart of United. He thanked the crowd, reminded them with humility that he might have been long, long gone had Mark Robins not scored the winner for United in an FA Cup tie at Nottingham Forest in 1990 when Ferguson was on the brink of the sack.

"When we had bad times, the club stood by me," he remembered, skipping the 13 league championships and two Champions Leagues he stayed on to win. Then, typically, he looked ahead: instructing the fans to stand by his successor, David Moyes, who must walk into all this and achieve just as much.

Where might United be now had Robins, now the Huddersfield Town manager, not grabbed that winner and the club decided to keep their newish Scots manager on? How many more short stints of United managers listed below Ferguson in the Sky Sports Football Yearbook, how many fewer championships won, how much less national and global dominance by United and the Premier League itself.

Instead, as millions of words have attested since the news of his retirement broke on Tuesday night, United kept him, and he stayed, not only to build great teams, but to have a new incarnation of a football club constructed all around him. His statue, round the other side of the ground from the forecourt over which Sir Matt Busby's bronze gazes benevolently, has him with arms folded, a more businesslike pose.

He stands above the entrance to United's money-spinning museum and tour centre and Red Cafe, and three expensive ways to watch football: in the Manchester Suite, Platinum Lounge and Salford Suites. Busby stands over the megastore, a slight irony, given that United took the souvenir shop back from him after he opposed the Edwards family's rights issue of 1978, an action which signalled the start of determined money-making by successive owners out of United.

It had sold out of programmes, and queues for the stalls in the rain outside stretched back 20 yards, for the souvenir copy, the one to keep and pass on to the grandkids, which said on the front: Thank you Sir Alex. That is what Manchester United FC – and Manchester United plc (Cayman Islands) – have been saying all week, simply that, with a hashtag in front of it for the 659 million Twitter followers they now claim to have.

It never was true, as the myth-making had it when Ferguson began building his dynasty, that all United fans were spread around the south, nor, as lifelong fans began to grumble, "day-trippers" from abroad. The 76,000 scurrying into Old Trafford looked as they always do, mostly Manchester stock, not greatly gentrified, although largely older than the regulars were when Ferguson arrived in the 1980s with a Stretford End ticket costing £3.

When a group of five lads in their late teens walked across the forecourt singing, they were an oddity, almost a breach of the peace. Inside, the megastore was heaving, with not just tourists rifling through replica shirts at £50 each this season. The "day-trippers", though, were the ones exiting with carrier bags, taking the opportunity to buy because they cannot be here week after week. Lee Brian, 27 from Hong Kong, was visiting his brother and paying this visit to the famous Manchester United. Asked if he was buying much, he laughed, pointed to a basket overflowing with kit and merchandise, and grinned: "Yes."

Mohamed Hassim and Rafique Omar had come from Johannesburg with their sons, specially for the game, £2,500 each for the trip. They started supporting in the 1980s when the South African Gary Bailey played for United in goal; then they nibbled on snippets in the newspapers, now they can watch every game live at home in South Africa.

In 1993 when Ferguson won for United the first championship of the Premier League breakaway era, this was all new, the superstore and the megastore, the merchandising, the very idea of building so huge a commercial operation from football support. The Independent Manchester United Supporters Association began their protests in shock at ticket prices which had reached £15, and the gradual sedating of the atmosphere.

On this day, it was loud, emotional, a constant, cascading chorus in flag-waving praise of Ferguson. It was all red, no green and gold, and not a hint of protest at the Glazer family, who sat as implacable as ever in the directors' box watching the scenes of thanksgiving at this English football temple they so improbably own.

They made a contrast with the Swansea City directors in the front row, all local men and lifelong fans, including the elected supporters trust director Huw Cooze, who all jumped up, hugged and backslapped each other, when Michu scored his deftly volleyed equaliser.

There was only so much emotion to go round, and the crowd had to dip into their reserves to see Paul Scholes on his way off to his retirement, then welcome Ryan Giggs on, the local boys who grew up into greatness under the nurture of Ferguson.

Truly, an era ended here, the departure of this one man who extraordinarily endured and phenomenally succeeded, spanning that time of terraces and trouble, to choreographed triumph. Rio Ferdinand lashing in the winner might have been scripted, to finish with a win, late on, the day the latest and last trophy was presented.

The question is just beginning to be faced, beginning with Ferguson's warning to the crowd: where will it go from here? He has said he is leaving "the organisation" – the team, the youth production line, the stadium, the training facilities – in the best possible shape for David Moyes, but there is huge expectation, and a gap to bridge to European success.

Ed Woodward, who has squeezed the global sponsorships for the Glazers, steps up to replace David Gill as the chief executive, and it remains to be seen if the club will provide a level of investment beyond that with which Ferguson has worked wonders in the most recent, debt-laden years.

Football is a grand and surprising storyteller, and anything can happen next. Moyes, and Woodward, have a daunting task, to come in after a history-making era of total transformation. But full, loud, a flag-waving red empire, there felt something impregnable about what has been built here, in all that Fergie time.

• Manchester United
• Sir Alex Ferguson
• Business
• Finances

When Sir Alex Ferguson arrived at Old Trafford, fans paid £3 to watch their heroes. Today it is a global money machine owned by corporate America

To look back now at Sir Alex Ferguson's first brief television interview as Manchester United's new manager in November 1986 is to be struck by dizzying differences, between then and his leaving of the empire 27 years later. Besides the obvious – the beguilingly fresh face of fortysomething Ferguson, his need to explain why Manchester United are a bigger football prospect than his previous club, Aberdeen – Old Trafford, behind him, frames a different age.

The old ground, still then about the grandest in English football, looks tired, a little bleak, and nakedly free of the all-around branding in which the Theatre of Dreams™ is draped now. Britain was halfway through the tenure of Margaret Thatcher, whose Conservatives Ferguson has always tribally opposed, and the atmospheres at football clubs the economic gloom and rancour into which the north had been plunged.

It is a historical sight, after so many years of all-seat stadiums in the top two divisions, made compulsory following the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, to see Old Trafford's neat rows of terracing then, beneath the K Stand seats, the United Road paddock, and the famous Stretford End.

The brief shot of that huge terrace, on which fans could stand to watch Manchester United for around £3, shows passionate, loud adherents, markedly younger than the more comfortable middle-aged who can afford the price of United tickets now. In front are the fences, still a shock to recall, installed to keep fans off the pitch, which turned into killers when 96 people could not escape the lethal crush at Hillsborough in 1989.

Where to start with the changes, in football and around it, which Ferguson's time embodies and charts? He arrived when today's communications, internet and mobile phones would have seemed an improbable tomorrow's world, then when his resignation finally came, it was announced to worldwide millions on Twitter.

In 1986, English clubs were banned from European competition for hooliganism, after 39 Juventus supporters were killed at Heysel the year before, following a charge by some Liverpool fans before the European Cup Final. Ferguson leaves the season in which England will host the European Champions League final as Uefa's tribute to the Football Association's 150th anniversary, at the new, all-seated £757m Wembley, arched symbol of the game's reinvention.

United's stars had won the FA Cup in the famous 1985 final, yet there was a well-documented drinking culture among players whose capacity for beer was legendary. It was a large part of Ferguson's early work to drain that out, and several of the players with it, and his time spanned a training revolution, involving nutritionists, performance analysis, statistics technology. Ferguson marshalled United's big men of the 1980s at the Cliff, the workaday Salford training ground where kids could freely hang around pleading for autographs. United's multimillion pound secluded complex now, down that endless single-lane farm track in the green belt of Carrington, fields as he said in his leaving statement: "training facilities amongst the finest in global sport".

