Balanced thread regarding the Glazer ownership

steffyr2 said:
The cold hard reality is that the Glazers bought Utd in 2005 and Utd has won the following under their ownership --
- 5 Premier Leagues
- 1 CL
- 1 FA Cup
- 1 Europa League
- 3 EFL Cups

The cold hard reality is that Utd succeeded under SAF and David Gill, and have not succeeded to the same degree since. Yet for some reason, a subset of the fans really want to place the blame (but not the successes) on the owners.

IIRC, Utd fans hated the previous owners as well.

My own personal opinion is that the 'unrest' allows the club hierarchy to hide. They can be completely incompetent and the fans will not blame them for it. As I've said before, if fraud/graft is found in the day to day running of the club and the player acquisitions, I will not be in the slightest surprised.

My hope is that this year has made the Glazers see that they have to take control of the club top to bottom -- that assuming that the British core and various old boys know in any way what they were doing was a big mistake.

I expect unrest to rise because it's stoked by the old boys every time their personal fiefdom is threatened.

Not sure that's a balanced look, but it is what it is.
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Here’s a balanced view, if the owners actually opened up the coffers and reinvested the Ronaldo money, we would’ve had more trophies and success. It’s a miracle that Sir Alex was able to maintain the levels and standards thru the no value era.

The Glazers are also complicit in the rise of city by letting a rival grow within their own city by barely putting up a fight. Players like Silva, Toure and Aguero, all would’ve chosen United back in our heyday. None of the Ronaldo money was properly invested to improve the squad after losing in 2009. Instead city invested while the club and sat on its laurels and debt while hoping for continued miracles under Sir Alex.

The Glazers are cnuts.
 
Balanced view. From the time they took over in 2005 they had 8 years to plan for the post SAF years. There was no plan. They enjoyed the benefits of what SAF had built and had NO plan post-SAF. None. I dare someone to 'balance' that argument because evidence is clear to see. Zero plan, opportunistic vulture capitalists, milking the club dry. Go on. Balance that one with any evidence of a 'plan'. I'll give you a fiver.
 
Regardless of how much we have spent on transfers there is over a billion pounds that has been taken out of the club as a result of their ownership.

They have also employed and retained people who do not have the ability to keep us competitive.

Those 2 things mean that they are objectively extremely poor owners up to this point.
 
Bosws87 said:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/s...l-18-resolution-delayed-fan-share-scheme.html

Before the Glazers, United had no debts

United's latest accounts, released in March, showed that net debt had risen to £455.5million, while dividends of just over £23million were paid

/thread

Nothing balanced or positive has come from these leeches.
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Debt in a business sense is not that bad of a thing. You’ll struggle to find a business that is booming that doesn’t have some form of debt.
 
Sky1981 said:
Most of the most damaging decisions comes from SAF. Moyes and ole

If only the glazer are more ruthless and trusting their business instinct of hiring manager based on their credentials instead of listening to SAF.

I wouldnt blame them for trusting SAF though, without hindishgt trusting him is the logical thing to do.
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Conveniently left out LVG who bought LOTS of mediocre players to the club who were left around the club for years after he left. He’s a major reason as to why the club had so many crappy players
 
The two major things the glazers have done


1) took a risk with the club, using an LBO could have resulted in catastrophy. As it was we had to be frugal on spending and sell Ronaldo in that period. We could have been far more successful

2) last ten years, incompetence. They let the club be run almost as a pet project to reward Woodward for past service. Woodward did well on the commercial side, was a revelation actually (other side's have since caught up). But what he oversaw on the football side was a reactionary approach, no planning or patience, or planning carried out by the wrong people and patience in all the wrong places.

Aside from that, initial financial risk and incompetent leadership, they have been fine. If they are hands off now and give the football side to John m, who is a football person, and continue to invest appropriately, I will be happy.
 
Gordon Godot said:
I dont think many demand records be broken. A clear coherent strategy and decent football from a competitive team should be the bare minimum for a club of this size.
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They do though. For years we’d spend as shitloads each summer and the second yet the window shut there’d be speculation about the next window and immediately we’d be back on the “We’re skint” treadmill.

We need big investment NOW but irony the one thing some were demand we do is the one thing that evidences we’re mismanaged.

Throwing money at aimlessly at the problem is poor management. Yet that’s what we’ve done to an ironic backdrop of fans thinking we’re not spending enough
 
Ah, a both sides thread on the Glazers. What could go wrong?
 
The Oracle said:
A lot of fans direct hatred towards the Glazers for their ownership of our club, so I have created a balanced thread to have a look at some of the biggest issues the fans have expressed since their takeover:

Stadium
The last expansion of Old Trafford was completed in 2006 when the north-east and north-west quadrants were installed, creating 2nd tiers to those parts of the ground and increasing seat numbers by around 8,000. Although the Glazer’s purchased the club in 2005, the plans for the quadrants were announced in 2004.
Upon completion of the quadrants, every part of the stadium had been expanded, apart from the South Stand (Sir Bobby Charlton Stand), and with a railway line running directly behind that stand, the complications and complexities involved in building up and over a railway line and entering the territory of houses, goes a long way in understanding why the Sir Bobby Charlton Stand has never been expanded (either before the Glazer ownership or since).

