THE FORMER Manchester United chairman Roy Gardner has criticised the debt-laden state into which the club has been plunged by the Glazer family’s ownership, describing it as not “a sustainable model”.

Gardner said the position of the club was as he had predicted it would be in 2005 when, together with the rest of the then United board, he emphatically opposed the takeover. Now the chairman of Plymouth Argyle, Gardner chaired the board at Old Trafford for three seasons, which he described as “outstanding”, until he left following the takeover.

Asked about United’s position now, with fans in open revolt following January’s revelation that the debts have climbed to €820 million, Gardner said: “It is no different to what I said at the time. I did not think it was a sustainable model.”

In a statement in April 2005, after the Glazers had presented a formal bid to buy United using significant debt, Gardner and his fellow directors, who included United’s current chief executive, David Gill, said: “The board remains of the view that the assumptions in the Glazer business plan are aggressive. Furthermore, the board believes that . . . the proposed capital structure, taken as a whole, still contains more leverage (debt) than the board would consider prudent and that as a consequence there is likely to be significant financial strain on the business.”

A month later, Gardner and his board were forced to recommend that minority United shareholders accept the Glazers’s offer, not because the board’s view changed but because the Glazers had already bought a majority stake in the club on the open stock market.

After they took over, the Glazers did make the club itself responsible to pay debts of €647 million, which the family had taken on to buy the club in the first place. In total, interest and fees amounting to €533 million have become payable by United to service those borrowings.

Gardner denied that he is a member of the Red Knights group of wealthy businessmen finalising plans for a bid to buy out the Glazers. He said he had remained close to Gill and Alex Ferguson, whom he believed had done “a first-class job” of keeping the club successful since the takeover.

Gardner said he became involved at Plymouth last year because he had been missing football: “I am very passionate about it and my time at Manchester United was outstanding – I very much enjoyed it.”

He aims to take Argyle, who have been relegated to League One, into the Premier League within five years.