Manchester United consider controversial Old Trafford change to fund £2bn rebuild amid latest Ratcliffe update

Manchester United will consider selling the naming rights to Old Trafford if it can help them fund a new stadium or significant redevelopment.

The Ineos Group are looking at a range of ways to raise capital to finance a potential rebuild of the iconic ground, with Sir Jim Ratcliffe having publicly outlined his preference is to build a brand stadium.

United insist they are still exploring all of their options in regards to what happens next with the club's historic home and they would be mindful of ensuring 'Old Trafford' remains in the title if naming rights were to be sold.

The Emirates Old Trafford cricket ground has been used as an example of one stadium which has a balance between a naming rights deal and sticking with tradition, while there is also acknowledgement that regardless of what United's home ground is called, it will still commonly be referred to as 'Old Trafford' anyway.

Just last week, co-owner Ratcliffe reiterated his preference was to build an entirely new stadium for United and also explained how it might be funded with help from both public and private investment.

"If you regenerate that south side of Manchester, it has to be a government initiative, because it's too big an area and it's too big a project," he told Bloomberg. "But a regeneration project needs to have an economic nucleus, otherwise you're just building housing. If you look at Barcelona, 5 million people a year come to the museum and Barcelona football club. So you would have an economic nucleus. Because Manchester United is the biggest football club in the world. Millions of people come every year to look around the facilitates, and you would build museums and fan zones.

"If you look at Wembley, if you look at the new Wembley that Norman Foster built in London. Then you look at the surrounding area, it is full of new developments which have come in because of it. Yeah...it would involve public money, it would involve our money and it would involve private money because you need people to come in and maybe you'd build new parts of the university, health and wellbeing, you'd build a museum, build a ground, hotels, housing facilities and transportation systems. It would be quite a large project."