United and the English game whose style changed so much, greatly due to Ferguson, are truly global now, watched live in 200 countries, followed on Twitter, befriended on Facebook, an expression of western glamour like Hollywood. United were world famous before, of course, propelled by football's universal appeal and the special sympathy attracted to the club after the Munich tragedy in 1958.

Yet in the 1980s United made no feverish effort to financially exploit its followers, abroad or at home, where there was a single souvenir shop, given to Sir Matt Busby himself as a leaving present. Megastores, superstores, online ordering, lines in the accounts boasting of merchandising millions and global sponsorships, are an industry of Fergie time.

He, the old-school football man, drove United into becoming dominant on and off the field in the Premier League era, the club itself symbol and pioneer of football's sudden obsession with money. In 1986, the club was still majority owned by the family of Louis Edwards, once a starstruck fan, who began buying shares and joined the devastated board the day after the Munich disaster.

Now the club is owned by a family who had no connection with United, in the US, the one country never seduced by soccer's charms. They loaded United with the £525m they borrowed themselves to buy it, and have now registered the club, based on Sir Matt Busby Way, Old Trafford, in the Cayman Islands tax haven.

Ferguson, the Labour man, has never raised a word even of regret about that, or the £550m so far the Glazers' takeover has cost United in interest and bankers' and professionals' fees. The announcement of David Moyes as Ferguson's successor was made to the New York Stock Exchange, on which the Glazers have listed the famous Man United.

These are great changes, but the motor of football's commercial reinvention is a core, 150-year-old constant: the love and passion people instinctively feel for a great and simple game. Ferguson personified that, kept those fires burning, while his own club became the corporate billboard for football's financial exploitation.

Many of the game's lifelong supporters will look at that footage of Ferguson's first interview and feel regretful, that not all these changes have been for the best. There is anger and alienation, a belief that the improvements and pay TV boom could have been managed to serve supporters and the sport's all-round health, not the bank balances of players, managers, agents and chief executives.

In 1986, for all football's problems, it was deeply loved and fervently supported. That is why there were 54,000 people at Hillsborough, a ground commissioned by the FA unfit to host them. There were four divisions of the Football League, through which money – £44m from the last, 1988-92 TV deal – was shared quite evenly. Now there is a Premier League, which broke away so that the top clubs would not have to share the pay TV cash due to roll in from the next deal. Several of the men who engineered that breakaway have since made millions selling the shares in their clubs.

In the eulogies to Ferguson, many reflected that he built United into one of Britain's greatest institutions; the northern Premier League football clubs are now oases of glittering success, contrast to the post-industrial, post-banking slump around them. That makes it strange that so few in football, politics or business worry about what it says of our country, that this English institution could be so easily thrown to a leveraged buyout, and be registered in the Cayman Islands for its US owners' personal tax convenience.

The European final at Wembley will feature two football institutions from Germany, where the Bundesliga has grasped pay TV's financial turbo-charge, but been more attentive to protect the game's traditions. Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund are still controlled by their supporters, and retain thousands of affordable tickets for raucous young fans like those long priced off the Stretford End.

English football could have had this boom, without selling everything. Ferguson, the former shipyard trade unionist, might have suited that even more, working for a genuine club, rather than serving the Glazers, who bought the Old Trafford club with debt and will sell it one day for a mighty Cayman Islands profit.

• Sir Alex Ferguson
• Manchester United
• Manchester
• Greater Manchester

Sir Alex Ferguson's decision to stay on as a director at Old Trafford has worrying echoes of the post-Busby era

Some people of suspicious minds may reflect that a week laden with tributes to the vaulting achievements of retiring Sir Alex Ferguson was a devilishly crafty way to silence the noisy neighbours. Manchester City play their second FA Cup final in three seasons on Saturday, favourites to beat Wigan Athletic, yet all attention in what otherwise would have been sluggish news days has been claimed by supplements, pages, airtime and Twitter trending, devoted to the glories of United.

Many have complained of overkill, that Ferguson was 71 and always going to retire sometime, so while it felt remarkable when the day actually arrived, it was not exactly a shock. Letters were written to editors about this being only football, of other things going on in the world — the death toll in the collapsed Bangladesh clothing sweatshop rose to 1,000 while half the English media jostled for room at David Moyes' press conference.

Yet the truth is that millions of people, here and all over the world, drank up the story of Sir Alex, were captivated by all the details, the extraordinary 27-year span in which he drove United from drinking culture decline to corporate powerhouse of the £5.5bn Premier League. The Guardian online had 5.75m readers the day Ferguson retired, more than for the resignation of Pope Benedict. That seemed to emphasise again football's status as a modern global religion — full of meaning to its adherents, a baffling opium of the masses to those who do not believe.

It was a similarly major emotional landmark, less the Twittersphere and football's media ubiquity, when Sir Matt Busby finally retired, for the first time, in 1969 – and some of the similarities have the seeds of potential discomfort for United. Eamon Dunphy's biography of Busby, A Strange Kind of Glory, one of the best football books ever written, tells the great story with an insider's intimate feel. The career remains astonishing, how Busby built and characterised a United transformation similar to Ferguson's: 24 years, three great teams, from a bombed Old Trafford in 1945 to Best, Law and Charlton and the first English club to win the European Cup, 10 years after eight United players died in Munich.

Dunphy, the former United player turned journalist, does not shy away from Busby's and United's disappointments after the great manager stepped down, and United always said they would never make the same mistakes when Ferguson finally retired.

Essentially these were two-fold. Busby, knighted, cherished, the crumpled face of United's odyssey, was allowed to play too keen a role in choosing his successor, then remained too involved for them to manage with independence. Wilf McGuinness, a United protege, similar to Ferguson's Gary Neville in his total devotion, was anointed to take charge of a fading club without any previous management experience. Busby stayed on as general manager and a director, and he stepped back in after just a year. McGuinness, still a lifelong United enthusiast, lost his hair with the stress of it.

Frank O'Farrell, who arrived from Leicester City, whom he had taken to the 1969 FA Cup final, which they lost 1-0 to City, told the same story for years afterwards to illustrate Sir Matt's continued presence. On his first day, O'Farrell was shown up to the manager's office, then Busby said he still occupied it and that O'Farrell's was down the corridor. "This isn't right, Matt," O'Farrell told him. And it never was.

The subsequent decline, ignominy of relegation in 1974, and hard journey back was said to be ingrained into the collective memory of United, a club always respectful of its history, even in this strange era of the Glazers' US ownership and registration in the Cayman Islands tax haven. So it took a little clearing of the head to wonder whether United, after all, may know their history so well, only to be in danger of repeating it.

This transition is different, of course; United are immeasurably stronger as a team and club than they were in 1969, or when Ferguson took over in 1986. Premier League winners again, with world-class infrastructure, the team a fine blend of age and experience, as Ferguson said in his leaving statement – although the all-round power of Bayern Munich is a swaggering challenge to United's level of investment under the Glazers.

Moyes's 10-year achievement of keeping Everton at the very limit of their potential, his dedication and attention to detail, have all been justly recognised since it emerged that the next United manager would be another driven Scot, and not, for example, a pugnacious Portuguese currently residing in Madrid. Then United's statement came, after the club's Facebook site breached its own embargo, and the level of Ferguson's involvement in appointing his own successor was revealed as remarkable. Avi Glazer, one of the six children of Malcolm Glazer who own United, said in the official statement: "The search for a new manager has been very short. Alex was very clear with his recommendation."

