Playing for keeps
MANCHESTER, ENGLAND--What the New York Yankees are to baseball, Manchester United is to the much more global sport of soccer: arguably the most famous team in existence. Like the Bronx Bombers, Man U has a fabled history teeming with success, agony, and colorful superstars. The result? International fame and fans, and a merchandising prowess that even a less-than-perfect year on the pitch can't diminish. As such, the "Red Devils" --a nickname derived from the color of its home-field uniform--are a source of Mancunian pride as well as a major attraction for this gritty northern city. (Just try to get a hotel room anywhere near here on a game day.) Not surprisingly, its fans are renowned for their intensity--which is saying something in a football-mad country where the term "rabid supporter" is redundant.
Manchester United, which traces its lineage back to 1878, is also something of a rarity in professional football: profitable. A publicly traded company since 1991, it had pretax profits of $53.5 million last year on revenues of $309 million. And it's debt free. Its glam image was in recent years burnished by its longtime star midfielder David Beckham, the Michael Jordan of international football, who ultimately left the club for Real Madrid in 2003.
But now Man U's success has attracted a fan it wishes would just go away: Malcolm Glazer, the American billionaire owner of the National Football League's Tampa Bay Buccaneers, who's considering a $1.53 billion ($5.75 a share) takeover bid. Glazer--who has a 28.8 percent stake in the team--took a run at Man U last fall but was rebuffed by the board because his bid was heavily leveraged. He has come back with an offer that contains just $573 million in debt.
But hold on. The prospect of Glazer's owning their beloved team has Man U fans more rabid than usual. To them, the team is an English icon with a worldwide reputation for success, glamour, and style--not unlike the Beatles or Rolls-Royce automobiles. And they don't want it in foreign hands. It's bad enough that league-leading Chelsea is owned by a Russian oil tycoon. But Man U has a legendary history, including its share of tragedy. In 1958, the team plane crashed at the Munich airport in West Germany, with eight of the players aboard losing their lives. It took then manager Matt Busby a decade to rebuild the team into a European powerhouse. "It's more than a football club; it's an institution," wails supporter Mark Leary. "We don't want him [Glazer] here." Adds fan John Dillon, "He's a businessman. We don't want a businessman; we want a sportsman." Attempts to reach Glazer were not successful.
Supporters fear that the American Glazer doesn't understand the "beautiful game" and would jack up Man U's ticket prices to help repay the banks who would partly finance the deal. Banks associated with Glazer have been deluged with angry E-mails from fans, and the billionaire and his family have received death threats. Oliver Houston, spokesman for Shareholders United, a fan-based group that owns about 5 percent of the shares and leads the opposition to Glazer, says it doesn't condone violence.
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