It is Britain’s most successful football club and worth over £5bn - but taxpayers’ cash will be used to kick-start Manchester United’s stadium redevelopment, it emerged on Tuesday night.
Millions of pounds of public money will help ‘enable’ the £2bn rebuild of Old Trafford, announced on Tuesday by co-owner, Sir Jim Ratcliffe.
Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham’s office defended use of public funding saying the plans would unlock a wider scheme which would be the ‘biggest urban regeneration since the London 2012 Olympics’.
But the use of taxpayers’ cash ‘simply to justify a football club’s desire to improve their ground’, was questioned by former Tory leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith.