The problem with running a modern top-flight football club is that raising revenue is hard to do. Once you’ve grabbed your slice of league-wide media rights, made a vaguely colonial-sounding pre-season tour of the “Far East,” stitched up some sponsorship deals with a gambling company or a country’s tourism agency, and shipped as many shirts as the global merch market can handle, you hit the ceiling of your earning capacity. At that point, as a club, what do you do?

You can raise ticket prices, which risks alienating fans and the local community you’re supposed to represent. You can try your hand at a few miserable little crypto or AI plug-ins to build “engagement” among supporters or become a pioneer in the nascent field of fan “activations,” with limited potential returns. You can promise to build a new 100,000-seat stadium, but that takes time and money and doesn’t solve your immediate (or even future, should you go into debt to finance the project) need for cash. You can flog off a hotel or two to a sibling subsidiary of your parent company, though for that you need to start off with a couple of hotels. You can hope to sell to a monied investor, but the days of loss-indifferent billionaires making vanity investments in clubs seem over, and there are only so many publicity-hungry sovereign wealth funds to go around.

Eventually, a much cleaner, easier option presents itself: instead of building revenue, you can cut costs.

The same spirit of austerity that is now rising with particular viciousness in the US under the Trump administration is beginning to sweep through European soccer. Elon Musk with his chainsaw and Sir Jim Ratcliffe restricting lunches at the Manchester United staff canteen are dual embodiments of a process, introduced under the guise of sustainability, likely to hurt and demoralize rather than improve and elevate.

After years in which runaway inflation in player salaries and a near-total absence of financial regulation saw big clubs across Europe rack up unsustainable expenses and debts, a new era of fiscal rectitude is upon us. Planning, control, precision, and discipline are the path to on-field success now, and increasingly clubs seem eager to project the same values off the pitch as well. But if austerity on the pitch achieves a kind of stark, hairless, Guardiola-esque perfection, off the pitch it seems more likely to promote an emerging feudalism. It deepens inequalities between the corporate suite and the concourse, between football’s royals and its commoners.

With 39% of the in-house staff laid off over the past 12 months in the service of a “transformation plan” to return Manchester United to profitability, Ratcliffe’s club – or rather, the club in which he remains a minority owner, a point that’s critical to any consideration of where the real economic malaise in this particular instance lies – is the poster child for this new spirit of austerity.

Manchester United has long fancied itself the world’s most consequential football club, a self-image that on-field results over the past decade have failed to validate. In the new order of punitive penny-pinching, though, the club’s status as a market leader is comfortably earned.

Other leading clubs across Europe have instituted miserly cuts in recent times: Chelsea chopped the away fan coach subsidy a few years ago, snatching £10 from each traveling supporter at a time when the club was busy splashing almost £1bn on player signings. Amid Ligue 1’s ongoing broadcast crisis, Lyon is studying a plan to cut up to 90 staff members. With teams across France’s top two divisions reportedly facing combined losses of €1.2 billion, the fiscal savagery of deep cost cuts may not even be enough to save some of them. In Spain, which has a longer history of stringent financial regulation than England, the crisis is less acute and big teams like Barcelona have not yet resorted to mass layoffs, but the infamous “levers” the club is pulling to generate short-term revenue will inevitably hit its long-term balance sheet and staff redundancies may soon become necessary.

Austerity is the poltergeist now lurking permanently in the background of modern football. On its own, of course, there’s nothing wrong with controlling costs: all clubs have to live within their means. But there are always choices involved in cutting spending, and in the new spirit of austerity it’s often the most vulnerable within a club – the cooks, the cleaners, the ticket sellers – who feel the axe first.

At Manchester United, for instance, it’s notable that “superfluous” back office jobs have been eliminated while the real cause of the club’s dire financial straits remains undisturbed: the interest on bank loans incurred as part of the Glazer family’s leveraged buyout and exorbitant spending on player and executive recruitment. The club paid £36m servicing its debt last season, and cumulative interest payments on the debt generated to fund the Glazers’ 2005 acquisition recently hit $1bn. Ratcliffe has tried to turn the £175,000 a year the club was supposedly paying its (still unidentified) in-house “body language consultant” into the scandal of the century even as the club, under his own watch, has shelled out £4.1m to get rid of sporting director Dan Ashworth and £10.6m to cut Erik Ten Hag loose. The club’s continuing servitude to the Glazers, who retain majority control, remains an immovable burden on the fiscal outlook. None of this matters, apparently, when there are rank-and-file staff members to fire and free lunches to cut.