My verdict regarding the stadium:
It is my opinion that the Glazers couldn’t have done anything more to have increased the capacity of Old Trafford (which would have increased match day revenue). The age of the stadium is something that fans overlook, and you have to remember that Old Trafford isn’t the only stadium in the Premier League that doesn’t have a giant TV screen, as neither does another old stadium - Anfield. In terms of the stadium being run down and requiring updating, yes I do agree that improvements to the stadium should have taken place well before now. It’s important to remember that this season (2021/2022) marked the 10th consecutive year that season ticket prices have been frozen at Old Trafford (https://www.thesun.co.uk/sport/14441880/man-utd-freeze-season-ticket-prices/). So whilst there may not have been improvements to the stadium, nor have match going fans saw any increases to the cost of their season tickets.

Players
It was only as recently as January of this year that it was reported that following the sale of Ferran Torres from Man City to Barcelona; Man Utd then had the most expensive squad in world football, coming in at an eye-watering £801m (twitter.com/ESPNFC/status/1479475420139507718)

My verdict regarding the players:
It is very clear that the Glazers have spent huge sums of money on assembling the squad. Is it down to the Glazers that the players don’t perform as expected once they are signed? I don’t think it is.

Managers
Let’s be honest about this, how many Pep’s and Klopp’s are there out there? Those are two outstanding managers that have taken, and continue to take, their respective teams to new levels of football that other teams (including ourselves Manchester United) are trying to catch up to.

My verdict regarding the managers:
Post Sir Alex Ferguson, we did have a manager that was known for delivering trophies (and did deliver trophies), and with his recent European semi-final win against Leicester with his current club Roma, he has now reached a major final with all of the clubs that he has managed (even if he didn’t get the chance to manage Spurs in their League Cup Final against City). My opinion is that Jose Mourinho should have taken over straight after Sir Alex Ferguson, as at the time he was the best manager available, and he had an outstanding CV and most importantly he did want to come to Old Trafford. Instead we hired David Moyes on a six year contract because Sir Alex Ferguson believed in him. From the point that Moyes was hired we started to decline, and the season after SAF retired, we had gone from being Champions to 7th in the league (even Moyes’ old club Everton finished above us). By the time Mourinho was hired in 2016, in my opinion it was 3 years too late; as we had already declined too much since 2013.
Ole Gunnar Solskjær was an overwhelmingly popular choice with the fans to become permanent manager after his good run as caretaker, and he was then hired permanently.
Fast forward to now, and Erik ten Hag was an overwhelmingly popular choice with the fans to become the permanent manager, and he will now be the permanent manager for the start of the 2022/2023 season.
It could be argued that the Glazers have listened to the fans when it has come to the appointments of our two most recent permanent managers (Ole Gunnar Solskjær and Erik ten Hag), and listened to our greatest ever manager when it came to hiring David Moyes (even if it was the wrong choice given hindsight).

Revenue
The Glazers have grown the commercial side of Manchester United to astronomical levels, and it is reflected on the pitch as recently as January 2022, when we had the most expensively assembled squad in world football (£801m). In 2009 Utd’s commercial revenue was £66m and by 2019 the commercial revenue was £275m. Matchday revenue remained relatively the same between 2009 and 2019, which was largely due to the freezing of season ticket prices (https://huddleup.substack.com/p/the-business-model-of-manchester?s=r)

My verdict regarding the revenue:
The Glazers really have performed incredibly well on the commercial side of Manchester United, and it can certainly be argued that because of how well they have done, we have been able to assemble the most expensive squad in world football. If Manchester United had of been taken over by someone other than the Glazers, would the other owners have performed as well as the Glazers have done commercially? It is a hypothetical question that we will never know the answer to. The only information that we do know for certain is that the commercial side of Manchester United is phenomenal, and we have the most expensively assembled squad in world football.

Structure of the club
Of all the things that are levelled at the Glazer’s, the structure of the club is where it has begun to unravel of where a lot of the problems that we are seeing on the field originate from (i.e. we are not seeing the expected results that the most expensive squad in world football should be delivering). Most notably we simply have not had the ‘Best in class’ in all areas off the pitch, and we have had people making football decisions who are not best placed to do so (i.e. their strengths are being able to create commercial revenue, their strengths are not necessarily being able to put together a cohesive football team).

My verdict regarding the structure of the club:
Without a doubt, commercially Manchester United is outstanding at generating revenue, and a big part of that is down to the Glazers. What the Glazers are beginning to realise is that having the ‘Best in class’ (in off field positions at the club), where they are brilliant at bringing in revenue; does not mean that they are best placed to make decisions regarding player recruitment, i.e. assembling a playing squad that has no cohesion will ultimately fail (even if it is the most expensively assembled squad in world football), and in my opinion this is what we are witnessing right now – a completely disjointed squad of players that has been put together by people who are not best placed to have done so – but who are the ‘Best in class’ at bringing in revenue.
In an ideal world everything would marry up – having the most expensive squad in the world should mean that we are a lot more competitive on the pitch, and should have been getting better results than we have been doing. I think the Glazers are listening to the fans and seeing it for themselves, as we are slowly beginning to see the changes now, especially with Ralf Rangnick being brought in as an interim to see first-hand with the squad just what has gone wrong and what needs fixing all round.
It is my opinion that the structure of the club is the crux of the problem, and is the reason why Manchester United is not getting the results on the pitch.

