Marc Skinner Leaves Manchester United Women Amid Investment Concerns

Marc Skinner walked away from Manchester United Women a month before a new season, and the message could hardly be clearer. The club’s new powerbrokers either do not care enough about the women’s team – or they are convinced they know better than every serious investor in the women’s game.

That is the charge being levelled by talkSPORT’s women’s football correspondent Angelina Kelly, who sees Skinner’s exit as the logical end point of a project starved of proper backing rather than a shock managerial twist.

Overachievement on a shoestring

Skinner’s reign was never straightforward. Turbulent, Kelly calls it. Yet his record, set against the financial muscle of Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester City, reads like a manager squeezing every last drop out of a thin budget.

He delivered Manchester United Women’s first major trophy with the FA Cup. He took league finishes of fourth, third, fifth, second, fourth. He put the club into the Champions League for the first time in their history. All of that while operating with “significantly less” money than the established heavyweights.

On one side of the argument, that is textbook overachievement.

On the other, the frustration never really left. The fanbase never fully warmed to him. His tactical calls were regularly dissected and doubted. United reached four domestic cup finals during his tenure and won only one. The other three? Lost to Chelsea on aggregate by a combined score of 6-0. Those are the scars that never quite healed.

Kelly likens his position to Eddie Howe’s at Newcastle before the takeover: a respected coach, admired within the game, looking up at a ceiling imposed by those above him.

“Ex-professional footballers that I speak to speak very highly of Marc Skinner,” she explained on talkSPORT, describing a polite, respectful figure who has simply run out of road. The problems he faced last season – a lack of squad depth, the absence of big-game stars – have only worsened. Players have been sold. The squad is thinner. The resources are not coming.

So he looked at the landscape and, in Kelly’s view, drew the obvious conclusion: this club is not willing to invest in this women’s team. Stay, and his reputation risks being dragged down with a side that cannot compete. Leave, and he at least controls the timing.

The powers that be are not backing you. That is where the story really starts.

Ratcliffe’s words, Ratcliffe’s reality

Manchester United Women actually looked to be pushing on in the market in the summer before Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s arrival in 2023. They lost Alessia Russo and Ona Batlle on free transfers, but they broke their transfer record for Brazilian forward Geyse and brought in Melvine Malard, Hinata Miyazawa and Irene Guerrero.

Then the tone shifted.

Ratcliffe’s public comments about the women’s team drew anger a year later, and the optics worsened when he visited the training ground and asked then-captain Katie Zelem what her role was at the club. For a new part-owner positioning himself as a restorer of standards, not knowing the name or job of your women’s captain is a damning visual.

Peterborough United chairman Darragh MacAnthony voiced the financial reality bluntly on talkSPORT: the men’s side brings in the “mass amount of revenue” at Manchester United. That, he argued, is the hard truth no one likes to say out loud.

Kelly did not dispute the economics. She did question the attitude.

“It doesn’t help matters when you don’t even know who your women’s team captain is,” she replied. “You don’t even know her name. It’s going to come across as a bit disrespectful.”

Look at the market, she argued. Arsenal, Chelsea, Brighton and others with both men’s and women’s teams are pouring money into their women’s sides. They are not turning a profit. They are doing it because they see an investment, a growth area, a future.

Manchester United Women, by contrast, only just about turned a profit last season, and even that was close to breaking even. Other owners are not chasing a balance sheet; they are building infrastructure and prestige.

Kelly points to Tony Bloom at Brighton. Smart businessman, shrewd gambler, hardly reckless. He is still pumping money into Brighton Women and building a stadium specifically for them. Purpose-built, not an afterthought.

The comparison is stark. And intentional.

A ‘sustainable’ plan – or a cheap one?

This summer has underlined the direction of travel. While rivals move aggressively, United have stepped back.

Lyon defender Alice Sombath chose Tottenham. London City Lionesses, sixth in the second tier last season, stunned the sport by signing two-time Ballon d’Or winner Alexia Putellas. That is an ambitious club punching up.

United, by contrast, sold Malard to Chelsea for £850,000 and pivoted to a new mantra: sustainability, homegrown talent, identity.

Sources, Kelly says, claim the club believe current levels of spending are not sustainable in the women’s academy. The strategy is to build around youth, to lean into the club’s historic reputation for developing players and let that define the women’s team.

On paper, it sounds coherent. On the pitch, Kelly is not convinced.

Pressed on whether “homegrown” is simply code for “doing it on the cheap”, she did not hold back. If you want to attract and develop top young players, you need proof of concept. A platform. Something tangible.

Right now, she argues, United do not have that.

Yes, there is a core. A “fantastic” goalkeeper. A captain in Maya Le Tissier who looks every inch a top-level centre-back. Ella Toone, the club’s biggest star, a homegrown symbol forced to leave the club as a youngster to find a pathway at Blackburn and Manchester City before returning. Jess Park, impressive since arriving from City.

Strip it back, though, and that is a spine, not a squad. Beyond that, Kelly sees little evidence of a club truly building around them with the ambition to win major honours.

While London City Lionesses are spending big to bring in a global icon, United are talking sustainability and trimming around the edges. It leaves Kelly with two possible explanations.

Either Ratcliffe genuinely believes he has found a smarter, more efficient route than the owners at Arsenal, Bloom at Brighton, Michelle Kang and the other serious players in the women’s market. Or he has decided the women’s side is simply not worth significant investment right now.

One is bold. The other is brutal.

A club still searching for a plan

The women’s senior side only re-formed in 2018. Before that, United’s pathway for girls effectively stopped at a certain age. Talented youngsters had to leave to become professionals. Toone’s story is not a one-off; it is a symptom.

Kelly cannot see the roadmap yet. If the vision is a seamless youth system producing enough quality to compete with Arsenal and Chelsea, she wants to know how, and when, that becomes reality.

Because the numbers involved are not enormous. She estimates around £10 million would transform the women’s operation – a figure she notes is less than Mason Mount earns in a year.

Nobody is suggesting you simply cut a player and hand the wages to the women’s team. The point is scale. What United Women need to close the gap is a rounding error on the men’s side. The impact, though, could be seismic: a squad capable of genuinely challenging Arsenal and Chelsea, a product that attracts and retains fans, a club that looks serious.

Right now, that is not what she sees.

The modern fanbase, she points out, is fluid. Allegiance is increasingly tied to players as much as clubs. Supporters followed Alessia Russo at United; now she is at Arsenal, some will switch their attention. That is the reality of the women’s game in its current growth phase.

To keep those fans, to draw in the next generation, you need stars. You need statement signings. You need to “put on a bit of a show”, as Kelly puts it.

At the moment, United are heading into a new season with a handful of standout players, a manager out the door, and a strategy that looks, from the outside, like a cost-cutting exercise dressed up as philosophy.

The question now is not whether Marc Skinner overachieved. He did. It is whether Manchester United are prepared to match the ambition of the clubs they claim to compete with – or whether, for all the talk of standards and vision, the women’s team is being quietly left to fend for itself.