United had already made it clear that Ferguson will be on the football club board, along with the chief executive, David Gill, who is also resigning. He will have an office at the club and be an ambassador too; not involved but available for wise counsel should the fiercely independent Moyes feel he needs it.

United will not discuss in detail the process of appointing the new manager, but it is odd that Avi Glazer said it was "short" and amounted to accepting a recommendation made by Ferguson himself. Between 1986 and 2013 Manchester United, and football in England and Europe, changed exponentially, so supporters may expect some time to be taken to consider how the club can best position itself, and with whom, to progress from here.

For all the rightful eulogies to Ferguson's brilliant career, it remains the case that United, although they won the Champions League narrowly twice, did not build the European dominance their financial power in the 2000s might have claimed. Partly this is due to the Glazers draining £550m out of the club in interest and fees from their takeover, a contrast with Bayern and Barcelona; supporter-owned clubs where every euro goes into the core football purpose.

City, and other clubs here, are moving towards a European-style structure with a director of football, or technical director, to oversee sophisticated football operations that can survive a turnover of coaches. In the year that Pep Guardiola was looking for a job, United had a short search, accepting a recommendation by Ferguson of a manager as close to his image as possible, and one without much European experience.

Ferguson promises to stay away from the dressing room, saying he has had enough of it, but the lure of the action, and fear of what he will do in his spare time without it, kept him away from retirement for so long. He has also asked that Neville be given a job on the coaching staff, a fine idea no doubt, but odd for the outgoing manager even to have a say in.

Moyes has worked his way to the greatest of jobs from playing as a centre-half at Cambridge United, and his abilities, and the wisdom of Ferguson's recommendation, should not be doubted. Yet he will arrive at his own career equivalent of 1986, past the immortalising statue of his predecessor, beneath a stand bearing Ferguson's name in massive red letters, with the great man still on the football club board, his presence and appointments all around.

United say Gill announced his own resignation with just an inkling, rather than knowledge, that Ferguson would be going, but anyway, the two who looked after the shop at Old Trafford while the Glazers sweated the dollars from it are both now gone. Edward Woodward, who has worked in London for the Glazers selling United's name to sponsors around the world, steps into Gill's office, to steward the football club itself, where he has limited experience.

This was a week dominated by reflections on the Ferguson phenomenon, emotional looks back, admiration, some reservations for Moyes, and City's Wembley appearance struggling for a look-in. Yet in the summer, and next season, United have to get on with it, and their own history tells them the transition from a manager of legend, who remains at the club, can be a very difficult one.

• Sir Alex Ferguson
• David Moyes
• Manchester United

Only success on the field guaranteed the owner's debt-fuelled gamble would succeed

The New York stock exchange's annual report from Manchester United, the great old football club now registered in the Cayman Islands tax haven, starkly acknowledges the central importance of Sir Alex Ferguson to United's whole football and financial edifice. Companies must set out for investors the risks to their future success, so the owners, the Glazer family, dutifully detailed their worst nightmares: serious injuries, falling crowds, and that "qualification for the European Champions League cannot be guaranteed".

"Our business," it says of United, depends on "our ability to attract and retain key personnel."

Addressing the looming certainty of Ferguson's retirement, the report states, a touch gloomily: "Any successor to our current manager may not be as successful as our current manager."

That frank assessment for a money market to which the famous Manchester United have been flung, is a central truth about even modern, sophisticated football, which this club embodies more than any other. They can have all the revenue streams, global sponsors and "digital followers" possible, yet what might seem a licence to print money flows from success on the pitch and one person, the team manager, is still utterly central to that.

The likelihood of his successor being less successful seems as much a certainty as Ferguson's ageing, which he, the greatest manager of the modern era and in football history in terms of trophies won, had to ultimately face up to. Whether José Mourinho, whose 3-2 aggregate victory with Real Madrid in March felt like an audition for Ferguson's job, or that other driven Scot, David Moyes, it is difficult to believe any successor will stay 27 years and stock United's shelving with so much silver.

United, of course, have the memory of botching a difficult succession written into the club's fabric, those sad episodes of United devotee Wilf McGuiness then Frank O'Farrell from Leicester City struggling to manage the club when Sir Matt Busby only semi-retired. Busby's greatness had epic dimensions as he had rebuilt United from a bombed Old Trafford in 1945, through the 1958 Munich air crash in which eight of his youthful team died, to further league championships and the European Cup in 1968.

Yet Busby left a rebuilding job, with the prime of Sir Bobby Charlton, Denis Law and other greats fading, George Best on the slide, and Old Trafford gripped by a kind of post-1968 anti-climax.

In Ferguson's statement announcing this was, really, the day of retirement, he made clear he has tried to leave United in a position incomparably more promising.

"It was important to me to leave an organisation in the strongest possible shape and I believe I have done so," Ferguson said. Listing United's great and increasing strengths, which can all be credited to the manager's obsessive production of success, he said: "Our training facilities are amongst the finest in global sport and our home Old Trafford is rightfully regarded as one of the leading venues in the world."

At 76,000 capacity, the old ground has been comprehensively made over since Ferguson arrived to its terraces, paddocks and fences in the 1980s, and incorporates all manner of lucrative feasting, the envy of other top clubs still grappling with the confines of their stadiums.

"The quality of this league-winning squad, and the balance of ages within it, bodes well for continued success at the highest level, whilst the structure of the youth set-up will ensure that the long-term future of the club remains a bright one."

That is all true, and describes an achievement as remarkable as all the trophies which Ferguson bestowed on United. He has kept replenishing United's squads with signings for the future, and, exceptionally among the Premier League's top clubs, promoted young players from the club's academy - Jonny Evans, Danny Welbeck and Tom Cleverly all started that game against Madrid, alongside that original homegrown lad, Ryan Giggs.

Addressing a group of apprentices recently on the invitation of Labour's former sports minister, Richard Caborn, with whom he has stayed in touch, Ferguson said he can predict now 80% of the players who will stock United's first team in five years' time.

So his successor will walk into a football kingdom glittering with unparalleled riches, not a hollowed out reconstruction challenge. Nevertheless, there is no manager with Ferguson's pedigree who can replace him, and this greatest opportunity in football is still fraught and daunting.

United note in that annual report that their financial might has depended on Ferguson.

"Our revenue streams are driven by the performance and popularity of the first team," it says, before setting out the worrying multiple downsides of "a general decline in the success of our first team."

Ferguson has not only relentlessly built success and planned for a brilliant future after he is gone, but steered United too through the financial horror the Glazers wreaked on the club. In 2009 and 2010 he made meagre signings and United looked potentially rocky when the £525m debts loaded on to the club to pay for the family's takeover cost United £176m in interest alone. Ferguson marshalled all his resources, dug in deeply, and the club and Glazers have emerged the other side, helped by the floatation, which raised £70m. The debt, still £420m in 2012, seven years after the takeover and costing £50m interest annually, is utterly dead money but more manageable now.

The financial gymnastics of a US family who want only to profit from Manchester United has been salvaged by Ferguson. However difficult for his successor, it feels unlikely the club's burgeoning commercial operations will be seriously damaged now.