Overall, could it be that the Glazers do actually listen to the fans, despite some fans believing otherwise?

Are the Glazers really as bad as what the fans make them out to be?

Maybe the Glazers are an easy target when we are not winning, because we don’t seem to be unhappy when we are winning.

Just look at the recent walkout protest that was planned for the 73rd minute of the Brentford game at Old Trafford, yet by the 90th minute most fans were still in the stadium. Was it because we were 3-0 up by the time the planned walkout was due to begin?

What are your balanced opinions on the Glazer ownership of Manchester United?
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Everything you’ve given them credit for eg growing the club commercially was actually Woodward & his team. So they deserve credit for having the right person in that role , but then Woodward got the job as part of his role in the acquisition of United. So it’s not like they headhunted him specifically.

Directly because of the Glazers. Over £1b has been lost to interest and other payments. That could have redeveloped the stadium, improved Carrington, and left £300-£500m.

imagine a window where you have £400m, with a great manager and a DoF like Rangnick. You could spend £250m on the first team. And the remaining £150m could be spent buying the worlds best 16-18 year olds who are 1-3 years away from breaking into the first team.

Basically the club would be kind of like City, never really needing a rebuild because it’s already signed most of the players to step in several years before the rebuild was needed.
 
The Glazers put idiots in charge of running the club. They then didn’t change those staff even when they were failing miserably. When this happens it’s up to the owners to be proactive and remove rubbish staff. They didn’t and that’s why we are in such a state right now.

I’d argue even the current staff are not up to standard. We should be hiring staff from experience in the roles they have be employee for. Fletcher, Rangnick, Murtough. None of these have qualified experienced in the roles they currently have. It’s shocking.
 
This will never be a balanced discussion as the hatred for the Glazers is too high.

Their leveraged buyout was a disgrace. It should never have been allowed and they are very lucky that around 2008/9
interest rates dropped like a stone as they could have very well sunk the club.

However in the last decade the only major mistake they made was appointing Woodward as CEO and allowing his incompetence in the footballing operation to spread and spread until we are where we are now.
If the Glazers had stood up 10 years ago at an AGM and told us we would be the highest spending club in the world in transfers and salaries ( as what is being reported ), we would have had no complaints so the available money and the debt are really not the problem.
The problem is fixing the football structure hierarchy which is relatively cheap considering we spend £200k a week on Rashford etc. We need the " best in class" often talked about and that is obtainable pretty easily for a club like ours with the right expertise from the high levels.
We get so hung up on the dividends taken but I read somewhere that they take around £25 million a year. In perspective that is Martial and Rashford's Wages. Probably a debate who has been more deserving this year.
 
Tarrou said:
my unbalanced viewpoint is they're leaching cnuts and the day they finally feck off will be one of the biggest piss-ups of my life
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Amen, shove the balanced view on these leeches, oh yeah might be worth the creator of this thread remembering they haven't spent a penny on this club in 17 years.

They have simply used leverage loans to buy the club in the first place and then have the utter nerve to take £25m yearly dividends too.

I think it's also safe to say the only guys in the media who really call them out is Winter & Custis, maybe Ducker too at times.
 
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I'll put here a brilliant comment that I saw on Youtube, its really long but worth reading IMO

okay. the problem with the glazers:

1) They bought us, but couldn't afford us, so they made a loan from a bank (the bank which Woodward worked in). Which means Glazers received debt, big debt - that debt is now Manchester United's debt. United didn't have debt, but now we have an enormous debt.

2) how do they pay this debt ? they pay this debt with United's Money. They don't put money into the club, that is clear for all to see. Look at our Stadium, its not been taken care of, but other than that Old Trafford was regularly built upon and made bigger and better from 1980 up to 2005, which was the year the Glazers took over. Nothing at new at Old Trafford since, its rotting basically.

3) They put the guy who allowed them to lend money in order to purchase Man United into a director position of the club, after no footballing experience, which is clear for all to see. look at the way he broke our Player payment structure, giving Sanchez an insane salary, which means other players want more and it continues in an endless spiral. Finished players are getting insane salaries and new contracts for not performing or haven't played a string of games in many years; Phil jones (nothing against him, prolly a great lad, but we aren't a happy boys camp, we are supposed to be the biggest FOOTBALL club in the world).

4) investment in training facilities ETC are lacking in comparison to our competitors; the likes of Man City or even Arsenal.

5) Lack of investment in players: look between the years from lets say 2000-2005, we get Ruud Van Nistelrooy, Rio Ferdinand, Rooney, Ronaldo, Veron, Forlan. top notch talents. What happens after 2005 ? not much, a few signings here and there, because we win the league with Fergie anyways they didn't care to spend money, and let me make this clear OUR MONEY, the clubs money which they are leeching to pay their debt and putting into their own fecking pockets. Fergie had an aging team, purchasing Van Persie on a bargain back in the 12/13. Fergie retires, an aged team with no real talent in the squad.

