19 Feb 2020
New image uploaded to the
Manchester United Player Sightings page entitled, The Cost of Glazer Ownership

1.) 20 Feb 2020
20 Feb 2020 10:37:05
The figures are eye watering and make for shocking reading. That said the 2008 market crash has played a large part in the need to restructure the debt and the associated costs. Something that certainly wouldn't have been part of the plan when the Glazer's took over. That doesn't make it any better, but just highlights that things outside of the owners control will have impacted how they run the club from a financial point of view.

The other thing is actually just how little dividends have actually been paid out over the last 10 years. 99m might sound like a lot. But less than 10m a year being paid out to 5 or 6 individuals mean that the owners of the club have been earning significantly less than a large proportion of the playing staff. Anyone in the squad earning more than say 40k per week is earning more than the owners. Which you would say is most of them.

As a PLC we used to pay out around the 10m a year in dividends. So to say the owners are leaching the club dry seems a little wide of the mark.

It's interesting reading, however, the numbers outside of context are hard to interpret.

2.) 20 Feb 2020
20 Feb 2020 11:10:59
Shap, those figures don’t include salaries, which the owners take for various roles/ duties. The figure is solely related to financing and re-financing tied to the initial leveraged buyout - I. e. it has cost the club close to £900m, so far, because the owners bought the club without investing any of their own money.

3.) 20 Feb 2020
20 Feb 2020 12:15:37
I completely agree that the 900m it has cost the club is a massive loss. The trick is that we naturally assume that had the leveraged buy out had not happened that the money would have gone on the team, or wages or the stadium.

While its safe to assume that without the debt incurred though the buy out that the club may have had money to develop the stadium and the facilities. I don't think much more could have been spent on wages, we have the second highest wage bill in the world as it is. Also a huge problem we have with selling players is that they are on wages other clubs either can't or won't match often meaning we either have to sell the player below their realistic market value or we are stuck with them.

Maybe we would have had more to spend on transfer or maybe we wouldn't have. One thing that is not considered when discussing the Glazer's is just by how much they have increased our revenues. Some people will say other owners would have done the same but the fact that these changes were made by the Glazer's highlights that they weren't being done before.

So how much of that 900m spent on the debt comes from additional revenue created by the people who incurred the debt?

Under private ownership the Glazer's decide whether to take dividends and how much they take. So far over the last 10 years they have taken less than 10m a year. If the club was still a PLC it is safe to assume quite a bit more would have been paid out in dividends to the shareholders over that period.

It's all if buts and maybes. In reality we will never know where the club would be without the Glazer's and its pointless and actually wrong to suggest that the club would have this figure or that figure more to spend in scenario x, y or z.

I don't like the Glazer's, very little if any good publicity has come out of their ownership. While regardless of what is happening off the pitch during their ownership the club has seen a sharp decline. That may or may not have happened regardless after Sir Alex stepped down. Either way, I'm not a fan of our owners.

That said there are many worst owners out there, and we could easily be worse off than we are. There has been a huge push from the fans to remove the owners, the Green and Gold campaign and the setting up of Untied FC of Manchester. Yet the owners are still here.

That to me suggests we can't do anything to shift them short of having a whip around and raise the funds to buy them out. You don't happen to have a spare 3-4 billion do you?

In fighting at a club never ends well, it spills out from the terraces and into the dressing room in essence destabilising the club which isn't to the benefit of the team, the owners or the fans.

We can't shift them, all we can do is drag our club down. Better to ignore them, and focus on the team, the players and fellow fans. The good things about the club. The Glazer's have owned the club for 17 years of our either 142 or 118 year history depending on which you count. They won't own the club forever. Do you know how many owners the club have had in that time? How many can you name? Doesn't that highlight how little they mean to our history?

4.) 21 Feb 2020
21 Feb 2020 07:17:06
Shappy, no one is begrudging the owners taking annual dividends. The problem is the amateurish running of the club from the footballing side. Ludicrous money wasted on terrible transfers, no money spent on Old Trafford or Carrington. No thought given to our academy for years, although that has improved in recent times. Players like jones, smalling, lingard, Pereira being rewarded for their mediocrity with new lucrative contracts. Woodward gets the blame and rightly so, but the owners have a responsibility to the club. It's not just a business, it's a football club and a business.
You don't have to look very far to see that our most hated enemy across the East lancs seem to have owners who want success on the football pitch and off the football pitch, it can be done.