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DanS
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Kickball Capital of the World
Jan 1970
time: 00:20
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Here's a fun article. Looks to me like naming rights to Old Trafford and rising ticket prices is where much of the money to renovate the team will come from.
See the end for what I'm sure will be LoA's favorite paragraph. The MLS is the example par excellence of this.
quote:
Red devil
May 19th 2005
From The Economist print edition
Can Malcolm Glazer, Manchester United's unpopular new American owner, turn a profit in European soccer?
A BITTER atmosphere threatens to spoil Saturday's English FA Cup Final—a showpiece that remains to many fans soccer's equivalent of American football's Super Bowl and the baseball World Series. Fans of Manchester United—the “red devils”—who play fierce rivals Arsenal in the final, plan to abandon their usual red scarves and joyful (at least when they are winning) singing in favour of black flags and protest. The focus of their ire is Malcolm Glazer, an American shopping-mall tycoon and owner of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, an American football team. This week Mr Glazer declared victory in his long battle to buy United. Death threats have been made against him.
Mr Glazer's main offence seems to be that he is a businessman who intends to run United as a business. That is not what owners of British sports teams—or, indeed, of teams in most of the world—are meant to do. Businessmen and other wealthy folk, even foreigners, are welcome as owners—but only if they plan to put money into a team, not take it out.
Manchester United has news of Mr Glazer’s dealings with the club. Shareholders United is a group of fans “holding shares in Manchester United plc as part of their emotional stake in the club”. See also Chelsea Football Club, owned by Mr Abramovich, and the cheerleaders of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, owned by Mr Glazer.
So what if by so doing they are merely trying to boost a flagging public image—as Harrods owner Mohamed Al Fayed and, earlier, the late Robert Maxwell, did by buying Fulham and Oxford United, respectively? Or if their aim is to cement a valuable friendship, as the Libyan dictator, Muammar Qaddafi's, 2002 investment in Italy's Juventus did with the team's main owner, the Agnelli family? Better, though, if he or she is a lifelong fan whose dearest wish is to spend money to help the team they love. A star of the English soccer season now ending has been Norwich City's main shareholder, Delia Smith, a celebrity cook, who made headlines by delivering an alcohol-assisted speech during a half-time interval urging fans to get behind the beloved team that she once rescued from the brink of bankruptcy. A more pertinent example for Manchester United fans is Chelsea's devoted owner, Roman Abramovich, a Russian oil billionaire, who has spent a large chunk of his controversially gotten gains to assemble the team that easily won this season's English Premiership title. His unprecedented redistribution of money from the people of an economically struggling nation to a handful of wealthy foreign sport-stars bothered fans of Chelsea not one bit.
If United supporters believed that Mr Glazer would follow Mr Abramovich's generous lead, there would be few protests. But they have not been reassured by one of 76-year-old Mr Glazer's five sons, Joel, who will oversee day-to-day affairs at United. He has said that his family are “avid Manchester United fans” who want the club to “achieve even greater success”.
Their scepticism can be attributed in large part to the fact that they view Mr Glazer and sons as typical profit-driven American capitalists, prone to do ghastly capitalistic things such as raise ticket prices—as they have done in Tampa at the Bucs. Indeed, as United tickets are now underpriced (rampant ticket-touting surely indicates unmet demand), he can and arguably should raise prices. If some fans then boycott United games, as they say they will, there are lots more where they came from—or will be so long as United remains successful. That, if only for profit-maximising reasons, will surely be a priority for Mr Glazer. The Bucs, which he bought in 1995, won the Super Bowl in 2003.
Likewise, it will be no surprise if the naming rights to United's Old Trafford home are sold to a sponsor; Arsenal recently took $100m over 15 years for naming its new stadium after Emirates, an airline. Mr Glazer will also bring marketing nous honed at Tampa—Bucs fans could not live without the comprehensive cheerleader section of the team's website, for instance. But it will not be easy to improve on United's existing merchandising efforts to its estimated 75m fans globally—judging by the club megastore's extensive range of replica shirts and other themed items (Manchester United curtains, anyone?).
In the red
True, United fans may have some reason to worry about the debt that Mr Glazer is piling on to the club's hitherto healthy balance sheet. Exactly how much of a purchase price that values United at £790m ($1.5 billion) will be paid by borrowing is unclear. His use of a high-risk financing technique known as a “PIK” (pay in kind) loan that is now worryingly popular in private-equity deals is not encouraging. Nor is the example of Leeds United, a team that only a few years ago was briefly among the best in Europe but has since been relegated amid a financial crisis brought on by excessive debt and whizzy financing techniques such as making asset-backed securities of its top players. The trigger for this disaster was the failure of Leeds to qualify for the hugely lucrative annual Europe-wide Champions League—a fate that Mr Glazer must ensure never befalls his new team.
To boost revenues, Mr Glazer is expected to try to end joint negotiation of television rights by the top English teams that play in the Premiership, instead negotiating separately the right to screen United games. That sort of rampant individualism, after all, is what American capitalists are famous for. In fact, American team owners tend to profit by suppressing, to some extent, their individualism, points out Stefan Szymanski, co-author of “National Pastime”, a superb new book that compares the economics of the sport business in different countries. American sports leagues—above all the National Football League, in which the Bucs play—tend to be cartels, with fewer teams than there would be in a free market, protected by the absence of relegation, and often using socialistic practices such as salary limits for players and a centralised sharing out of young players to stop any team becoming too hopeless. As the Premiership evolves, and, above all, as Europe's top soccer teams, with United to the fore, debate how to take Europe-wide competition to the next even more profitable level, Mr Glazer's knowledge of American sport's anti-competitive collectivism may prove priceless. |
Last edited by DanS on 24-05-2005 at 21:04
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C0ckney
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Big Up The Macedonian Massive
Apr 2000
time: 05:20
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quote:
Originally posted by reds4ever
I'm no expert but, for a start, I'd guess that the draft and the salary cap would both be found to be illegal the first time they were challenged. |
i can confirm that is (probably) true. 
and a european 'super league' is a horrible idea, mostly advanced by those who don't understand the sport.
Last edited by C0ckney on 24-05-2005 at 22:02
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24-05-2005 04:25
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