Man United are the Ferrari of football but winning the cups isn’t enough, no matter what Erik ten Hag says, writes SIMON JORDAN

As an 11-year-old playing 2 Tone records in my bedroom in 1979, a brilliant band called The Specials had a deep-seated influence on me.

By 2003, I had built and sold a business for close to £100million, bought my boyhood football club which was on the cusp of the being promoted to the Premier League and I was labouring under the belief I could turn my hand to anything. I acted upon this instinctive desire and passion to try and get The Specials to reform.

That’s when I met one of my few heroes, their lead singer Terry Hall, for the first time, via a convoluted sets of contacts including Alan McGee, head of Creation Records and discoverer of Oasis.

Terry was an unassuming character but very witty with an acerbic sense of humour. We got on like a house on fire.

Over a three-year period of relentless pursuit, we managed to get the band together again. Their first ‘gig’ was at my 40th birthday party in 2007, after that they went on to massive tours and national acclaim.

Ten Hag’s side suffered a chastening defeat at the hands of their bitter rivals Liverpool on Sunday afternoon

Manchester United are like the Ferrari of football compared to their local rivals Man City

Why am I reflecting on this in a sports column? Because a shared love of football was part of my bond with Terry and part of the cementing of a vision. Terry was an avid Manchester United fan and when they played Millwall in the 2004 FA Cup final, I invited him along and we jumped into a helicopter and headed for the Millennium Stadium.

Terry hailed from Coventry but was far removed from being a plastic Red. He was a season-ticket holder at Old Trafford and his devotion to the club was almost religious.

He bloody sadly passed away in 2022 but it’s because of Terry and millions of others like him, there is this endless fascination with Manchester United.

Whenever they hit the skids, like Sunday’s 3-0 defeat to Liverpool, it’s a subject I’m drawn into on a regular basis, whether on TalkSport or in these pages, even when I’d like to discuss something different!

Terry’s loyalty to the club in these darker times would have remained unquestioned. Don’t forget, he grew up in the 1970s when United had many fallow years which essentially remained until 1992. He was a fan, full stop.

It was remarkably good timing under Sir Alex Ferguson that a club which had been asleep for decades woke up just as the Premier League started its engines.

It was a marriage made in heaven, the launch of the Premier League with a fledgling broadcaster that had balls and ambition, and Manchester United as the club with most sizzle.

Rupert Murdoch bet the house on football being something of value to Sky, then the Man United effect came on board and, bang, off goes the Premier League.

While Manchester United’s success has declined since Sir Alex Ferguson’s retirement, Manchester City are building this legacy and the next generation of fans are evolving to them

To this day, Manchester United are an incredibly valuable property inside the auspices of the Premier League.

They have the effect of gold dust. Graeme Souness calls them FC Hollywood. The club created out of workers’ unions has become the club with all the fizz.

It’s something the Premier League won’t want to lose. They like to see their major brands doing well but neither can United be complacent because the league is now an international product and package that’s the sum of all its parts, no longer exclusively reliant on Old Trafford.

We have seen the rise of Manchester City as a powerful force for different reasons, being fuelled by huge amounts of ambition from a nation-state that sees football as a global pathway, and that has partly altered the landscape.

Man City are so good and so successful now, they are building this legacy and the next generation of Premier League fans is evolving to them, a new digitalised footprint around the world.

Man United are built in this era to be at the very top of the English game – but are falling short

Sir Jim Ratcliffe made the decision to keep Ten Hag as United manager after their FA Cup win

Erik ten Hag has a lot to do to prove that he is the answer to bring United back to the top

I still maintain there is an element of Manchester United being a Ferrari with Manchester City as Red Bull but as generations evolve and times go by, I don’t think the Premier League is going to be massively diminished by any single club no longer being at the epicentre.

Sir Jim Ratcliffe made the decision to keep Erik ten Hag. If you listen to the Dutchman he’ll tell you they are the second-most successful team in English football over the last two years because they won the League Cup and FA Cup.

But the League Cup engagement is now held together by gaffer tape because most of the big clubs aren’t bothered. Even the FA Cup has been so diminished by the Premier League and poor marketing from The FA, it is like a second-class citizen.

The only way you bounce is when you hit the bottom. Have United hit it? Their real value is where they finish in the Premier League. Manchester United are built in this era to be at the top of English football. Eighth is a long way from it and I don’t feel ten Hag is the answer.

Even so, we still find ourselves for ever and a day talking about Manchester United. There are sometimes more people talking about a Manchester United loss than a Man City win. That might irritate me but my dear mercurial genius friend Terry would have a wry smile about that.

Chelsea have missed a Toney trick 

It’s curious that Ivan Toney is off to Saudi Arabia at the age of 28 and reputed to be a top centre-forward. It appears nobody wanted to buy him in the Premier League.

Have clubs like Chelsea who need a goal scorer missed a trick? My gut feel is they have, but my nose tells me maybe they haven’t even if Brentford’s asking price had dropped to £40million.

Chelsea clearly didn’t want to rip up their model and start paying new signings more than £150,000-a-week. So you couldn’t wheel in an older player and give him a quarter of a million, which is what Toney would have wanted and what he was given in his lucrative offer from Al-Ahli.

A club like Chelsea could have gone for Ivan Toney, who has instead gone to Saudi Arabia

It was the same situation the club had with Victor Osimhen. Chelsea were never going to do those deals.

In the circumstances, it was right for Toney to control his own destiny. He’s a talent we are going to miss in our league but if somebody had told him at Peterborough, he’d play for England and get offered £50million tax-free to change his family circumstances for generations, he’d have never believed it.

The best-case scenario for him now is he does so well over there, he comes back to Europe with a big bag of money and who knows more opportunities still ahead of him.