Marc Skinner's Departure: A Warning for Manchester United Women
Marc Skinner’s exit from Manchester United Women is not just another managerial change. It is a statement – or, more damningly, an admission – about where Jim Ratcliffe and INEOS place the women’s team in their grand Old Trafford project.
A month before a new WSL season, United have lost the coach who delivered their first major trophy. Not to a rival. Not to a national team. To frustration.
Overachiever walks away
Skinner’s reign was never simple, never universally loved, but it was undeniably productive. As talkSPORT’s women’s football correspondent Angelina Kelly pointed out, he operated with a fraction of the budget available at Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester City, yet still dragged United into the conversation with them.
He won the club’s first piece of silverware in the women’s game, lifting the FA Cup. He took league finishes of fourth, third, fifth, second, fourth. He put United Women into the Champions League for the first time in their history.
By any rational measure, that is overachievement.
But the story is more jagged than the numbers. The football often left fans unconvinced. Choices were questioned. The mood around him never quite settled. United reached four domestic cup finals under his watch and won only one; the other three ended in aggregate defeat to Chelsea by a combined 6-0. That is a brutal ceiling to keep smashing your head against.
Kelly likened his departure to the Eddie Howe situation at Newcastle before the takeover transformed the men’s side. A respected coach, admired within the game, but operating under financial limits he simply could not bend any further.
Whenever she spoke to Skinner, Kelly said, he was polite, respectful, grounded. But he could also see the writing on the wall: a thinning squad, big names sold, no marquee arrivals, no depth.
He knew he was being sent into a new season without the tools to compete. And so he walked.
‘The powers that be aren’t backing you’
The core of the issue is not complicated. Last season’s problems were obvious: a lack of squad depth and a shortage of elite players who can decide big matches. Those problems have not been fixed. If anything, they have deepened.
“A lot of players have been sold. The squad depth is less,” Kelly said. “He’s looking at it and thinking, I’m not going to be able to do anything with this team.”
That is the point at which a manager starts thinking not just about the club, but about his own reputation. Stay too long in a project that is not serious, and you become part of the problem in the eyes of the wider game.
The comparison with Howe is telling. At Newcastle, the limitation was whether the club could spend. At United Women, Kelly argued, it is whether the club will spend.
And that distinction goes straight to the top.
Ratcliffe’s blind spot
When Ratcliffe arrived in 2023, there were hints United were finally taking the women’s squad seriously. They had lost Alessia Russo and Ona Batlle on free transfers, but responded by paying a then club-record fee for Brazilian forward Geyse and bringing in Melvine Malard, Hinata Miyazawa and Irene Guerrero.
That short-lived surge now feels like an outlier rather than the start of a strategy.
Since then, Ratcliffe’s comments about the women’s team have landed badly, and one moment in particular cut through: a visit to the training ground where he asked then-captain Katie Zelem what her role was at the club. The owner of Manchester United, meeting the captain of Manchester United Women, and not knowing who she is.
Peterborough United chairman Darragh MacAnthony told talkSPORT that nobody wants to disrespect a women’s team, but stressed that the men’s side brings in the vast majority of United’s revenue. It was a blunt, commercial view.
Kelly accepted the reality of the revenue gap, but did not let the club off the hook.
“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.”
The contrast with other owners is stark. Arsenal, Chelsea, Brighton – clubs with both men’s and women’s sides – are pumping money into their women’s teams despite not turning a profit on them. They treat it as investment, not charity.
Kelly pointed to Tony Bloom at Brighton. Smart, shrewd, data-driven, everything Ratcliffe likes to think he is. Bloom is funding a stadium in Brighton specifically for the women’s team. Not an add-on. Not a borrowed ground. A purpose-built home.
That is what commitment looks like.
United step back while rivals accelerate
The market this summer has underlined just how far United are slipping off the pace.