For all his football greatness, it has been a huge disappointment to many Manchester United fans that Ferguson, the avowed lifelong socialist, never even acknowledged their concerns let alone supported their protests over the Glazers' speculations which have cost the club £550m. Supporters suffered ticket price increases partly to pay for the club's ownership by a family none of them ever wanted, yet not only was Ferguson silent, he repeatedly praised the Glazers.

The old Govan union man publicly sneered at the fans who felt strongly enough to turn away and formed their own, mutual club, FC United of Manchester, whose hard graft from the bottom has brought them now to a promotion play-off final to the Blue Square Bet Conference North.

Even in his leaving statement, setting out the booming advantages with which he has furnished Manchester United (Cayman Islands), Ferguson said: "The Glazer family have provided me with the platform to manage Manchester United to the best of my ability." Thanking David Gill too, the chief executive who has resigned and will be replaced with the Glazers' protege, Edward Woodward, Ferguson said: "I am truly grateful to all of them."

His tenure spanned soaring change for United and English football; the Premier League breakaway, pay TV and huge money which attracted the world's best players.

Ferguson harried Manchester United into dominating that era, he leaves the club in enviable pomp – and he enabled rampant money-making off the club, first by the Edwards family, and now for the Glazers.

• Manchester United
• Sir Alex Ferguson

The Anfield club have broken a promise to regenerate an area and may now forever be the poor cousins to their richer rivals

Contemplating Liverpool's revised plan to stay within Anfield's confined, squalid streets and enlarge two sides of the ground, the worry intrudes that for the short-term cash flow of relatively new US owners, the club could regret missing a once-in-a-generation chance to build the long-promised new stadium. It is striking that there has been so little questioning of the decision in October, never fully explained, to scrap that project, to which Liverpool city council and the wider community were signed up and planning permission secured.

Largely this was because supporters had waited so long, for the shiny vision to become reality, that, like the council, they grew sceptical and just wanted something certain to happen. John Henry's Fenway Sports Group made it clear from when it bought Liverpool in October 2010 that a brand new 60,000-seat stadium looked very expensive for the 15,000 extra seats it would gain. So Ian Ayre, the club's managing director, presented the scrapping of the stadium, and reversion to the Anfield plan of 14 years ago, as "a great leap forward".

The council, which wholly supported the new stadium as the basis for planned regeneration of the whole battered area, is now supporting Liverpool staying at Anfield with compulsory purchase powers to ensure the removal of residents whose homes the club want to demolish. Regeneration is earmarked around an enlarged Anfield, and the space controversially cleared in Stanley Park will never see a stadium.

Yet after the 20-year legacy of blight the club deepened by buying up odd houses and leaving them empty, this is a historic failure to make good on the promise of the new stadium. These major landmarks are very difficult and expensive for football clubs, local authorities and communities to achieve. It is usually easier not to go through with them than to bring them to fruition and, at the time they are called off, it is often a relief, as it was to many in Liverpool, if not the local residents, in October.

It felt a little like that when Everton, across the park in Goodison, called off the proposal for a new stadium on the waterfront Kings Dock, after boardroom and shareholder squabbles and a struggle to find the money. History, though, puts the day-to-day difficulties into perspective. It is now accepted that the Kings Dock was Everton's big chance to propel themselves into the modern era and genuinely compete as a big club, and they lost it. A decade later, they are still at outdated Goodison, their £81m turnover a quarter of Manchester United's, punching above their weight due to David Moyes and careful husbandry, the future uncertain.

History may not consider Liverpool's retreat under FSG, back to the 1999 plan to expand Anfield, quite the great leap forward interpreted by Ayre. It will of course take into account the ballooning costs of a stadium, from perhaps £140m or less when it was conceived, to the £400m club sources said it would be now, even in a recession and with the construction industry desperate for work.

The long view will see Old Trafford's relentless expansion to 76,000 seats, the Emirates and Etihad Stadiums which incorporate greatly more facilities than even the expanded Anfield will be able to, plus some space around them. The very idea for a new stadium on Stanley Park came from seeing how constricted Anfield still will be by its surrounding terraced streets even if expanded.

The council became enthusiastic for the new stadium because it was a grander plan for the area's revival. The stadium itself was intended to be a statement of ambition for a better economic future in Liverpool after the economic devastation and consequent decline of the 1980s. The land on which Anfield stands was to be developed into a commercial centre intended to bring real businesses to the area. The horrors of the housing would be dealt with as part of that whole.

Then the club were sold – the sole rationale being that rich owners would arrive to build a new stadium. It will not make great reading in the history of Liverpool that owners finally came who decided they could not afford the plan and went back to one the club could have got on and built in 1999. It risks making the council, too, look like it has not achieved the best possible for Liverpool, compared with Manchester's. It used the 2002 Commonwealth Games to lever in public money for the new stadium which City occupied, thereby attracting a genuinely wealthy owner prepared to massively invest, as neither Everton nor Liverpool, lacking a new stadium, have been able to.

Funding is difficult and neither club has dared even approach making a vigorous case for a shared stadium, for which both know there is a deal to be done.

Instead, FSG, which may not be the owners of Liverpool very long itself, decided it makes more financial sense to stay put.

That is true now, of course, so the drawing board is chucked in a skip and design costs are written off – but such an opportunity for a new era will not come again for a very long time.

• Liverpool
• Fenway Sports Group
• Business

Policy of buying up houses around the stadium and leaving them empty has driven the local area into dreadful decline
• This is Anfield – in pictures

In the blighted streets around Liverpool's Anfield stadium, residents are packing up and leaving their family homes, so the football club can have them demolished and expand their Main Stand. In the six months since the club scrapped their decade-long plan to build a new stadium on Stanley Park, and reverted to expanding Anfield instead, Liverpool city council has been seeking to buy these neighbours' homes, backed by the legal threat of compulsory purchase.

People's farewells are bitter, filled with anger and heartbreak at the area's dreadful decline and at the club for deepening the blight by buying up houses since the mid-1990s then leaving them empty. A few residents are refusing to move, holding out against the council, which begins negotiations with low offers. These homeowners believe they should be paid enough not only to buy a new house but to compensate for the years of dereliction, stagnation and decline, and crime, fires, vandalism, even murders which have despoiled the area. Their resentment is compounded by the fact that they are being forced to move so that Liverpool, and their relatively new US owner, Fenway Sports Group, can make more money.

On Lothair Road, which backs on to the Anfield Main Stand, one man who lived next door to a house Liverpool own and have left empty, shuttered – "tinned up" as the locals call it – shook his head. "I'm not moving out," he told the Guardian, "I've been driven out."

Residents' bitterness derives from when the club started buying houses in Lothair Road, without saying they were doing so or making their intentions clear. The club used an agency to approach some residents, while some houses were bought by third parties then sold on quickly to the club. That left residents with the belief, which has endured ever since, that Liverpool were buying up houses by stealth, to keep prices low.

The club have never publicly explained in detail what they did, and declined to answer the Guardian's questions about their historic behaviour and current plans. Neighbours, many of whom have lived in Anfield for decades, remembering a vibrant, flourishing area, believe Liverpool bought and left houses empty to deliberately blight the area, intending it would prompt people to leave and drive house prices down.

Howard Macpherson, now 52, was the first to sell his house on Lothair Road to the club, in 1996. He had lived there, at No 39, a four-bedroom end terrace, for 10 years. Macpherson says it was a fine home, which he had spent money refurbishing, but after Liverpool bought it they always left it empty – now for 17 years.