However selective the penny pinching may be, this new austerity is not purely about job cuts. It’s about socializing economic pain; making the matchday experience less accessible for ordinary working people is part of this process. This is by no means a new phenomenon; the saga over ticket hikes has been ongoing for years. But there’s every sign this grimy trade of profit for risk will intensify in coming years as owners begin to realize that running clubs at a profit is a fiendishly difficult task.

Many of the measures taken at Manchester United and elsewhere may look like regular corporate downsizing. They are that, of course, but I believe there’s something additional at work here, that the socialization of economic pain has an explicitly ideological dimension that’s similar to the way that governments have pursued austerity as a form of economic “common sense” since the 1980s.

As political economists like Mark Blyth and Martijn Konings have shown, there’s a formula to the imposition of austerity at a national level that will sound familiar to anyone paying attention to recent financial maneuvering across European soccer. The disciplining authority – usually an incoming government, but sometimes an institution like a central bank or the IMF – must claim they inherited a calamity, that the situation is so dire that exceptional measures are necessary. The legitimacy of austerity is grounded in the argument that present restraint is the precondition for a glorious future of growth, investment, and generosity, enclosing society in what globalization’s water carrier-in-chief, Thomas Friedman, once called a “golden straitjacket.” While the needs of “ordinary people” are met with skepticism and subjected to the tightest cost-benefit analysis, even the most hallucinatory projections of financiers and tech titans are credulously taken as gospel.

It’s notable how neatly this template maps on to the approach that Ratcliffe has taken at Manchester United, where the fiscal emergency is so acute, he has claimed, that the club would have run out of money by Christmas without the cuts he’s implemented, and where the pain of the present is sweetened by the fantasy – unfinanced and so far in the distance it’s exempt from the details of ordinary planning – of a throbbing, starchitect-designed “mini-city” that will rank as the “largest public space in the world” (is this good?), expand the club’s match-day capacity to 100,000, and bring laughter, joy and (no doubt) overpriced tacos to the long-suffering denizens of Manchester’s redder half. For those who are prepared to weather the economic storm, Ratcliffe is promising, sunnier days are ahead.

But what if they’re not? The modern fantasy of austerity was born in the 1990s, when the end of the Cold War fed triumphalist narratives about the invincibility of market liberalism, and Third Way Democrat Bill Clinton’s fiscal cuts preceded a spurt in US growth and investment. Ratcliffe is a product of this era – he founded petrochemicals giant Ineos in 1998 – and incarnates its fossilized wisdom. Understanding the future trajectory of Ratcliffe’s Restructuring United is not an exercise in pure speculation, because he’s already tried to implement 1990s thinking in other parts of his business empire.

Ineos acquired the Grangemouth oil refinery in Scotland in 2005 and almost immediately began cutting costs: retirement benefits were the first big target for savings, and eventually, after years of grinding workplace conflict, Ratcliffe secured a humiliating victory over the unions and workers agreed to freeze pay and strike action. When the refinery received its first shipment of US shale gas in 2016, Ineos’s in-house magazine Inch hailed Grangemouth’s “renaissance”, projecting the plant would soon be making a yearly profit of £100m; Ratcliffe claimed the move “guarantees the security of thousands of jobs in Scotland”. Late last year Ineos announced it was shutting down the refinery owing to soft demand and soaring costs; more than 400 jobs will likely be lost when the plant ceases operation this summer. For most workers at Grangemouth, the 20-year austerity-borne promise of a beautiful future has ended up delivering nothing more than joblessness for many. For Ratcliffe and the plant’s owners, however, it’s been a rather more remunerative affair: recent reports suggest that the Ineos-backed joint venture that owns Grangemouth could earn around £6m from the sale of thousands of free pollution permits once the refinery closes this summer.

Since the turn of the century austerity has been an economic and political disaster, leading to the decades of stagnation in growth and incomes across the developed world that are in part responsible for the rise of the far right – the very political forces now looking, in the US at least, to drive society even further into the ground with more austerity. The limp decline of the Grangemouth plant shows how suicidal austerity thinking at a smaller scale can be, and despite all his promises of a proud and gleamingly erect, tent-covered future, there’s good reason to suspect that Ratcliffe could lead Manchester United down a similar path (unless, that is, people become too mean to him online, at which point he might walk away from the club).

The vampiric snips that Ratcliffe has implemented make Manchester United look like a small club that’s getting smaller – and perhaps that’s the point. Eventually, in nominally seeking to heal the patient, the doctor can cut so hard that the patient bleeds to death. In the end, it might not be sustainability rules, underwhelming media rights deals, or football’s natural earnings ceiling that push Europe’s top clubs to the financial brink, but the business world’s old-fashioned zeal for economic punishment.