New co-owner of Manchester United Jim Ratcliffe plans to cut 200 staff and reduce benefits after £300 million losses over three years.

Anyone who has worked in a studio knows that you cannot carve form out of stone without respecting the hands that hold the tools. What worries me about a slash of two hundred jobs and a proud announcement of savings is the sense that workers are being treated as excess material to be chipped away until the numbers look pretty. You may end up with a sleeker silhouette on a balance sheet and a hollowed out reality behind the scenes. A club that thins its own foundations in the name of efficiency should not be surprised if the sculpture later cracks.

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