"Anfield was a good area, all the houses occupied, nothing like it is today," says Macpherson, who runs a garage, Aintree Motors. "The area started to decline in the early 1990s with the city's economic problems. But Liverpool football club accelerated the decline, by leaving good houses empty and boarded up. It wasn't a natural decline; it was engineered."

The involvement in the process of a notorious solicitor, Kevin Dooley, acting for the club, did not encourage confidence. Dooley, who acted for several Liverpool players and the convicted drug baron Curtis Warren as well as the club before he died in 2004, was struck off by the Law Society in 2002 after it found him guilty of being involved in fraudulent purported bank schemes.

Liverpool were motivated to buy neighbouring houses by a fear of losing pre-eminence in English football after their mighty playing success and financial dominance of the 1970s and 80s. The club felt bruised by having been delayed in building the new Centenary Stand because of two elderly sisters, Joan and Nora Mason, who refused to leave their house at No 26 Kemlyn Road, until November 1990. Manchester United entered the super-commercialised Premier League era by floating on the stock market in 1991, raising £6.7m to seat the Stretford End, and with Old Trafford's ceaseless, lucrative expansion and Sir Alex Ferguson's team-building, Liverpool fell behind United's money-making capacity.

The club turned their attention to expanding the Main and Anfield Road stands, although they did not announce this intention or discuss it openly with residents. The Main Stand backs tightly on to the terraced row of odd numbers on Lothair Road. Liverpool began buying houses in 1996, mostly leaving them empty. Land Registry records reveal that between January 1996 and March 2000, Liverpool bought 10 houses on Lothair Road.

Most were on the odd side, closest to the Main Stand: Nos 1, 3, 7, 9, 15, 33, 35 and Macpherson's No 39. In March 1999 Liverpool made their first purchase across the road, on the even side, No 16. That row is not needed for a bigger Main Stand itself, but the residents, and those in the row behind on Alroy Road, would have their right to light blocked by it, a major obstacle to planning permission. In March 2000 Liverpool bought No 10 Lothair Road. That house, like most Liverpool bought, was never again occupied, has been empty for 13 years and is "tinned up".

Liverpool also bought houses on Anfield Road: grander Victorian piles with front gardens, backing on to Stanley Park; almost the whole row opposite the stand, Shankly gates and Hillsborough memorial: 51, 53, 55, 61, 63, 69 and 71. These houses were also left mostly empty and allowed to fall into disrepair.

With houses empty and demand for them falling in a city struggling to recover from its 1980s economic decimation, the Anfield area collapsed into dramatic decline. Alongside Liverpool football club, family homes and private landlords, the main other property owner was Your Housing, a large group of housing associations, then called Arena. It also began to leave properties "tinned up" – 265 were empty in the wider Anfield area by 2011. Residents complain that as the area was blighted, problem tenants moved in, bringing crime and antisocial behaviour.

Liverpool's secret plan to get houses knocked down and expand the stadium, which the residents had suspected from the beginning, was exposed by a local free newspaper in September 1999. The club, with the council and Arena, had produced Anfield Plus, a plan to demolish both rows of houses on Lothair Road, the one on Alroy Road backing on to Lothair, and those on Anfield Road, for two enlarged stands. In the wider area, 1,800 properties were designated for demolition. A food, drink and retail area was planned on a cleared corner across from the Kop and Centenary Stand. New social housing, shops, a supermarket and community centre were also envisaged.

Shock at such a plan being conceived without discussion with residents produced an outcry. The council did not support the plan with compulsory purchase threats but instead embarked on a consultation process. Rick Parry, Liverpool's then chief executive, acknowledged the club were seeking a bigger Anfield to compete financially with Manchester United, but said nevertheless: "I believe we can also work much better with the community, be a good neighbour."

In the intense, often fraught discussions with residents, some progress was slowly made. New homes were built or renovated, including the Skerries Road terrace, behind Kemlyn Road, which Liverpool had previously bought up and left blighted. Two health centres have been built and the new Four Oaks primary school and North Liverpool Academy. Yet Lothair Road, Alroy and Anfield Road, on which the club had set their sights, were left to rot.

While the Premier League, its club owners, players, managers and agents were growing rich on pay-TV millions, right around one of its most revered clubs there was squalor and horror. The many empty houses were vandalised, robbed, stripped, set on fire. People living next door to Liverpool's tinned-up houses told the club they feared waking up in the night to find them ablaze. Still, the club did not put tenants in them. Some people began to move out, their houses' value having tumbled, but many good people stayed, determined not to be forced out.

Liverpool's switch to a plan for a wholly new stadium on Stanley Park came partly out of the post-Anfield Plus community consultation. In one meeting, Parry looked at a map and was struck by how hemmed in by houses the ground would still be, even if expanded. Yet even as the plans developed over years, many residents did not believe Liverpool would ever build a new stadium. Partly this was because even after all the outcry over Anfield Plus, Liverpool still bought houses on Lothair Road, including No10.

In October 1999, 33 Lothair Road, owned by Liverpool and unoccupied, was set on fire, filling the house of the elderly couple who lived next door with smoke and soot. Residents say that three people were killed, set alight, in a horrific incident, in a house further along Lothair Road. A woman reported to be renting on Lothair Road who worked as a prostitute was murdered, in 2001.

A Lothair Road resident, who did not want to be named because he is in negotiations with the council to finally leave, recalled his elderly father going out to fill a coal bucket from the old-fashioned scuttle under the front steps. Two tenants who had moved in across the road threw a brick at his father's head. The resident went across the road, banged on both doors, and roared at them to come out, which they did not.

"These are some of the drastic things we've had to do," he said, talking on his doorstep. "I brought three children up here. If Liverpool had been honest from the beginning, said they wanted our houses to expand their ground, we're realistic, we know they're a huge football club, most of us support them, deals could have been done. Instead they were underhand, blighted the area and we've had to live like this for years."

The sorry saga of how the new stadium plans turned to dust was played out in public, while residents suffered stagnation and wreckage. The club had continued to buy houses on Anfield Road: No 65 in 2001, 47, 49 and 67 in 2007. Parry and the then majority shareholder, David Moores, believed they needed rich owners to stand behind the borrowing required for a new stadium, which could have been built in the early 2000s for perhaps £140m. It took years before finally in 2007 they sold the club for £179m to the Americans Tom Hicks and George Gillett. Moores personally made £89m.

Hicks famously promised "a spade in the ground" and work to begin on the new stadium in 60 days, but he and Gillett had borrowed the money to buy the club and were planning to borrow for the stadium too, then could not. Under pressure from Royal Bank of Scotland, in October 2010 Hicks and Gillett were forced by court order to sell the club, John Henry's FSG paying the £200m price of the RBS debt.

FSG, which renovated the Boston Red Sox stadium, Fenway Park, rather than build a new one, suggested from the beginning it might scrap the new stadium plan as too expensive. In October, Liverpool's managing director, Ian Ayre, confirmed that, describing the intention to go back to expanding Anfield as "a great leap forward".

FSG's current plan envisages expanding the Main and Anfield Road stands, with both sides of Lothair Road, and one side of Alroy Road, demolished. A hotel is proposed behind the enlarged Main Stand on the footprint of Lothair Road's even side and Alroy, because a commercial property does not have the same right to light as homes. A development, probably bars and restaurants, with training promised for young people, is proposed opposite the corner of the Kop and Centenary Stand. With Liverpool having purchased a whole row on Anfield Road, they have already knocked those houses down, so there is no obstacle to enlarging that stand.

