Manchester United's final match of the season was abandoned thanks to a dummy bomb left behind during a training exercise.
The clash between the Red Devils and Bournemouth was abandoned after the device - consisting of a mobile phone taped to a lead pipe - was discovered in one of the stadium toilets.
The ground was emptied and a controlled explosion carried out - but the terrorist threat turned out to be a dummy device planted by a security company who had been running an exercise, a device that they failed to remove after the exercise was completed.
United have offered to refund everyone who had tickets for the sell-out match - some 76,000 fans - but they have announced that all existing tickets will still be valid for the rescheduled game on Tuesday.
In other words, they'll have to pay the costs of staging two matches, but without any ticket revenue to show for it. And that's just the start of the problems, as you'll see...
How much will it cost them in total? We've crunched the numbers to find out...
Fans of Manchester United evacuated v AFC Bournemouth - Imago
The bare cost of refunding tickets for the 76,000 fans who attended the match against Bournemouth is about £3 million. But that is just the start for United. In addition to the normal fans, there is the matter of the 155 corporate boxes and the 24 hospitality suites to account for.
Those fans, while comparatively small in number, punch well above their weight on a cost-per-head basis - particularly for a high-profile match such as this last-day-of-the-season clash.
How much above their weight? Well, the 'Sir Bobby Charlton Suites' - a fairly low-end option - are listed on United's website at £3,100. Per person. PLUS VAT! (And that doesn't even include an open bar.) Think that's a lot? Pfft. 'The Gallery' comes in a £6,800 a head, while the Premier Suite hits you for £6,500.
Those corporate prices are based on Champions League nights, so Premier League charges will be a bit less. But the missed revenue will still be enormous. All those corporate boxes from Sunday will have been refunded, and United are unlikely to find new takers for the empty spaces on Tuesday night - not at such short notice, given that invitations to such things tend to be arranged months beforehand. They might find somebody at a cut price rate, but the chances are that most of the suites will lie empty.
How much are we talking about in total? Well, United's average total match day revenue was recently reported at just over £108m a season - or £5.7m a game. That average figure includes the Tuesday nights against Stoke and so on, as well as tastier clashes such as Sunday's, which we can safely assume would have been at the top end of the pricing scale. We can probably infer that revenue from Sunday would have been substantially higher than the average - probably as much as £6.5m.
Police attend the scene at Old Trafford - Reuters
Yet there is some good news: a decent large chunk of the match day revenue will come from fans buying drinks, burgers and replica kit at the stadium. Much of that outlay will already have been made before the match was abandoned on Sunday, and what's more the club will benefit from further such sales on Tuesday night.
United's programmes cost £3.50, and you can get a meal deal of pie, crisps and a drink (including beer or cider) for a very-reasonable £7. Say half the ground takes up those options at roughly £10 a head, and United just recouped £380,000. Throw in sales of shirts, hats and t-shirts and we could be charitable and bump it up to £500,000.
The end result of all this? We can probably quite comfortably stick with a £6m figure for lost revenue. And that's before we've started looking at the doubling-down on the actual match day costs...
| LOST REVENUE | £6,000,000 |
| SUB-TOTAL | £6,000,000 |
United's staffing costs are an astronomical £203m a year, or £4m a week. But that doesn't mean an extra match day will add that much to the bill.
Now, a lot of that will be for the players themselves, who won't get anything extra for lining up on Tuesday instead of Sunday; and the club's 500-plus permanent staff will very likely not get paid any extra for coming back.
But United have well over 2,000 temporary employees on any given match day - in 2014 the figure was 2,323.
Some 1,200 of those are stewards - assuming they each get minimum wage of £7.20, and work for the industry-standard four hours to cover everything from the first turnstile opening to the last one closing, that's about £35,000 a day. They'd have paid those costs anyway on one or other day, so we'll only add one lot of costs.
The other 1,100 or 1,200 temporary employees include catering staff, cleaners, security guards. Many will get basic wage, but others - particularly supervisors, chefs and senior security staff - will earn a fair bit more. Let's say a total of £80,000.
Old Trafford was evacuated. - AFP
On top of that are policing costs. In total for a United match these are close on £100,000 - the lion's share of which the taxpayer will pick up the bill for, with around a quarter of that contributed by the club (it used to be far more, until Wigan's Dave Whelan won a court order a few years ago letting Premier League clubs off the hook for the cost of policing around the stadium).
