Roy Keane could not let it go.
“No-one wants to talk about the horse. Can we talk about the horse? The horse is key,” he told Gary Neville on the latest Stick to Football.
The question Keane kept pressing: how did the Glazer family end up at Manchester United in the first place?
Neville was not biting.
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“They have to sell now, they have to sell, I’m sorry the time has come,” he said on the same Stick to Football episode.
It is a demand he has made, in various forms, for most of two decades.
The horse Keane keeps circling is Rock of Gibraltar, a champion stallion at the centre of a bitter dispute between Sir Alex Ferguson and the Coolmore racing operation of Irish billionaires John Magnier and JP McManus.
How a stallion rearranged a football club
Ferguson believed a 2001 conversation had made him a half-owner of the horse. By late 2002 Rock of Gibraltar was valued at around £50m and Ferguson wanted his cut. Magnier disagreed, Coolmore said the claim would be “vigorously defended”, and the case went into the Irish High Court in November 2003, according to Goal.
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What started as a stud-fee row metastasised into football’s biggest ownership story. In 2004, Magnier and McManus, who held their United shares through a vehicle called Cubic Expression, fired 99 questions at the board about transfers and finances. In May 2005 they sold their 28.7% stake to Malcolm Glazer, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers owner then quietly building a position. Within a month, Glazer had secured 98% of the club in a leveraged takeover worth around £800m.
21 years, the same argument
The ownership that followed is why Neville now wants out. He rounded on both the Glazer family and Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s INEOS group, telling Keane the time had come for the family to walk away for good.
The structure he is complaining about splits control. INEOS Limited disclosed a 54.54% beneficial ownership of United’s Class A shares in a June 2026 filing, after Ratcliffe moved his personal holding under the group. The Glazers still hold the controlling voting power through the Class B shares they have owned since 2005. Ratcliffe only bought in in a deal completed in February 2024.
The sporting backdrop sharpens Neville’s point. Michael Carrick’s side are without a win in eight matches, having been beaten 3-0 at home by Bournemouth on Sunday. A trip to Chelsea follows on Saturday.
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Keane, for his part, never got Neville to properly engage with the horse. He kept asking anyway.