6) not appointing football people making footballing decisions. it cannot be a good thing when a club is run solely from a commercially-driven perspective. Look at our Scouting department? they have no idea, they just go after names. Signing Maguire for 80mil without realizing his been playing for England in a fecking BACK-three or at Leicester where they don't press as high with their defense, which is ultimately what United want.

7) not appointing the right managers, we've been in the wilderness, but the club and people running it should have enough knowledge about football to appoint the right managers, not scaring the like of Klopp away because they ramble on about the commercial side, quoting Klopp; "sounding like Disneyland".
They appoint LVG, okay.. Defensive football, possession based, sure, but still defensive. LB and RB's not allowed to go higher up the pitch than the midline. Mourinho I guess was a desperate choice as his a winner, but not of the United way, its the Maguire way. playing not pressing, not making our own play or dominate games with the ball. but sitting far back and waiting to counter, same thing was with Ole or I guess he used what was best for the players, as there were players NOT recruited to play UNITED football, but mostly defensive not pressing players between multiple managers. appoint a fecking football director or whatever its called, to make sure whatever manager we have, we only recruit united players.

they are spending their cash when they are desperate, sorry I mean OUR cash, while they are leeching way more of OUR money to pay their fecking debt and in their pockets.
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C3Pique said:
Personally I think Woodward is far more directly responsible for a lot of the issues we have seen. The Glazers are responsible by proxy for placing trusting in him to run the football side of the club, which he has no business doing.

For all the complaints about dividends etc, they have never been shy about spending - Pogba, Maguire, Di Maria, Lukaku, the list goes on. That they were advised that these were good purchases falls more on Woodward's head for me.

I have some hope that the boardroom changes we have seen recently are the first steps in the right direction. I just hope it's not too late to fix the damage that a decade of mismanagement has wreaked.
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Yeah could well take a fair few years to start clearing up the utter mismanagement of Woody and his mates
 
mu4c_20le said:
The cold hard reality is that we sold Ronaldo for 80m and replaced him with Valencia under their ownership. We started looking for 'value on the market' shortly after they took over.

I dread to think where we'd be if SAF walked back then.
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Yeah should have been Ronny out with Benzema and top class creative CM coming in but nope it was freebie scouse twat Owen and a winger from Wigan, wow
 
No matter what the question is relating to the mess that ManUtd is currently in - the answer is always Woodward.

In a sense that falls back on Glazers enabling him to have the keys to operate as club supremo, without doubt the most football incompetent appointment of any club, anywhere. Then when it was obvious he was completely out of his depth. Crickets and tumbleweed, nothing done to resurrect the club . Terrible management from top to bottom.
 
On the 25m dividends, directors fees and interest payments: that could mean the difference between signing a defensive midfielder when needed or not, or if an 80m signing is shit, selling him for 40m and buying a replacement for 50m.
City have been able to do this when signings haven’t worked whereas we have hoarded ours.
We had built up enough credit through fergie before the glazers to be able to outspend city, which was needed due to the poor recruitment and aging squad.
 
Lentwood said:
It's incredibly popular to blame the Glazers for all of our on-going on-pitch struggles and I can get onboard with that to a certain extent - but like OP I am going to try and offer a balanced opinion with some hope for the future....

First and foremost, I think you have to split the Glazer ownership into two parts - the first before the restructuring of the PIK loans and the second after the restructuring of the PIK loans.

Period One - Before Restructuring of PIK Loans

I am not going to go over (again) all of the History of the circumstances and details behind the Glazers' purchase of the club, but in a nutshell, the Glazers, with the help of Ed Woodward, undertook a leveraged buyout of the club and used the clubs own profits to pay back their loans.

Now, from a football-fans point of view, this is abhorrent. United generating money through commercials interests and player sales, only to see that money go into the pockets of banks and American uber-Capitalists is disgusting...but it's common practice in industry. Some people struggle to offer a consistent opinion on this type of activity...it seems that the entire population become Socialists when we're discussing football clubs but it's part and parcel of the financial system.

Now, the very important point to note is that the PIK loans carried an extremely high rate of interest, largely because the Glazers borrowed so much money that the banks/financial institutions actually doubted their ability to pay it back, even using funds generated by the club. Football wasn't quite the cash cow it is now in 2004, so many at the time couldn't see how the Glazers would actually profit on this investment.

I don't have the actual figures to hand but I did a thread on this a couple of years back and from memory, I believe the annual interest payments alone from the first six years of Glazer ownership were £75m, totally £450m between 2005-2010. Now, this is a large sum now, in the context of a football club, but bear in mind we're talking about the noughties here....£450m could basically buy an entire World XI of superstar footballers. Instead, that money was drained from the club and paid back to banks. Sickening.

It's telling that during this period, United actually recorded a positive net-spend over a period of six years. This is absolutely key to starting the decline that we have experienced post-SAF. SAF himself famously repeated the mantra that in order to stay at the top, you had to strengthen whilst you were strong. United did not do this. Sure, we enjoyed huge on-field success during this period, and that distracted many supporters from what was going on behind the scenes. However, if you looked past the trophies, you could see all was not well and that the purse strings were definitely being tightened (many of us will remember the 'no value in the market' line we got fed every window).