This FSG plan, then, is strikingly similar to Anfield Plus, which was worked up in 1999, then put on hold for 13 years in favour of the new stadium proposal.

Ruth Little, of the Anfield and Breckfield community council, says: "After people suffered so much, from the football club and Your Housing leaving properties empty and blighting the area, when they went back to the original plan I did wonder what the last 12 years of consultation have been for.

"A lot of good work has been done, though, much of it by local people volunteering. At least we have some certainty now, and we have to make sure that the people who are left are treated with respect."

Reports on that are mixed. While many homeowners have sold their houses over the years for little, the council's final offers now are more generous. Some residents have settled for around £80,000, more than the houses would have fetched on the market in such blighted conditions, and the council is also providing interest-free loans. This enables those who own their own homes to buy another similar house without taking on a new mortgage.

However, several people accuse the council, which is negotiating via agents, of starting with low offers, forcing people in difficult circumstances to negotiate hard or be seriously disadvantaged.

Bill Higham, who owns 25 Alroy Road, says he was offered £55,000, which he refused outright, for a house he has had to refurbish twice after it was seriously vandalised.

"I find it disgraceful," he says. "After the way the area has been run down, I'm being forced out and they want the properties for a song. They could pay everybody up, properly, for less than one Liverpool player's wage."

Bill McGarry, vice-chair of the Anfield Rockfield Triangle residents' association, a qualified town planner, has helped some residents negotiate with the council. Patrick Duggan, chair of Artra, is an ardent critic of the club, whom he vehemently accuses of running the area down. Duggan runs Epstein House, a refurbished hotel in the old Anfield Road family home of the Beatles' manager, Brian Epstein. Duggan bought it for £450,000, partly, he says, because Liverpool were building a new stadium which would regenerate the area. He has been shocked instead to find the area's degradation, then felt betrayed when FSG scrapped the new stadium plan.

"I have always been a Liverpool fan," says Duggan, who has mounted a campaign targeting Ayre. "They play 'You'll Never Walk Alone' but they have left their neighbours to walk alone for years."

Paddy McKay, 58, a builder who has lived for 37 years on Walton Breck Road, is refusing to accept the council's offer. He and his wife Carol brought up three daughters there; he has paid his mortgage off in full and argues that, if he is forced to move, he should be paid enough to buy a similar house somewhere decent and compensation for the years of blight. Even now, antisocial behaviour is continuing on those streets, including house fires.

"Liverpool FC have said they want to be good neighbours? They're the world's worst neighbours; they couldn't care less," McKay says. "After all the damage they have done to the area, they should do the decent thing by the residents."

James McKenna, chair of the Spirit of Shankly supporters' union, says the fans have sympathy for the club's neighbours. "The stadium expansion is all about the club making more money, and fans will have to pay more for tickets," McKenna says. "To do that, Liverpool have played a part in derelict houses, streets boarded up. It's a blot on LFC's record."

A council spokesman declined to discuss details of the house-buying process. "Since last autumn we have been developing a robust set of plans for the area which are absolutely on track," he said. "This will include working with the local community on a blueprint for the wider regeneration of Anfield."

Brian Cronin, chief executive of Your Housing, defended his organisation's property stewardship in the area and said the group has invested more than £23m in refurbishments or new homes around Anfield since 2009. Your Housing has 22 properties on Lothair, Alroy and Sybil Roads behind the Main Stand, of which 12 "are long-term vacant". Cronin said: "We are currently working very closely with Liverpool city council and other partners in Anfield to establish the best long-term future for these properties as part of the wider regeneration of the area."

Liverpool declined to comment but last month Ayre updated the Liverpool Daily Post, saying: "To extend Anfield, we need to acquire a bunch of privately owned property around the stadium. We're making really good progress with that. We said some months back it would take several months to improve that property acquisition situation. We're definitely on target so far."

Once the properties are bought, Ayre said, the club will apply for planning permission. After that, the third challenge is to "build the thing".

He told the Guardian in October that an expanded Anfield with a 60,000 capacity will not allow cheaper tickets; its aim is to make more money. Liverpool have employed PricewaterhouseCoopers to survey fans, and corporate customers, to help plan price brackets for the new facilities.

Some fans wonder if FSG, which is quite remote as owner, with Henry hardly in Liverpool and progress slow and costly, may sell the club, particularly once planning permission has been secured. FSG and Henry have not said that is a possibility. The stated plan is to expand the ground and enable Liverpool to compete again by making more money, so attracting better players by offering them huge wages on a par with the other top clubs.

Liverpool's remaining neighbours, suffering some of Britain's worst living conditions, are grappling with hardball offers, to have their houses knocked down and make way for it all. In the Premier League of the 21st century, this is Anfield.

• Liverpool
• Finances
• Business

• Belgian agent Daniel Striani claims rules are 'anti-competitive'
• Striani hires lawyer who won landmark victory in Bosman case

Uefa's financial fair play regulations face a legal challenge in the European courts after a players' agent argued the rules will unfairly restrict the amount of money he can earn. Daniel Striani, an agent registered in Belgium, has lodged a formal complaint with the European commission against the rules, which require clubs in European competitions from 2011 to move towards breaking even financially.

Striani is represented by Jean Louis-Dupont, a lawyer who in 1995 successfully challenged football's contract rules on behalf of a Belgian player, Jean-Marc Bosman, a legal victory which allowed players to move for free at the end of their contracts. Dupont argues that, as in the Bosman case, he will defeat Uefa's FFP rules even though they are supported by the European Commission.

He argues that Uefa's regulations, which prevent clubs making heavy financial losses whether backed by an owner or not, will have five separate consequences he claims are anti-competitive. The first is that they will restrict investment in a club by no longer allowing them to run at a loss.

The second is the key concern being voiced particularly in England, that it will lock in the power of the already rich clubs, whose dominance will no longer be able to be broken by the odd club like Manchester City or Chelsea which has losses supported by a mega-rich owner.

He then argues that the aim of FFP to dampen down players' wage and transfer fee inflation is "anti-competitive", a breach ofEU law. This is because FFP will lead to a "reduction of the number of transfers, of the transfer amounts and of the number of players under contracts per club", and will have a "deflationary effect on the level of players' salaries".

In conclusion, Striani argues that FFP will be "anti-competitive" because it will affect his own ability to earn agents' fees from players' wages and transfer fees.

Dupont will base his case for Striani on the argument that "the 'break-even' rule infringes other EU fundamental freedoms: free movement of capital (as far as club owners are concerned), free movement of workers (players) and free movement of services (players agents)".

Uefa could better rebalance European football and make it more competitive, he states, by greater sharing of money from rich clubs to small, preventing the need for them to overspend.

Uefa responded by referring to the support the rules' introduction had received from Europe's clubs and players' union, and from the EC.

"The rules encourage clubs to 'live within their own means,' which is a sound economic principle aiming to guarantee the long term sustainability and viability of European football," Uefa said in a statement.

"Uefa believes that financial fair play is fully in line with EU law and is confident that the European commission will reject this complaint."

• Uefa
• Finances
• Business
• Football politics
• Financial fair play

Lord Justice Goldring says hearing should be held near where bereaved families live, but not too close to Liverpool

The new inquest into how 96 people died at Hillsborough football ground in 1989 will be held in the north-west, the coroner has ruled. Michael Mansfield QC, representing 71 bereaved families, had argued it should be in London because of concern about "actual or perceived bias" in the north.

Pete Weatherby QC, representing 20 families, and lawyers for a further three, were "vehemently against" London, arguing it would make attending the inquest extremely difficult.