Lyon defender Alice Sombath has joined Tottenham. London City Lionesses, who finished sixth in the Championship last season, have signed two-time Ballon d’Or winner Alexia Putellas. That is the scale of ambition elsewhere.
United, by contrast, have sold Malard to Chelsea for £850,000 and pivoted to a new model: build around homegrown youth, keep spending down, lean into the club’s historic identity as a developer of talent.
On paper, it sounds noble. In practice, Kelly sees a cost-cutting exercise dressed up as philosophy.
Sources, she said, claim the club now view heavy spending on the women’s academy and senior squad as unsustainable. The talk is of sustainability, pathways, identity. All the right buzzwords.
The question is what sits behind them.
‘Homegrown’ or just cheap?
Kelly did not hide her scepticism when asked whether “homegrown players” is simply code for doing it on the cheap.
“If you want to bring in young homegrown talent, you need to have something to show,” she said. “At the moment, they have absolutely nothing going into this new season.”
That is not entirely literal, of course. United still have quality. Mary Earps has gone, but they retain a “fantastic goalkeeper” in the squad. Maya Le Tissier wears the armband and anchors the defence as a high-class centre-back. Ella Toone is the club’s biggest star, a player with genuine pull. Jess Park has arrived from Manchester City and impressed.
There is a spine there. A thin one.
Beyond that, Kelly argued, there is precious little to convince anyone that United are building a serious contender around those players. Not when London City Lionesses are out there signing Putellas. Not when Spurs are outmuscling them for talent.
So what is Ratcliffe really doing? Is this a bold bet that he and INEOS have cracked a smarter, leaner model than the owners of Arsenal, Brighton or Washington Spirit’s Michelle Kang? Does he genuinely believe he has seen something in the numbers that everyone else has missed?
Or is the truth simpler – that, in his mind, the women’s team is not yet worth the outlay?
A club that once shut the door
The senior women’s side at Manchester United has only existed since 2018. For a club of United’s size and reach, that is astonishingly late to the party.
For years, talented girls came through the system only to find there was nowhere for them to go. They hit the end of the pathway and were shown the door.
Ella Toone is the perfect example. She grew up a United fan, but had to play her early senior football at Blackburn and Manchester City because the route to the top at Old Trafford simply did not exist.
That history is why Kelly struggles to see a coherent plan now. United talk about a seamless youth system that can compete with Arsenal, Chelsea and the rest. She wants to know how.
What does that pathway look like? Where is the investment in coaching, facilities, recruitment that makes it real rather than rhetorical?
Because the numbers involved are not eye-watering. Kelly estimated that around £10 million would transform United Women’s prospects – a figure she compared, pointedly, to the annual wages of Mason Mount.
She acknowledged you cannot just cancel Mount’s contract and hand the money to the women’s team. That is not how football finance works. But the comparison exposes the scale of the gap between what United could do and what they are choosing to do.
£10 million is a rounding error on the men’s side. On the women’s side, it is the difference between clinging on and competing.
The risk of losing a generation
There is another danger in stripping the women’s squad back to a handful of stars and a lot of promise. Modern fandom is fluid.
“Young fans now, it’s not always the club – it’s the players,” Kelly said.
Supporters followed Alessia Russo to Arsenal. They will follow other icons if United cannot keep them or replace them with players of similar stature. If the club stop signing big names, stop reaching finals, stop making noise, they risk becoming a stepping stone rather than a destination.
United Women do not need hundreds of millions to change that trajectory. They need clarity, intent and a level of backing that reflects their potential, not their current balance sheet.
Right now, they have lost a respected manager who no longer believed he could compete with what he was given. They have a squad that has been trimmed while rivals are flexing. They have an ownership that talks about sustainability, yet appears unwilling to invest at the level required to make that sustainable model truly elite.
So the question hangs over Old Trafford, unanswered and uncomfortable: is Sir Jim Ratcliffe really trying to outsmart the rest of the women’s game – or has he simply decided that Manchester United Women are not worth the gamble?
