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Gary Neville has perfect response to reports saying his hotel is £10m in debt
The headline of the report failed to mention how the hotel’s staff received full pay throughout the entirety of the Covid pandemic
Gary Neville had the perfect response to a recent headline saying his hotel had fallen into financial difficulties.
The former Manchester United footballer co-owns Hotel Football with Ryan Giggs, and recently hit back at a headline by The Mirror that claimed the Old Trafford-based hotel had haemorrhaged £3m in two years.
The report, originally found in the Daily Star, also said the hotel owed £10m in loans and had pulled a restaurant from the National Museum of Football to cut back on costs.
However, what the headline failed to mention was that throughout the Covid pandemic, 120 medical professionals were housed at the hotel for nine months completely free of charge while they sheltered from vulnerable family members.
All staff members at the hotel were also paid in full throughout the crisis.
Predictably, Neville wasn’t too impressed with the wording of the article or the absence of certain information, and shared it onto Twitter with his own headline suggestion.
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The Sky Sports pundit wrote: “Can I just sort your headline out for you…
“‘Hotel owners maintain and pay all staff 100% of their wages in a global pandemic, whilst also hosting 120 medical professionals and nurses who were sheltering from vulnerable family members at no cost to the NHS for 9 months’.”
Cystic Fibrosis physiotherapist Nicole Petch responded to Neville’s tweet, revealing that she had been one of the staff members to find solace in the hotel.
She wrote: “I stayed at Hotel Football during the first wave of the pandemic. Thank you so much for your kindness, generosity [and] allowing me to keep my family safe”.
Speaking to PoliticsJOE, Neville elaborated: “We funded the £3m over two years with either our own cash or loans and paid our staff in full.
“We also looked after the NHS staff locally that couldn’t stay at home in the first wave of the pandemic… We’d also seen in Italy that doctors and nurses were struggling to find accommodation away from vulnerable family members, so we partnered with the Manchester NHS foundation trust.”