Jesus mate, id stick to the star wars knowledge if you are trying to be positive about glazers ownership. :-)
I appreciate this has been done to death but...
Yes the 680+ figure is accurate, it includes big one of payments to debt on to of interest payments.
What it doesn't include is the millions of cash each family member took out of the club balance sheet (approx 1m each) to oay off their private debt... Although it pales in comparison.
Yes, they have made a lot of money for the club, but they have taken out SIGNIFICANTLY more, and you are only assuming other owners, or the plc wouldn't have done the same thing (no, I don't believe they would have been AS profitable, but still...).
They have yet to show any example of putting in a decent amount of money into transfers for the club in comparison to the plc. We've just broke or record transfer of 37m. 7m more than we did 11 years ago.
It simply isn't possible to have any argument that the glazer ownership is positive for utd. It has been horrific for this club, but moaning won't help so it's just best to deal with it, nothing will change.
We can be positive about future, but looking at how they have run the tampa bay buccs...To be optimistic is bordering on naive
I don't disaree with this. It would be good if someone can clarify if the 680m number comes entirely from revenue or a part of it (around 150m or so) comes from their sale of stocks which doesn't effect the club revenue. If it is the second, then it is better cause actually it means that they have got from the club only around 530m (which again is very big) and if they have financed the debt (partially) by the sale of their stocks than great. We have less debt and they have less shares here.
I guess that in this case I am seeing the half full glass. The revenue has significantly increased under them which likely will mean that the difference between the money that went out of the club is a bit lower (still big though). They have never interferred with the manager job (it is easy to say that they didn't need to do that because SAF was great, but the likes of Mourinho, Ancelotti, Del Bosque etc were great but that didn't stop the likes of Roman/Perez to interfere and to sack them). I think that with a Roman type owner, Sir Alex wouldn't have survived those three years without trophies (actually without the league/UCL trophy), years that then lead us to our best ever spell. I also don't see how someone can buy the club without financing the deal (at-least partially) on debt and now that the club costs around 3b, the debt likely will be even bigger than the first time. If the new owners wouldn't be as good in commercial deals as Glazers than it will become worse.
Of course, I am not naive to think that they are good. They are here for money and they would send this club to Conference if that will make more money to them. But it seems that the best way to get money is if this club wins trophies, which leads to make them invest money here. It could be worse (see Arsenal). Yes, I would replace them yesterday (if I could) and gave the club to the fans who wouldn't get a single penny out of it. I would also be happy with a sugar daddy who wouldn't take money out of the club, would give some money from his own pocket to the club and wouldn't interfere on manager's plans. But I find that possibility highly unlikely.
Also, despite the myths I don't think that the previous ownership were any better (in fact I think that they were worse). I remember Kenyon saying that if SAF wants to sign new players he should sell first (after SAF complained that other European clubs have two teams while we have only 18 players). I remember seeing in an Italian TV a few years ago Arrigo Sachi saying that SAF asked him to find a strong striker and he proposed Batistuta. When Fergie asked for the price, and Sachi said that it was around 30m, SAF joked and said to him to find a less stronger striker (ie. cheaper). Fergie mentioned in his book that only after Gill came he was paid as much as he was worthy and despite the good relations, under Edwards he was always underpayed. I also think that we did better under Glazers than before depsite that the league was much more competitive.
I am not happy with them. Not at all. They aren't good and they don't love the club. But I also don't think that it has been as bad as predicted and a lot of people judje them on how we thought the things will go, rather than how they went. They also judge them on only the bad things (debt) but not on good things (the increase on revenue, non interference on manager's plan, comparison to previous owners). And ultimatelly I am here a bit pragmatic and don't see how (at-least in the near future) we can find an owner who will spend 3b and won't expect to get any money from the club. I don't think that it can happen so until then, we can only hope that the Glazers won't cripple the club more (and actually invest more cause Moyes isn't SAF). They look like they know that and we spend 65m in transfers this year, something that we haven't done before. They are also promising that we'll spend even more in summer. Lets see if that happens.
). It's a crying bloody shame, but there's no way in hell we're getting rid of the blood sucking bastards in the near future so all we can do is hope to minimise the damage.