Martínez has drawn back the curtain on Manchester United’s ruinous ownership | Jonathan Liew

Heartbreaking: the worst defender you know just made a great point. And no, nobody would describe Lisandro Martínez as the ideal person to scrutinise Manchester United’s indifferent start to the season, given that his high-profile defensive errors against Fulham and Tottenham are partly responsible for it. “We’re all trying to find the guy who did this,” Martínez burbles on Amazon Prime after United’s 2-0 defeat by Atlético Madrid on Tuesday night, dressed in a hot dog costume and throwing his arms out in mock innocence.

For those with no interest in engaging with what Martínez actually had to say, this alone will be sufficient grounds to ignore him. Already you can sense the squeamishness of former players for whom the violation of an omertà is the real cardinal sin here, a phantom limb that still tingles years after they last stepped into a dressing room. “Disrespectful,” reckoned Wayne Rooney. “I don’t feel like he’s got the right,” agreed Ashley Young. “These things don’t end well, man,” Rio Ferdinand observed on his podcast.

But traducing the messenger will always be easier than hearing the message, even if Martínez’s views are widely shared within the United dressing room. If the fallout from the Manchester City legal case has demonstrated anything, it is English football’s ingrained reluctance to scrutinise the owners and executives who hold more influence over the sport than anybody else. Men in boots, not men in suits. Hey, watch the ball. It’s going to move!

All the same, it’s worth parsing exactly what Martínez was complaining about, because it’s a good deal more complex than it may appear on first viewing. Player calls out board – and specifically “technical director” Jason Wilcox – for failing to invest sufficiently in the squad over the summer. This was a summer in which United brought in three midfielders (Andrey Santos, Youri Tielemans, Carlos Baleba), a reserve goalkeeper (Karl Darlow), nobody up front and nobody in defence. So far, so simple.

But let’s begin to unpick the threads. Why did United not buy a defender in the summer, despite pursuing deals for Lewis Hall and Myles Lewis-Skelly? Because they were unable to sell a defender. There was no interest in Diogo Dalot or Noussair Mazraoui, nor in Harry Maguire, nor in Luke Shaw or Martínez, whose contracts are up next summer in any case. This is the product of recruitment decisions made and deals signed years ago. But why do United, one of the world’s most lucrative clubs, need to sell to buy in the first place?

Perhaps for the same reason they baulked at the asking price for Elliot Anderson and decided to sign the inconsistent Santos and the adequate but overpromoted Tielemans instead: this is a club in austerity measures, whose part-owner Jim Ratcliffe has been furiously cutting costs and raising ticket prices, determined to curb the years of excess that preceded him, where mediocre players were signed on ridiculous money, where failing coaches were paid to leave. But why would United, one of the most commercially successful clubs in footballing history, ever need to cut costs?

Perhaps as a result of the more than £1bn drained out of the club by the Glazers in their 21 years of ownership, not just in dividends but share sales and interest payments on the debt they undertook to buy the club, while neglecting the maintenance of Old Trafford and the training ground at Carrington. Whether he knows it or not, when Martínez is criticising the lack of investment he is in effect holding the Glazers accountable for more than two decades of avarice and mismanagement.

All of which lends a certain significance to Martínez’s intervention that goes beyond the churn of the weekly news cycle. Has any serving United player spoken out so frankly about the ruins of the Glazer ownership? Ole Gunnar Solskjær made a minor stand in early 2005, before they had arrived at the club. Cristiano Ronaldo threw some hand grenades over his shoulder a few days before he left for the second time in 2022. Countless others waited for the safety of retirement, when their disgruntlement could be monetised for personal gain, rather than used to stigmatise them, as Martínez will doubtless be stigmatised in the coming days.

Does any of this help United to win games in the short term? Almost certainly not. Martínez attempted to clarify his comments in a social media post on Wednesday night. He may still be dispatched to the bomb squad anyway, for the crime of pointing out that the emperor secured his throne almost entirely through the use of payment-in-kind loans.

Inevitably Michael Carrick too will be gone before long, away to the great Overlap podcast in the sky. A few months ago I wrote hopefully that Carrick might be the ideal man to cut through the noise and nonsense. I was wrong. The noise has beaten him; the nonsense always wins; any accumulated credit from last season has long since evaporated.

Of course it’s not Carrick’s fault that United haven’t signed a new defender in almost two years, that Bruno Fernandes is so clearly playing through discomfort, that Joshua Zirkzee is still somehow hanging around the place, that the ownership decided to embark on a purge of season-ticket holders in the summer, generating a huge wave of ill-feeling and apathy that can be felt at Old Trafford on matchdays: an entire fanbase trying to work out whether they actually still care about this.

But accountability is for the little people, and far easier to replace a coach on a modest 20-month contract than to oust Ineos or the Glazers, to replace Wilcox or Omar Berrada, even if we now know they partly built their reputations on the success of a club that has been found to have serially cheated. Bumper returns for the owners, price hikes for the fans, corners cut on the pitch; this is the story of the modern Manchester United, which by no coincidence is also the story of modern football.