We should have been looking to find the next Scholes, the next Ferdinand, the next Vidic, the next Rooney, the next Ronaldo etc....during this period...but instead, with a few notable exceptions, we largely bought in underwhelming and odd signings like Obertan, Manucho and Mame Diouf on the cheap.

Period Two - After the Restructuring of the PIK Loans

In 2010, the Glazers, following the recent increases in the size of the TV deal signed by the Premier League clubs and increasing commercial revenues, were finally able to restructure the clubs debt and make if far less expensive to manage. United still have debt today, but it doesn't actually cause us nearly as many issues as some supporters believe. Sure, it would be better not to have that debt, and without the Glazers the debt almost certainly would not exist...but it needn't necessarily hold us back.

Almost immediately, the interest rates dropped and I believe, again from memory, that we started to pay around £20m per annum, as opposed to £75m, to service the debt. Bear in mind, this was also happening against a backdrop of increasing profitability and revenues, so the debt payments were now very manageable and increasingly, largely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. Again, of course it would be better to have no debts and pay no interest...but this idea that we can never be successful under Glazer stewardship because of financial constraints doesn't really hold-up.

Even after more funds became available, we didn't necessarily rush out and become mega-active in the market, like many believe we should have, but we definitely made some effort to try to build for the future and replace key players. We signed the likes of Smalling, Jones, Kagawa, Hernandez and DDG during this period, all touted as genuine stars of the future. We also added RvP to give SAF the firepower he needed to win one last PL title.

After SAF left, the club made a war-chest available to Ed Woodward, now promoted to CEO and various managers. Again, this is not the place to debate how or why it all went wrong...but suffice to say having an investment banker with a physics degree and his mates oversee transfers with the input of various different hangers-on and managers with their own ideas and agendas is not a winning strategy.

What cannot be disputed, and this is important, is that the Glazers have 'allowed' United to spend £1BN net under Woodward's stewardship. Again, please do not come at me with stupid comments like 'it's the clubs money, of course we should be able to spend it' like that idiot LUHG Mike off Twitter. Nobody disputes that, but that's not the reality of our situation. The Glazers could have allowed us to spend none of that money and siphoned it all off for themselves. Again, this is the World we live in, they own the club, it's now 'their' money to do with as they see fit. That's before we even get into the insane amount we have spent in wages over the last decade...very few people think about that when they calculate our out-goings. All-in, we've probably spent more than any club in World football.

So, the key point I am making here is that whether you like the Glazers or not (and I am no fan) their ownership of the club need not prohibit further success. I get tired of seeing so many posters trot out lines they have heard on Twitter about how we cannot possibly win anything under Glazer ownership. With the budget they have allocated, it's perfectly reasonable to expect that if the club is managed correctly, we can compete on all fronts. Liverpool manage to achieve far more on a much smaller budget, yet nobody is campaigning for the removal of FSG because it just so happens the much smaller amount of money they make available has been spent incredibly well.

This is not an attempt to absolve the Glazers of responsibility or try to win people over and make them Glazer fans. Not at all. I was outside the ground protesting in 2004 and putting what little cash I had at the time into Shareholders United/MUST, so I'll have none of that thanks. I am just trying to offer a message of hope that it is possible for us to be a successful football team and be owned by the Glazer family. To suggest otherwise now, after the money spent, feels like sorry excuses for poor football decisions to me.
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I didn't notice anyone else say so, but thank you for your effort and the context in this post.
 
I have less issue with Glazers' ownership than the fact they trusted Ed to run the football club.
Even now I still have reservation on Arnold and Murtough running the club.
Hope I am wrong but ask any sane person would prefer someone with real experience as DOF building a top club in Europe.
Case in point , 10 years ago, City brought in the DOF and team from Barcelona in preparation to employ Pep to revolutionize the style of play.
We are 10 years behind City, FFS.

Recently, seeing Chelsea got so many bidders that committed to provide funds to invest in the club rather than take dividends.
I think we could get better owners. I am not talking about bottomless oil or state money. We could get owner that willing to put all our profits (reportedly Glazers took more than 1 bil out of the club so far) or maybe also their own money into the club (Glazers so far invested "zero" of their own money). Yes, Glazers provided 1 bil in the last decade for players recruitment but based on our profits we should be getting more. Most importantly, the Chelsea bidders also came in with plan how to properly manage the club including the football structure. It was not like Glazers coming in with no proper plan to run the football side of things at all. They only concerns about commercial and dividends. This is negligence at the highest order. We need better owners with proper leadership, vision and capabilities to bring back the glory days of Man Utd for 600 mils fans worldwide and not a club own by someone living in USA who know nothing about football and let an investment banker run the club.
 
steffyr2 said:
The cold hard reality is that the Glazers bought Utd in 2005 and Utd has won the following under their ownership --
- 5 Premier Leagues
- 1 CL
- 1 FA Cup
- 1 Europa League
- 3 EFL Cups

The cold hard reality is that Utd succeeded under SAF and David Gill, and have not succeeded to the same degree since. Yet for some reason, a subset of the fans really want to place the blame (but not the successes) on the owners.
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The owners are responsible for the people that they hire. The people hired by the previous model kept us successful. As soon as the onus was on the Glazers they ran the whole thing to the ground. I don't see what is confusing you about this. You don't need to be imbalanced / balanced to understand that owners who have seen us go from an elite club to a laughing stock, have done a miserable job
 
Yakuza_devils said:
I have less issue with Glazers' ownership than the fact they trusted Ed to run the football club.
Even now I still have reservation on Arnold and Murtough running the club.
Hope I am wrong but ask any sane person would prefer someone with real experience as DOF building a top club in Europe.
Case in point , 10 years ago, City brought in the DOF and team from Barcelona in preparation to employ Pep to revolutionize the style of play.
We are 10 years behind City, FFS.