Then there are all the other sundry costs: electricity, gas, weed killer for the pitch, training bibs for Carrington, you name it. United didn't break these down too much in their last annual report, but their operating costs excluding employee wages were £72m in 2014-15, which worked out at £3.4m a match that year (a season in which there were only the 19 home league matches, plus the two FA Cup matches played at Old Trafford that season). To work out how much of that is match day cost (as opposed to week-in-week-out expenditure that wouldn't change) we'll look at the 2013-14 season, in which they played 28 home games (19 in the league, four in the cups, five in Europe) at a cost of £88m.
In other words, the seven extra matches cost the club £16m to stage. That gives us a final figure of about £2.3m per match in stadium operating costs.
| LOST REVENUE | £6,000,000 |
| STADIUM RUNNING COSTS FOR EXTRA MATCH | £2,300,000 |
| SUB TOTAL | £8,300,000 |
Manchester United will be forced to pick up the tab for Bournemouth's extra costs, and there is even talk of them paying similar compensation to the 3,000 travelling fans who'd made the 504-mile round trip from the south coast city to Old Trafford.
If United pay up? Well, an off-peak return train ticket from Bournemouth to Manchester Piccadilly comes in at a whopping £120.60. Yup, that's a further third of a million quid and more that just went on the Red Devils' bill. Throw in the Bournemouth club costs as well, and you probably won't get much change from £400,000.
And last but certainly not least: there's the matter of prize money.
United could have played a full-strength team on Sunday, safe in the knowledge that the FA Cup final was a full six days away.
But with the match at Wembley being on Saturday, they now have just four days recovery and preparation time. In other words, and with a Europa League spot safe in any case, United are likely to play a team of kids on Tuesday night with a view to putting out their first XI on Saturday.
Losing Tuesday's match will mean little to United's players and coaches compared to cup success, of course, so it makes sense to do so. But should they fail to get at least a point, they will finish sixth instead of fifth in the table - and miss out on prize money of a huge £1,236,083.
| LOST REVENUE | £6,000,000 |
| STADIUM RUNNING COSTS FOR EXTRA MATCH | £2,300,000 |
| COMPENSATION TO AFC BOURNEMOUTH AND FANS | £400,000 |
| POTENTIAL LOST PRIZE MONEY | £1,236,083 |
| SUB-TOTAL | £9,936,083 |
Louis van Gaal has made it clear he wants to win the FA Cup - AFP
So far, we've clocked up all the likely costs:
Lost revenue, in the form of ticket refunds and missed corporate revenue: £6,000,000
Stadium operating costs: £2,300,000
Compensation to Bournemouth and fans: £400,000
Potential lost prize money: £1,236,083
But what about the unlikely costs? The known unknowns, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, which could crop up?
First among those is the fact that there will be increased security at Old Trafford on Tuesday - let's throw in £15,000 or so for that.
And secondly there will be the inevitable legal and professional fees that will follow: United will no doubt have to sue their security supplier (as noted below) and may have to resort to lengthy proceedings to get everything cleared up.
On top of that, the club is almost certain to change that security supplier; no doubt the new people will charge more, on account of having to hire employees who aren't daft enough to leave fake bombs lying around on match days. And there will also be the considerable expense in putting the security contract out to tender once more.
All things considered, we can estimate a bill running well into five figures for United, just sorting things out around the edges of this mess. That leaves us with this as our final total:
| LOST REVENUE | £6,000,000 |
| STADIUM RUNNING COSTS | £2,300,000 |
| COMPENSATION FOR BOURNEMOUTH | £400,000 |
| POTENTIAL LOST PRIZE MONEY | £1,236,083 |
| FURTHER LEGAL COSTS AND OTHER UNFORSEEN EXPENSES | £63,917 |
| FINAL TOTAL | £10,000,000 |
- - -
WHO WILL PAY?
This is the big question - or should we say the £8.7m question. Given that this bomb threat appears to have stemmed from a cock-up by a third-party security contractor, that company could theoretically be on the hook for the lot.
Or their insurance company, of course. No doubt both the company and the club have insurance in place for these sorts of things - but what the limit of the payout might be, or whether it would cover such unusual circumstances, is currently unknown. It certainly seems likely that United will end up with serious losses from what happened.
That said, will they really notice it? £8.7m is roughly half Wayne Rooney's annual salary. Should United offload their ageing skipper over the summer, they'd instantly plug the gap and then some.
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