Fair enough. Thanks for taking the time to explain that. Although I don’t fully agree it’s a logical and well thought out answer, and I’d be lying if I said I knew much about the Sky takeover, or about the financial constraints of the new ESL, about which I’d heard nothing, which certainly supports your point.
It’s at best very convenient though, that a central consequence of getting rid of the factors in football that fans on here claim to have a purely ethical problem with, would be that Man Utd would return to being by some distance the richest club in the league. Which would likely mean getting the best players, winning the biggest trophies. You must agree that in the back of every Utd fans mind they know that that would be the likely outcome.
I’m sure I could google it but what exactly was the problem with the Sky takeover, and was it fan power that stopped it happening?
It is very convenient, I agree - and that's also part of the reason people don't listen to us. There are 100% fans who just want Utd to be dominant at all costs, as evidenced by those who want the Glazers out so that the Saudi's can buy the club. However, what most of us want is 'organic' competition and sporting merit.
I don't know what the forums rules are on copying and pasting links or large amounts of text from other sites. However, here is a piece taken from The Guardian (dated April 1999) in answer to your question about the BSkyB (Rupert Murdoch) takeover. I have removed parts which are not directly relevant but the article is easily searchable on the Internet. I have highlighted some parts in bold I feel support my point about our fans being keen to protect organic competition.
How Murdoch was caught offside in United takeover
It wasn't Blair who did for Sky. It was the fans, report Emily Bell, Denis Campbell and Mark Honigsbaum
On 1 July last year, Martin Edwards, Manchester United chairman, and Maurice Watkins, the club lawyer, turned up for what they thought was a routine business meeting on a drab industrial park near London's Heathrow Airport.
Mark Booth, the American chief executive of Rupert Murdoch's BSkyB satellite station, had told Edwards he wanted to discuss pay-for-view television , a potential money-spinner for both parties.
But when Edwards arrived, Booth dropped a bombshell: Murdoch not only wanted to be a player in TV, he wanted to be an owner. He wanted to buy Manchester United.
That meeting and Murdoch's controversial offer for the club set off an earthquake, the reverberations from which are far from over.
The tycoon's bid called into question the future of the world's biggest football club, TV's increasing stranglehold over sport and, most crucially, his surprisingly close relationship with Tony Blair.
The Government's announcement last Friday that it was blocking the takeover, after the Monopolies and Mergers Commission ruled it anti-competitive, would seem irreparably to have damaged that relationship.
Yesterday, Labour MPs were themselves united: the MMC decision was not simply a bloody nose for Murdoch, but showed that the rift between his News International and new Labour had entered the divorce courts.
An editorial in yesterday's Sun condemned the ban as 'a disgrace' and accused the Government of having 'succumbed to an orchestrated and hysterical propaganda campaign'.
By contrast, football fans hailed the move as a guarantee that the future of the national game was safe, and that there would not be a destructive divide between super-rich clubs and the rest. Trade and Industry Secretary Stephen Byers had made this point himself in accepting the MMC decision.
But despite the symbolic importance of Byers's announcement, it settles none of the key questions that emerged during the 10-month takeover saga.
Does it mean all media companies are now barred from ever taking over any British football club? Apparently not. The MMC may yet let cable TV firm NTL take over Newcastle United, another big name.
Has the trend towards pay-per-view televised sport suffered a permanent setback? Probably not. Will the inequality between the large and small clubs now be halted? Again, almost certainly not.
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When Edwards left the meeting with Booth last summer, he could not have anticipated the coming storm. He was shocked but not surprised by the offer. Others had shown an interest in buying United, and he had indicated he would sell if the price was right.
But there was an outcry when news of the deal leaked out in September. Although all the United directors eventually accepted it, the fans were vehemently opposed. A pressure group, Shareholders United Against Murdoch (SUAM), fronted by BBC TV Newsnight reporter Michael Crick, quickly established itself as an incisive, articulate critic of the merger.