Recently, seeing Chelsea got so many bidders that committed to provide funds to invest in the club rather than take dividends.
I think we could get better owners. I am not talking about bottomless oil or state money. We could get owner that willing to put all our profits (reportedly Glazers took more than 1 bil out of the club so far) or maybe also their own money into the club (Glazers so far invested "zero" of their own money). Yes, Glazers provided 1 bil in the last decade for players recruitment but based on our profits we should be getting more. Most importantly, the Chelsea bidders also came in with plan how to properly manage the club including the football structure. It was not like Glazers coming in with no proper plan to run the football side of things at all. They only concerns about commercial and dividends. This is negligence at the highest order. We need better owners with proper leadership, vision and capabilities to bring back the glory days of Man Utd for 600 mils fans worldwide and not a club own by someone living in USA who know nothing about football and let an investment banker run the club.
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That's the entire point of ownership from the fans perspective - that the club should be well run / managed. Nobody has an inherent issue with an owner, it's always based on the job they do.
 
I think they have seen the future when the superleague collapsed and realised without focusing on getting the team to start winning things again, the cash cow will start to diminish. Thats why we are having this big change upstairs. Team viewer aint paying what chevrolet paid. Adidas deal will not be bettered as things change. Without winning trophies the foreign market will decline and even young fans in cardiff london birmingham etc will support the teams that win things regularly. When you look at the last 10 years and see how fast other teams revenue has caught us up, thats the only thing they are worried about.
 
big rons sovereign said:
I was wondering the other day if it's a case of Malcolm Glazer the business genius dying and leaving his idiot kids behind who then feck up everything up.
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I mentioned this a few years back. It was under him they bought all the land and maybe he had some grand design for it. It makes you wonder.
 
It is very easy to blame on the owners when things are not going good. But, in reality I don't think they were too bad. Debt is the main bad thing with them but any business will have debt and the debt to value ratio is pretty low for the club.
Truth is we were not shrewd in signings after Ronaldo sale nor we were prepared for SAF exit.
We signed Berbatov when clearly Tevez would have been better suited for our style. We did not sign him for reasons which seemed wrong (3rd party ,agent fees etc) at that time. Same thing for Hazard , for agents fees when few years later we did not mind paying hell of agent fees for Pogba.
Our recruiting were slow to realize modern game is changing and agents were playing a crucial role and by the time we realized it was late. And our CEO and board were too stupid to not clear the deadwood but give them with bumper deals and higher wages to preserve the value, which ironically made harder for us to sell any of the players. Our recruitment , board are a joke but not the owners.
 
amolbhatia50k said:
That's the entire point of ownership from the fans perspective - that the club should be well run / managed. Nobody has an inherent issue with an owner, it's always based on the job they do.
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But there weren't any protests against Ed woodward. Surely there were few incidents against him but not constant protests like fans do against Glazers. Fans are protesting against Glazers when in-fact they have to protest against Ed woodware, players, recruitment , board. Protesting against the owners is making them to give more and more power to Ed and board.
 
Schmeichel=God said:
I didn't notice anyone else say so, but thank you for your effort and the context in this post.
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No problem. I think it's important to be balanced and objective for two reasons-.

1) The football World won't understand what we are protesting if we don't understand ourselves. All the uninitiated see is owners who have overseen the highest net spend on wages and transfer fees in World football over the last decade. It is unlikely we will get traction/sympathy if we aren't clear what our issues are with the Glazers and what we would like them to do about those issues.

2) The recent on-pitch struggles of the team are not directly related to the Glazers (obviously you can get all 'meta' about the fact they have ultimate control and oversee the staff and their decisions etc...) but anyway...the point is, IF we can get the right football-people in and they make the right decisions, we have a budget which is more than adequate to enable us to compete at the very highest level.

Personally, for me, I would love the very romantic idea of the Glazers selling to a lifelong United fan who runs the club as a not-for-profit...but because I live in the real World and know this is unlikely, and because I do not want United be owned by a Sovereign wealth fund...what I would like is the Glazers to fulfil their promise to sell some shares to fans and give the leader of a fans forum a seat on the Board.
 
Giggsy13 said:
Here’s a balanced view, if the owners actually opened up the coffers and reinvested the Ronaldo money, we would’ve had more trophies and success. It’s a miracle that Sir Alex was able to maintain the levels and standards thru the no value era.

The Glazers are also complicit in the rise of city by letting a rival grow within their own city by barely putting up a fight. Players like Silva, Toure and Aguero, all would’ve chosen United back in our heyday. None of the Ronaldo money was properly invested to improve the squad after losing in 2009. Instead city invested while the club and sat on its laurels and debt while hoping for continued miracles under Sir Alex.