The coroner, Lord Justice Goldring, has ruled the inquests should be close to where the bereaved families live, enabling them to attend conveniently and return home at night. He decided that in the north-west, not too close to Liverpool, there was no more risk of a jury being prejudiced than in London.

The original 1991 inquest was quashed in December after a long campaign by the families. The new inquest is to start in early 2014.

• Hillsborough disaster
• Liverpool
• Liverpool

• Birmingham City owner wants case thrown out
• Yeung's lawyer says police delays meant trial would be unfair

The trial of the Birmingham City chairman Carson Yeung for alleged money laundering has begun with his lawyers attempting to have the case dismissed, according to reports from Hong Kong. Yeung, the chairman and a shareholder in Birmingham International Holdings Limited, the club's parent company, is accused of handling approximately HK$720m (£60m) which were the proceeds of crime. He pleaded not guilty to five counts of money laundering, which the prosecution alleges happened between 2001 and 2007, in five separate bank accounts.

Yeung's barrister, Graham Harris, applied for the case to be dismissed because, he argued, too much time had passed for Yeung's lawyers to mount his defence.

Harris said "a significant portion" of Yeung's wealth had been made in "lawful and legitimate stock trading" before 2001. As Hong Kong financial institutions need only hold records for seven years, proof of Yeung's legitimate stock trading could not be produced, he said.

The prosecutor, John Reading, objected to the application, saying the missing papers related only to a small part of the money which is the subject of the prosecution. The judge, his honour Douglas Yau, adjourned the case until Friday when he will rule on whether the trial should continue.

City, already relegated from the Premier League in May 2011, have been in turmoil and financial difficulties since Yeung was arrested in Hong Kong the following month and charged with money laundering. He had led the £81.5m takeover of the club in 2009, and owns a 25.4% stake in BIHL.

A former hairdresser who has been reported to have made his millions in investments and a Macau casino, Yeung has loaned the club £14m. City's 2011-12 accounts included a statement addressing the question of whether the Hong Kong prosecutors could seek to reclaim that money if Yeung is found guilty. "The directors have not received any information to suggest that funding provided to BCFC by Carson Yeung … was sourced from money-laundered funds," the statement said.

The three directors are Yeung himself, his 19-year-old son Ryan, and Peter Pannu, the club's acting chairman, who has been involved since the BIHL takeover.

• Carson Yeung
• Birmingham City
• Hong Kong

Lawyers say officers will exercise right not to answer questions to avoid incriminating themselves in criminal proceedings

Police officers on duty at Sheffield Wednesday's Hillsborough football ground when 96 Liverpool supporters died in 1989 will refuse to give evidence to the new inquest into the disaster, their barristers have said at a pre-inquest hearing.

Lawyers for the three most senior surviving officers in command that day, and the Police Federation representing lower-ranked officers, said the inquest should be delayed for years until any possible criminal proceedings have been concluded. If held before that, said Paul Greaney QC, for the Police Federation, officers under investigation for possible criminal misconduct would exercise their right not to answer questions, to avoid the risk of incriminating themselves.

"Many of those witnesses will be under investigation for possible offences, including homicide, and there is potential for them to be prosecuted," he said to the coroner, Lord Justice Goldring. "It is likely there will be an increased incidence of witnesses refusing to give evidence by invoking the privilege against self-incrimination."

From the rows of bereaved Hillsborough family members in the large courtroom on High Holborn in London, there were audible gasps, and one said, quite loudly: "Outrageous."

John Beggs QC, representing Chief Superintendent David Duckenfield, who was in command at Hillsborough, and the senior officers inside and outside the ground, Superintendents Roger Greenwood and Roger Marshall, supported Greaney's call for the inquest to be delayed.

Goldring refused, however, and ruled that the new inquest should start in early 2014. He said that waiting for the criminal investigation, which was being led by former Durham chief constable Jon Stoddart, and then any prosecutions and appeals, could amount to a six-year delay.

In his opening remarks, Goldring expressed sympathy for the families' anguish and grief, and emphasised the need for the inquest to be held quickly, given that 24 years have already elapsed since the disaster. The original inquest with its verdict of accidental death was quashed in December after a long campaign against it by the families of the victims.

"I bear in mind that over that course of time some of the bereaved have died, most recently, of course, Anne Williams," Goldring said. Williams, 62, who lost her 15-year-old son Kevin at Hillsborough, died last week. "Her death is a powerful reminder, if one were needed, that there is an urgency attaching to the commencement of the inquest hearings."

Michael Mansfield QC, representing some of the families of the victims, pressed Goldring to appoint his own staff to handle the evidence for the inquest, saying the families had no faith in the Independent Police Complaints Commission, which is gathering the evidence on police conduct during and after the disaster, and with whom Stoddart is working closely. Goldring said he would consider that request.

Goldring will decide next week the location for the new inquest, after the family groups disagreed about where they would prefer. Mansfield, representing the largest group, 71 families who are HFSG members, said their overwhelming majority view was for the inquest to be held in London. The principal reason, he said, was that London would be perceived as neutral in the bitterly contested history of Hillsborough, and there would be no possibility of "actual or perceived bias".

However Pete Weatherby QC, representing 20 families, and lawyers for two other families, argued London was too far for mostly Liverpool-based family members to attend in full, and somewhere neutral in the north, such as Preston, should host it.

• Hillsborough disaster
• Liverpool
• Police

• Only seven clubs in England pay directors more
• Includes £687,611 salary and a £405,000 consultancy fee

The Birmingham City director Peter Pannu has been revealed as one of the highest paid directors in football, earning over £1m a year. The Guardian can disclose that on top of his £687,611 a year salary, Pannu also receives £405,000 a year in a "consultancy agreement" net of tax from the Championship club's parent company.

In the 2011-12 financial accounts of all Premier League clubs, only seven, including Manchester United, City and Arsenal, paid their highest earning director more than Pannu received for his work on behalf of Birmingham International Holdings Limited (BIHL) and Birmingham City.

In a statement to the Hong Kong stock exchange, BIHL said the company had failed previously to reveal the detail of the consultancy agreement with Pannu, "due to inadvertent oversight."

Correcting that oversight, BIHL stated that Pannu, a former policeman-turned barrister qualified in Hong Kong, had a five-year consultancy agreement agreed when BIHL took over at St Andrews in September 2009. Initially the agreement was to pay Pannu HK$310,000 a month, the equivalent now of £314,232 a year. The company committed to "wholly and unreservedly" pay that to Pannu net of tax.

The consultancy agreement, agreed with his Hong Kong company , Asia Rays Limited, also entitled Pannu to bonus payments, whose terms were not detailed, reimbursement for his masters degree in the management and business of football which he passed at Birkbeck College, London, and a personal loan of HK$2m (£168,948) towards his housing costs.

BIHL said "all payments due under the consultancy agreement" up to 30 June 2011 were personally paid by chairman, Carson Yeung, whose trial for money laundering offences is due to start next week. The 10% commission paid to Pannu on a £3.1m legal settlement with the former City owners David Gold and David Sullivan in June 2010 (£265,000 to Pannu net of VAT), revealed by the Guardian last month was on top of his £314,232 net-a-year consultancy payment.

On July 28 2011, Pannu's payment for consultancy was more than doubled, to £65,000 a month, equivalent to £780,000 a year, net of tax. Five months later, from January 1 2012, the payment was reduced to its current level, HK$400,000 a month, £405,000 a year.

