As the twentieth anniversary of the Glazer family’s tenure as owners of Manchester United approaches, it’s a struggle to see how it could have been any more disastrous.

Over £1 billion in debt, dressing room dramas and fan protests every other week, cost-cutting practices from new part-owner Jim Ratcliffe that would make George Osborne blush and destined for the worst league season result since they were last relegated in 1974: the football club that once led more than any other on the world stage appears to have been reduced to a chaotic circus.

This sense has only increased with yesterday’s announcement of a brand-new stadium which looks less like a dignified vision of the future and more like it was carved out of mashed potato by Homer Simpson. The ‘trident umbrella design’ coating the design of the new arena is supposedly meant to capture rainwater and harvest solar energy. An honourable addition perhaps, but one that smacks of the useless environmental tokenism we’re so often used to seeing from large corporations.

This is by no means the worst of it. A ‘public plaza’ is also to be built, apparently twice the size of Trafalgar Square. Ideally, this would be surrounded by small independent businesses, and not by the very same chain restaurants and corporate entities that increasingly dominate the landscape of today’s Cottonopolis (as well as the other recently refurbished oversized shopping centres that have so greatly contributed to the decades-old gentrification of the city). But this is Manchester. We do things exactly the same here.

In many ways, the impending demolition of Old Trafford, perhaps the most iconic club stadium in English football history, is completely in line with Manchester’s increasing erosion of its proud history in favour of shiny newbuilds. A stadium that, while far from perfect (mostly due to years of neglect by the Glazers), is the home of the most wonderful memories for any United fan lucky enough to venture there regularly. The ashes of many a red who stood on (and later sat in) the Stretford End watching the majesty of the Holy Trinity of Best, Law and Charlton, the genius of Cantona and the raw talent of Rooney are scattered across what will soon to be turned to rubble.

Perhaps the most glaring flaw in this grand plan, however, is how exactly a debt-laden Manchester United intend to afford a £2 billion project which is expected to be built within five years. As the fan-owned breakaway club FC United of Manchester recently said in a club statement, £1.1 billion has been drained from MUFC in interest payments, dividends and fees since 2005, and the club has decided to make hundreds of the most low-paid staff redundant while the highest-paid players remain.

One suspects the toxic billionaire tag-team of the ruthless Floridians and the local petrochemical magnate Ratcliffe will likely hand the bill to fans paying through the gate on matchdays, since the latter has seen fit to raise all remaining ticket prices, regardless of age, to £66 a pop for the rest of this woeful season. Imagine what they’ll charge when the football on the pitch is at least palatable.

For any Manchester United fan with any semblance of ethics or class consciousness, it is pretty exhausting maintaining your undying love for an entity which has drifted what feels like a million miles away — and appears to represent the dead opposite — of what you stand for as a human being. But what can we do? We are born with our football clubs. For whatever reason you fell in love with them, it is an affiliation almost impossible to shake when it is with you from such a young age.

The answer to this malaise is not one that comes to mind easily. Manchester United, and indeed other Premier League clubs like them, seems destined to forever be the plaything of either oligarchs, tech companies or nation states. While more clubs at smaller levels are now owned by their supporters than ever before, it looks a distant dream for any club near the top flight getting anywhere close to it.

An alternative for reds, however, thankfully does exist in the aforementioned FC United, a fine example of the tradition of Mancunians rebelling against those exploiting them and doing things their own way, whose fans have managed to build a fantastic stadium of their own in Moston in the north-east of the city.

Approximately 1/2000th of what it’ll cost to build the Circus of Nightmares could pay off the comparatively small debt on FC’s Broadhurst Park, which would allow the Red Rebels to continue providing a top-notch community facility in one of Manchester’s most deprived areas. Perhaps a more fitting place for many disaffected reds to spend their £66 on a Saturday.