The Glazers are cnuts.
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My theory is that SAF, knowing Ronaldo would leave the club in the near-future, went to the Board and asked for the money to buy Anderson, Nani and Hargreaves with the intention of covering this with the eventual sale of Ronaldo for a large fee - knowing that this would give him the best chance of success in the Champions League.

Obviously we'll never know if this theory is correct but it explains why we didn't re-invest the Ronaldo money and explains why we had the 'outlier' transfer window were we made some exciting signings in a period were we held the purse-strings very tightly.

As an aside, whilst we can blame the Glazers for our decline, I don't think we can blame them for City's success. That would have happened anyway. Just like Newcastle will eventually be really good. They just have so much money, it's impossible to get it wrong.
 
Interesting podcast on the Athletic where Jim O'Neill (Red Knight) is interviewed, and he talks about how the publicity generated by this disaster season has likely been a positive for the Glazers, and he noticed that following the Liverpool defeat there were 6 stories on United on the BBC and none on Liverpool. Goes on to say that there was a survey of global brands in the last two months where United is twice as high as the next sports brand, which was Barcelona. Given that Chelsea will now be sold for 2.5 billion plus 1.7 billion, the Glazers will likely think United worth a lot more than recent figures bandied about.

All of which seems to indicate that there is hardly any reason for them to sell. Super depressing.

Regarding the OP, I echo the sentiments by many here, the balanced view is that they are leeching cnuts and should never have been allowed to buy the club. And I'm astonished there hasn't been a rule change to prevent this kind of shit going down, like we've seen recently with Burnley.

Seems the US is buying the Prem wholesale.
 
They really haven't been so amazing as some like to thing on the commercial side of things. They arrived at the right time for the explosion of money into the PL and other clubs have massively increased their revenues as well. Glazers are parasitic scum, nothing more. The only reason they put what they do into the club is to keep their host alive while they suck its blood.
 
Lentwood said:
My theory is that SAF, knowing Ronaldo would leave the club in the near-future, went to the Board and asked for the money to buy Anderson, Nani and Hargreaves with the intention of covering this with the eventual sale of Ronaldo for a large fee - knowing that this would give him the best chance of success in the Champions League.

Obviously we'll never know if this theory is correct but it explains why we didn't re-invest the Ronaldo money and explains why we had the 'outlier' transfer window were we made some exciting signings in a period were we held the purse-strings very tightly.

As an aside, whilst we can blame the Glazers for our decline, I don't think we can blame them for City's success. That would have happened anyway. Just like Newcastle will eventually be really good. They just have so much money, it's impossible to get it wrong.
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More likely the PL record transfer of Berbatov was on this kind of thinking

On your last line though, we have spent as much as City in recent years but still got it wrong! And that along with lack of infrastructure investment is the major issue with the Glazer ownership since SAF (and Gill) retired
 
amolbhatia50k said:
The owners are responsible for the people that they hire. The people hired by the previous model kept us successful. As soon as the onus was on the Glazers they ran the whole thing to the ground. I don't see what is confusing you about this. You don't need to be imbalanced / balanced to understand that owners who have seen us go from an elite club to a laughing stock, have done a miserable job
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The Utd fans should make that exact point to the Glazers -- that they want the Glazers to be more involved in the running of the club rather than handing the task off to the next good old boy available. I agree. There's far too many people feeding off the trough that is Man Utd at present.

Man Utd fans don't want the Glazers. They didn't want David Moyes, they didn't want LVG (I was bored silly by his teams, so I agreed with that), they didn't want Mourinho after about 6 months because he wasn't nice enough to Pogba and Martial, wanted Ole tho' he wasn't qualified for the job, wanted Rangick and now want Ten Haag. Maybe 8th time is the charm.
 
Bastian said:
Interesting podcast on the Athletic where Jim O'Neill (Red Knight) is interviewed, and he talks about how the publicity generated by this disaster season has likely been a positive for the Glazers, and he noticed that following the Liverpool defeat there were 6 stories on United on the BBC and none on Liverpool. Goes on to say that there was a survey of global brands in the last two months where United is twice as high as the next sports brand, which was Barcelona. Given that Chelsea will now be sold for 2.5 billion plus 1.7 billion, the Glazers will likely think United worth a lot more than recent figures bandied about.

All of which seems to indicate that there is hardly any reason for them to sell. Super depressing.

Regarding the OP, I echo the sentiments by many here, the balanced view is that they are leeching cnuts and should never have been allowed to buy the club. And I'm astonished there hasn't been a rule change to prevent this kind of shit going down, like we've seen recently with Burnley.

Seems the US is buying the Prem wholesale.
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Shame that the Red Knights never came up with a serious bid back in 2010 - they said that Glazer was asking too much but in hindsight it was good value as the price of the club has probably doubled since then and thats even in a period with little success
 
Lentwood said:
It's incredibly popular to blame the Glazers for all of our on-going on-pitch struggles and I can get onboard with that to a certain extent - but like OP I am going to try and offer a balanced opinion with some hope for the future....

First and foremost, I think you have to split the Glazer ownership into two parts - the first before the restructuring of the PIK loans and the second after the restructuring of the PIK loans.

