Not since Sir Alex Ferguson kicked a football boot at David Beckham’s head and drew blood has there been such anger at Old Trafford.
An icon of British sport, a national institution that commands more loyalty than the monarchy and greater global recognition, Manchester United has been sold to the Yanks.
Just one Yank in fact: a swashbuckling corporate raider who aptly owns an American football team called the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. And doesn’t even like sport.
The supporters call it piracy, or even treachery, but to Malcolm Glazer, his bankers and the two Irish horse racing fans who sold their pivotal shareholding to him, it is just a matter of business. Big business.
Not only has Florida tycoon Glazer never set foot in Old Trafford, he is not one of Manchester United’s 3.29m worldwide supporters and is not known ever to have watched a match on television. What he is, however, is a shrewd operator and, according to his sisters, a nasty piece of work.
As the diehard fans — many of them small shareholders who worked hard to stop the takeover — burnt their season-ticket renewal forms and Glazer effigies outside the stadium this weekend, the mood was apocalyptic.
For a man who claims his “personal trademark” to be “accomplishing the impossible”, buying the club may have been the easy bit. Getting the fans to like him — or even live with him — is the challenge. There are threats of mass desertion, even a breakaway club.
They want a shrewd manager and good players and fear they may lose both under a regime more interested in corporate marketing, television rights and profit. The reclusive 76-year-old Glazer and his bevy of sons insist they are offering everything to everyone: sporting success and commercial profit.
Their track record is not all bad. When they purchased the Buccaneers in 1995 they were trailing in the National Football League; in 2003 they won the Super Bowl.
He may be dubbed “the Leprechaun” in Tampa for his short stature and ginger beard but, far from having Irish roots, Glazer is of Jewish-Lithuanian stock and purports to be a living example of the American dream.
His father arrived in the United States just before the first world war, having deserted from the Red Army (United fans, take note). Malcolm was born in 1928, in the town of Rochester in upstate New York, just in time for the beginning of the Great Depression.
The official Glazer history says that when his father died in 1943, Malcolm, aged just 15, inherited a watch repair business and $300. In one of his rare public comments he described the events as tragic but added: “It made a man of me.”
His sisters, who no longer speak to him, claim their father was in fact running a lucrative jewellery business. Far from being poor, they say he left a smart house with a Steinway piano and new Cadillac. Malcolm took over the business at 18, they say, because he had no interest in anything but money.
“He never had time for sports or hobbies or friends because after school he ran to work in the business,” they told a reporter last week. “From eight years old he was earning money. He’s like a machine.”
The machine appears to have worked. Today he is worth an estimated $1.1 billion (£600m). The United takeover has cost £790m, but only about £260m of it was Glazer’s money; the rest is borrowed. Fans fear a total takeover would allow him to load a profit-making club with debt from elsewhere.
Glazer dropped out of college, having given up hiring other students to sell his jewellery, and built up his pile by investing in nominal partnership with his mother in cheap property, which he rented out at expensive rates. The reason his sisters no longer speak to him is that when his mother died in 1980 he seized all her assets. When his sisters sued him, he told his lawyers to keep the case going until the estate was valueless. It is still going on.
By then, aged 52 and married to a local girl whose family had run a furniture business, the property portfolio included commercial rents, nursing homes and 15 trailer parks. In the years that followed he made a fortune out of junk bonds and invested in American icons such as the motorbike maker Harley-Davidson and household name Formica, fuelling takeover speculation that sent the share price soaring before unexpectedly pulling out with a fat profit. In a court hearing over his approach for Harley, a US judge branded him a “snake in sheep’s clothing”.
There are still the trailer parks, some of which, according to the residents are overcrowded, run-down, badly managed and magnets for drug dealers. Some residents won a court case against Glazer for charging them extra to keep pets and even having babies.
The tycoon and his wife live in a mansion in an exclusive enclave of Florida’s Palm Beach where their neighbours include Donald Trump and Rod Stewart, though it is doubtful that Glazer has ever run through the finer points of the beautiful game with soccer-crazy Rod the Mod.
He has promised United an annual transfer fund of £20m, but how long will this last? Glazer uses budget airlines for business trips and criticised his son for spending $199 (£110) on a pair of trousers, when he picked up his own for $19 in a sale.
United fans fear Glazer will not appreciate the value of their star assets. Wayne Rooney’s contract has a way to go but the parsimonious Glazer may balk at going ahead with an offer to quadruple the salary of United’s other boy wonder, Cristiano Ronaldo, from his current £14,000 a week. Also in doubt could be an extension to Welsh wizard Ryan Giggs’s £70,000-a-week deal.
These may seem telephone-number salaries but they are the reality of top-flight football. If Glazer won’t pay them, other clubs will.
The Glazers’ trumpeted achievements at Tampa include a new stadium (largely paid for by a local sales tax) with wider seats (appreciated by American soda-and-sausage-consuming sports fans) and state-of-the-art scoreboard technology, and a redesign of the club logo to enable new sponsorship deals.
The makeover was warmly greeted by the marketing men, but it is hard to imagine such a friendly reaction if he dares tinker with United’s dated but venerated “Red Devil”.
His original plans for Old Trafford included a sale and leaseback, hardly the veneration of the hallowed turf expected by those to whom it remains the “theatre of dreams”. Now he insists it will be maintained and capacity increased. But given that Glazer has raised Buccaneers’ ticket prices every year since he took over, he is likely to wonder why United’s tickets remain substantially cheaper than those at Arsenal and Chelsea.
The Glazers boast that, under their control, the Buccaneers have become one of American football’s “most recognisable and successful franchises”. But the word they use is “franchise”, not “team”.
Deep down, even the most blinkered Manchester United fans know they have long been reserves in a global marketing game, but they appreciate the careful nurturing of the illusion that it is really all about football. Glazer has said he thinks there is room to expand the Manchester United franchise: in other words, more merchandising and maybe even breaking away from the Premiership cartel television deal.
As ever at Manchester United, the seeker after truth needs to revert to the poetical soul of their former star Eric Cantona: “When the seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea.”
Already fans are offered not just £45 replica shirts — which some have said they will not wear to the FA Cup final in protest at the Glazer takeover — but their own MUTV subscription television channel, Manchester United credit cards, broadband internet access, loans, car insurance, home insurance, ISAs. Even mortgages.
Some sardines! Just as long as the trawlermen don’t all jump ship.