The statement said BIHL expects Pannu to be paid at this rate for the current financial year, ending June 30 2013, and next year, then reduce to HK$1.2m, £101,368, in 2015.

In Birmingham City's accounts for 2011-12, Pannu's salary from the club, now revealed to be in addition to his payments from BIHL, was stated to be £687,611. Pannu subsequently explained to the Birmingham Mail that of that figure £250,000 was actually his salary, while the rest, more than £430,000, was "pocket expenses" for Hong Kong staff.

The BIHL statement said the company entered into the consultancy agreement for Pannu to provide "post acquisition due diligence consultation services ... and general legal consultancy services." The fee paid was increased, the statement said, after he was appointed a director of Birmingham City, and made its acting chairman, on July 11 2011. That corrects a statement from Pannu's and City's lawyers in a letter to the Guardian last month, which said Pannu was appointed "the acting chairman of BCFC" in October 2010.

The revelation of Pannu's payments from BIHL in addition to his salary come as City continue to grapple with the financial shock of relegation from the Premier League in 2011. The club's income reduced from £61m in 2010-11 to £39m in 2011-12, several higher earning players were sold, goalkeeper Jack Butland will leave this summer for Stoke City, and the Premier League parachute payments will shrink. Pannu has said efforts are being made to sell the club, and offers are invited for it.

• Birmingham City
• Finances
• Business

The US family have outlasted fiery protests by supporters after their debt-loading takeover of the Old Trafford club

As the key signing Robin van Persie volleyed Manchester United to their 20th league title watched by an Old Trafford crowd which did really look like 76,000 including two Glazer brothers in their cushioned seats, there was the sense that a rancourous era is ending and a new period of United strength beginning. After the fiery 2005 protests against the US family's hostile, debt-loading takeover, renewed in 2010 when they spent more of United's fortunes reorganising the source of their borrowing, Old Trafford has quietened.

Last night , and throughout this season, there have been fewer protests, and the defiant green and gold symbol of the club's original colours and working-class values became less visible. All the issues the Manchester United Supporters Trust (Must) and other fans' groups protested about in a well-informed campaign remain true. The Glazers, with no previous connection to United or English football, really were allowed, by United's availability on the London stock market and football's lack of regulation, to buy one of the world's greatest football clubs and load it with £525m of debt.

This debt was not borrowed by the club to invest in an academy or expand Old Trafford – that was done with cash made in the previous 13 years of Premier League success. The £525m was the Glazers' own borrowing to buy United, then they loaded their debt mountain on to the club itself to repay the debt and interest. Perhaps the most staggering perspective on this is to understand that in interest, fees paid to bankers, lawyers and accountants, and other hits of finance charges, the Glazer takeover has cost United more than £550m. Yet even after paying all that, United still have £420m debt derived from the Glazers' takeover.

In 2011-12, even with the crowd more resigned to it all, United paid £50m in interest on this debt. The Glazers paid themselves a £10m dividend, to pay off the £10m loan they borrowed from United in 2010, £1.6m by each of Malcolm Glazer's six children. The club paid a £3m management fee to the Glazers' company and Kevin Glazer, one of Malcolm's five sons, was owed £558,484 interest, having bought up some of United's debt for himself.

While United fans raged, informed by those with professional expertise such as Andy Green, the investment analyst who chronicled all the eye-watering details on his Andersred blog there was silence from the Premier League and Football Association. Now, with Sir Alex Ferguson's latest United team claiming the title, there is more silence around Old Trafford, the acoustics being tested for their noise-generating capabilities.

The Glazers have outstayed the protests, which even included the formation of the breakaway, supporter-owned club FC United of Manchester, partly because they came through the financial challenge their dealings created. For a time it looked difficult, even for this most famous and well-followed club in the greatest of booms for football. The Glazers took over a United being recast by Ferguson, who had signed Rio Ferdinand for £30m in 2002, Cristiano Ronaldo for £12m in 2003 and Wayne Rooney for £25m in 2004. Even as the fans vilified the corporate raiders, United won three successive Premier Leagues in 2007, 2008 and 2009, and the Champions League in 2008.

Despite that supreme success, and United's income being dramatically higher than any other club, they haemorrhaged losses. In the year to 30 June 2007 United paid £82m in interest on £667m debts from the Glazers' own borrowings – and made a financial loss of £58m. In 2007-08, the year they won the Premier League and Champions League double, the £69m interest they paid pushed United into a loss of £45m. As some United campaigners exasperatedly pointed out, the "leveraged" buy-out, loading debt on to a healthy company solely to make money for bankers and owners, meant United were no longer paying UK corporation tax because they had been pushed from profit into loss.

That summer of 2008, Ferguson did sign Dimitar Berbatov from Tottenham Hotspur for £30.75m, a trademark signing of a major star from a Premier League rival.

After that, though, coinciding with the club's submersion in debt, Ferguson's signings appeared markedly less ambitious. In the summer of 2009, when Real Madrid paid £80m for Ronaldo, United banked most of it. Ferguson signed the solid Antonio Valencia for £16m from Wigan Athletic, Gabriel Obertan, £3m from Bordeaux, and, on a free transfer, 29-year-old Michael Owen, who went on to play six full league matches for United.

In 2009-10, the year the Glazers refinanced their borrowings with bonds and the fans yearned for the green and gold simplicities of the club's Newton Heath beginnings, United recorded a £79m loss and had fully £107m interest to pay. United were pushed into second place by Chelsea and won nothing, Sheikh Mansour was pouring money into City acquisitions, but that summer Ferguson signed the promising Chris Smalling and Javier Hernández, and spent £7.4m on the enduring Portuguese puzzle of Bébé.

United looked to be wobbling then, but three key changes have enabled the Glazers to ride it out. First, in late 2010, they settled the excruciatingly high interest "payment in kind" part of their borrowings, from funds whose source they have still never revealed.

Second, supervised by Edward Woodward in a London office, a team of sales staff was slicing the world into sponsorships, by product sector, globally, and regionally, squeezing so much more money from selling the United name that commercial income last year reached £118m.

Third, they scoured the world for a stock market to accept their route to partial salvation. The 134-year-old Manchester football club ended up registered in the Cayman Islands and floated in New York as an "emerging growth company". The Glazers made £70m selling shares themselves, United received £70m selling shares to new investors including the speculator George Soros. Crucially, according to Duncan Drasdo, Must's chief executive, this float sees them safer because they can sell shares on the market if they ever need cash.

With Ferguson gazumped to the Premier League title by City's £38m Sergio Agüero in the 94th minute of last season's final game, the Van Persie signing felt like a landmark response. At 29, the Dutchman contradicted Ferguson's assurances that his patchy signings of previous years were because he was now interested only in youth. The signing signalled determination at United not to be outdone by Mansour's multi-millions being spent at City and that, although still hugely debt-laden, they are financially through the worst.

So it was fitting that United reclaimed the title with Van Persie's hat-trick. The Glazers have, in some watershed sense, come out the other side, owning Manchester United, their own personal asset now worth more than twice the £790m they paid for it with so much borrowed money.

On Tuesday night Bayern Munich and Barcelona play each other in the Champions League semi-final, two great clubs still in the traditional ownership of their supporters. England's champions represent a dramatically different incarnation: football clubs as objects of financial speculation, and modern-day banking practices we would all feel better never having known about.

• Manchester United
• The Glazer family
• Sir Alex Ferguson
• Finances
• Business