Ed Glazer, a sitting director of Manchester United, has handed more than $220,000 to Donald Trump's Republican National Committee this year, days before the US midterms. If you support United and you're furious about it, you're right to be. It's one more line in a ledger fans have been forced to read for two decades.
The numbers are plain. City AM, citing Federal Election Commission filings, put Glazer's giving at $221,502, around £166,000, split across eight separate donations through 2026. The US midterms fall this week. So while United sat 16th in the Premier League through the round of matches played on 25 October, a man on the club's board was funding a political party on another continent, in an election where not a single United supporter gets a vote or a benefit.
A man's politics are his own business, the argument goes, and what Ed Glazer does with his money has nothing to do with the football club. Fine, in a vacuum. But Ed Glazer doesn't own a corner shop. He's a director of Manchester United, inside a family that has treated this club as a cash machine since the day it arrived. City AM puts United's total debt above £1bn and estimates the wider Glazer family have made around £1.3bn during their ownership while the team on the pitch got worse. When money is that tight for the thing fans actually care about, and that loose for an American election, people notice. They're allowed to.
This fits a pattern. Glazer gave to Trump's 2016 inauguration, a reported $250,000, and hosted a Trump fundraiser at his Beverly Hills home in 2018. Any claim that this was a one-off falls apart against his own record. He knows exactly what he's doing and keeps doing it.
Reports this week say the Glazers are privately raging at Jim Ratcliffe for how he's running the football side, with a family source quoted calling it "a travesty" and "not what they expected or were promised." So the men who loaded this club with debt and pulled a fortune out of it have cast themselves as the aggrieved party, while one of them finds six-figure sums for a foreign campaign. It's one worldview showing up twice in the same week.
Name the person: Ed Glazer wrote the cheques, and the responsibility is his alone. But a United fan feels it as a gut-punch because of the system he operates inside. A family that built its wealth off this club and now services more than a billion in debt with it wants sympathy for being disappointed by the manager it chose. Against all of that, eight donations to Trump make Glazer's priorities clear.
Fans didn't need a new reason to despise this ownership. They got one anyway.