Period One - Before Restructuring of PIK Loans

I am not going to go over (again) all of the History of the circumstances and details behind the Glazers' purchase of the club, but in a nutshell, the Glazers, with the help of Ed Woodward, undertook a leveraged buyout of the club and used the clubs own profits to pay back their loans.

Now, from a football-fans point of view, this is abhorrent. United generating money through commercials interests and player sales, only to see that money go into the pockets of banks and American uber-Capitalists is disgusting...but it's common practice in industry. Some people struggle to offer a consistent opinion on this type of activity...it seems that the entire population become Socialists when we're discussing football clubs but it's part and parcel of the financial system.

Now, the very important point to note is that the PIK loans carried an extremely high rate of interest, largely because the Glazers borrowed so much money that the banks/financial institutions actually doubted their ability to pay it back, even using funds generated by the club. Football wasn't quite the cash cow it is now in 2004, so many at the time couldn't see how the Glazers would actually profit on this investment.

I don't have the actual figures to hand but I did a thread on this a couple of years back and from memory, I believe the annual interest payments alone from the first six years of Glazer ownership were £75m, totally £450m between 2005-2010. Now, this is a large sum now, in the context of a football club, but bear in mind we're talking about the noughties here....£450m could basically buy an entire World XI of superstar footballers. Instead, that money was drained from the club and paid back to banks. Sickening.

It's telling that during this period, United actually recorded a positive net-spend over a period of six years. This is absolutely key to starting the decline that we have experienced post-SAF. SAF himself famously repeated the mantra that in order to stay at the top, you had to strengthen whilst you were strong. United did not do this. Sure, we enjoyed huge on-field success during this period, and that distracted many supporters from what was going on behind the scenes. However, if you looked past the trophies, you could see all was not well and that the purse strings were definitely being tightened (many of us will remember the 'no value in the market' line we got fed every window).

We should have been looking to find the next Scholes, the next Ferdinand, the next Vidic, the next Rooney, the next Ronaldo etc....during this period...but instead, with a few notable exceptions, we largely bought in underwhelming and odd signings like Obertan, Manucho and Mame Diouf on the cheap.

Period Two - After the Restructuring of the PIK Loans

In 2010, the Glazers, following the recent increases in the size of the TV deal signed by the Premier League clubs and increasing commercial revenues, were finally able to restructure the clubs debt and make if far less expensive to manage. United still have debt today, but it doesn't actually cause us nearly as many issues as some supporters believe. Sure, it would be better not to have that debt, and without the Glazers the debt almost certainly would not exist...but it needn't necessarily hold us back.

Almost immediately, the interest rates dropped and I believe, again from memory, that we started to pay around £20m per annum, as opposed to £75m, to service the debt. Bear in mind, this was also happening against a backdrop of increasing profitability and revenues, so the debt payments were now very manageable and increasingly, largely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. Again, of course it would be better to have no debts and pay no interest...but this idea that we can never be successful under Glazer stewardship because of financial constraints doesn't really hold-up.

Even after more funds became available, we didn't necessarily rush out and become mega-active in the market, like many believe we should have, but we definitely made some effort to try to build for the future and replace key players. We signed the likes of Smalling, Jones, Kagawa, Hernandez and DDG during this period, all touted as genuine stars of the future. We also added RvP to give SAF the firepower he needed to win one last PL title.

After SAF left, the club made a war-chest available to Ed Woodward, now promoted to CEO and various managers. Again, this is not the place to debate how or why it all went wrong...but suffice to say having an investment banker with a physics degree and his mates oversee transfers with the input of various different hangers-on and managers with their own ideas and agendas is not a winning strategy.

What cannot be disputed, and this is important, is that the Glazers have 'allowed' United to spend £1BN net under Woodward's stewardship. Again, please do not come at me with stupid comments like 'it's the clubs money, of course we should be able to spend it' like that idiot LUHG Mike off Twitter. Nobody disputes that, but that's not the reality of our situation. The Glazers could have allowed us to spend none of that money and siphoned it all off for themselves. Again, this is the World we live in, they own the club, it's now 'their' money to do with as they see fit. That's before we even get into the insane amount we have spent in wages over the last decade...very few people think about that when they calculate our out-goings. All-in, we've probably spent more than any club in World football.

So, the key point I am making here is that whether you like the Glazers or not (and I am no fan) their ownership of the club need not prohibit further success. I get tired of seeing so many posters trot out lines they have heard on Twitter about how we cannot possibly win anything under Glazer ownership. With the budget they have allocated, it's perfectly reasonable to expect that if the club is managed correctly, we can compete on all fronts. Liverpool manage to achieve far more on a much smaller budget, yet nobody is campaigning for the removal of FSG because it just so happens the much smaller amount of money they make available has been spent incredibly well.

This is not an attempt to absolve the Glazers of responsibility or try to win people over and make them Glazer fans. Not at all. I was outside the ground protesting in 2004 and putting what little cash I had at the time into Shareholders United/MUST, so I'll have none of that thanks. I am just trying to offer a message of hope that it is possible for us to be a successful football team and be owned by the Glazer family. To suggest otherwise now, after the money spent, feels like sorry excuses for poor football decisions to me.
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Good post - agree with most of that.
 
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