Manchester United fans want the Glazers out but Knighton isn’t the answer

The fans are desperate for Manchester United to be sold, but a Michael Knighton takeover would be like jumping from a frying pan into a fire.

It already feels as though this is going to be a winter of discontent at Manchester United. Losing their first game of the season seems to have been the catalyst for a renewed attempt to get the Glazer family out of Old Trafford once and for all.

There are already plans for a mass protest during their game against Liverpool – though how successful that might be is debatable, to say the least – but the rumour mill is already speculating that attempts to prise the club from its owners could be coming about sooner rather than later.

Sir Jim Radcliffe, commonly referred to in the media as ‘Britain’s Richest Man’, submitted a bid to buy Chelsea at the end of April which was dismissed out of hand. When he was asked at that time about his reported support of United he described his interest in them and the Blues as a ‘split allegiance’.

There has been considerable speculation surrounding the possibility of him making a bid to buy the United.

But the other name to have been thrown around over the last couple of days has been a blast from the club’s past, a callback to another time when their condition didn’t look so great.

Michael Knighton is a name indelibly linked to one of the most bizarre publicity stunts that the club has ever seen, an act of self-publicising hubris that preceded a very public fall.

At the start of the 1989/90 season Manchester United were in an even more moribund state than they find themselves today. It had been 22 years since they last been the champions of England, and big money signings in the early to mid-1980s hadn’t significantly improved the club’s fortunes.

They’d won the FA Cup three times in the previous decade, but Liverpool had been far away at the top of the table over most of this period.

Alex Ferguson was appointed as manager in 1986, but he’d yet to deliver any silverware and his position was believed to be far from secure. A slump in the latter stages of the 1988/89 season saw United drop to a final position of 11th, scoring just 45 goals in 38 league matches, their joint worst final league placing since relegation 15 years earlier.

When the team took to the pitch for their penultimate home league match of the season against Wimbledon, just 23,368 people – considerably below half of Old Trafford’s capacity at the time – turned out to…