The biggest CapEx project in sport

Why this is in the vault

Part III of CFO Secrets' four-part Manchester United case study — a live Q&A with guest sports-business CFO Jason Hershman walking the club's £2bn stadium-rebuild decision in real time: two-option framing, a land-acquisition BATNA negotiation, cost-overrun comps against Spurs and Everton, a revenue bridge, and an unresolved capital-structure question — as a rare example of megaproject capital allocation reasoned through step by step rather than reported after the fact.

The core argument

Old Trafford, un-redeveloped since 2006, has accumulated enough deferred maintenance CapEx that United now faces a binary: patch the existing ground for £1-1.2bn (adding ~12,790 seats but losing income during construction) or build fresh on adjacent land for £2bn (100,000 seats, no legacy maintenance burden). Hershman treats option 2 as "the no-brainer" on paper. A land dispute with infrastructure owner Brookfield (asking £400m for a plot United valued near £40-50m) resolved when United simply walked to a different site — a textbook BATNA outcome the host calls out explicitly. On cost, Hershman anchors to Tottenham's stadium (initial £400m estimate, final ~£1.2bn, a near-3x overrun) and Everton's Hill Dickinson Stadium (60% overspend), noting Oxford's Bent Flyvbjerg finds only 8.5% of megaprojects land on-time and on-budget; the host's own read is that a similar overspend pattern could push United's build past £3bn. The revenue case (extra seating, naming rights at an estimated £25-50m/yr, events, a surrounding entertainment district) pencils to real incremental EBITDA, but the financing math doesn't close cleanly: borrowing the full £2bn against the stadium would push pro-forma leverage to 8.3x EBITDA (matching Spurs' COVID-era peak), so a lender-imposed 4.0x cap would only fund ~25% of the project via debt, leaving roughly £1.5bn to be raised via equity — diluting existing shareholders by an estimated 33.7%. The piece ends flagging three specific uncertainties (build-cost optimism, a 2030 opening target the host thinks is really "2035," and an unresolved funding structure) and speculates the whole stadium plan may exist to make the Glazers' eventual exit story more sellable.

Mapping against Ray Data Co

The concrete connection is to the /verify-strategic-output calibration rubric and the L5 decision-audit thesis, not a boilerplate "sports finance parallels business" gloss. Hershman does, unprompted, exactly what that rubric asks a strategic-output critic to check for: he names his three biggest sources of estimate risk explicitly (build-cost optimism, timing slippage, funding-structure ambiguity) rather than presenting the £2bn-and-a-clean-EBITDA-bridge case with false confidence, and he anchors every assumption to a checkable comp (Spurs' £19k/seat vs United's projected £20k/seat, Barcelona's PSL pricing, Etihad/Emirates naming-rights deals) instead of a synthesized number with no lineage. That's the same discipline the calibration rubric is trying to force onto RDCO's own investing-thesis and paper-trade outputs — cite the comp, flag the uncertainty band, don't let a clean bridge chart substitute for an honest confidence level. Worth noting as a negative case too: the piece's own EBITDA and naming-rights figures are sourced through Summation, the sponsor, with no independent cross-check shown — the same "unverified-figure-dressed-as-analysis" failure mode the rubric exists to catch.

Related

• [[2026-08-08-secret-cfo-manchester-united-balance-sheet-history]]
• [[2026-04-19-acquired-formula-1]]

⚠️ Sponsorship

Sponsored by Summation (AI Analyst product), its third confirmed appearance overall and second within this specific Man Utd series (Part I, filed 2026-08-08, was also Summation-sponsored) — consistent with the README's note that Summation has become the de facto standing sponsor for CFO Secrets' longer analytical series. Every chart in the piece is watermarked "powered by Summation" with a click-through replay link carrying UTM tracking; the bias implication is the same as Part I — the sponsor is credited as the verification layer behind figures that are otherwise unattributed (naming-rights ranges, EBITDA bridges), which is a mild incentive to present those modeled numbers as more rigorously sourced than an unsponsored equivalent piece would claim.