Their campaign immediately put the spotlight on Peter Mandelson, Byers' predecessor at the DTI, and crystallised the Labour Party's growing unease about its leadership's cosy relationship with the Murdoch empire.
The tycoon needed United as a lever to drive the next stage of his TV revolution: digitisation. He was worried that BSkyB could lose its key asset, the exclusive right to broadcast Premier League matches, when its existing contract runs out in 2001 because the Office of Fair Trading may outlaw such deals.
Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian TV entrepreneur who owns AC Milan, had given Murdoch the germ of the idea. Now Booth convinced his boss it was time to make the leap from broadcasting football to owning it.
'It was very much Mark Booth's idea to push it,' said a source close to the deal. 'Rupert is always sceptical about these things at the outset, but Mark was convinced he could run with it.'
Booth did not foresee any regulatory problems in having the deal approved. Most people in football expected it to be waved through, but with conditions to stop BSkyB exploiting its new position.
And the political climate looked favourable. Since Blair's election as Labour leader in 1994, the party had ended its long hostility to Fortress Wapping and won the support of the Sun at the 1997 general election. Tim Allan, Blair's deputy press secretary, joined BSkyB a year later.
Alastair Campbell, the Prime Minister's spin doctor, ensured that Murdoch's four British newspapers all increasingly Blair-friendly, were well looked after.
But the key figure was Mandelson, a regular dining companion of Elisabeth Murdoch, Sky's general manager and Rupert's daughter. Conveniently for Sky, Mandelson saw no problem with the deal.
Indeed, Sky sources were confident that Mandelson probably the only non-football fan in a soccer-mad Cabinet would simply say yes.
Sky's complacency backfired. At a press conference to launch the bid, Texan Booth was embarrassed when he could not name United's left-back, Dennis Irwin.
A series of public reactions disasters followed. At the United annual meeting in November, anti-Murdoch shareholders were manhandled by security men. Incredibly, Edwards did not bother to get Alex Ferguson, United's hugely-influential manager, behind the deal or even tell him about it.
BSkyB and United reckoned without the opposition of both SUAM and the Manchester United Independent Supporters' Association. In the Eighties their respective chairmen, Crick, the dogged journalist, and Andy Walsh, were on different sides. Now they were on the same team.
The groups mounted an expert campaign. A City law firm helped draft the initial MUISA submission to the OFT. Crick discovered that one of the country's leading competition lawyers was a United fan who opposed the deal. Then Dr Peter Crowther, of London solicitors Rosenblatt's, joined as SUAM's legal adviser.
Johnathan Michie, an economics professor at Birkbeck College, London, persuaded 10 other economists to help draft SUAM's submission to the MMC. One, Professor Stan Metcalfe, happened to be an ex-member of the MMC. The document warned that Murdoch's takeover would be against the public interest.
But what forced Mandelson to refer the bid to the MMC in October was the insistence of other Ministers, notably Chris Smith, the Culture, Media and Sport Secretary, and Sports Minister Tony Banks.
That reference was the moment when Murdoch's strategy began to unravel. Suddenly his ambition of overnight becoming the biggest player in British, if not European football, rested on a five-strong MMC takeover panel of the great and the good. Unlike Murdoch's political friends, this quintet appointed impartially was beyond his reach. As the panel began taking evidence publicly from the football authorities, BSkyB's rivals, politicians and fans, the Murdoch firm's confidence slowly evaporated.
Perhaps the key submission came from the Independent Television Commission, the ITV watchdog. It said the guarantees necessary to prevent a sports broadcaster, which also owned a football club, from abusing its position would be unenforceable.
The MMC concurred. In its 254-page report on Friday, it agreed that the necessary safeguards could not be guaranteed to work. They decided that a Murdoch-owned United would be bad for British football because it would further polarise rich and poor clubs and, crucially, it would give BSkyB too much influence over all televised football.
Byers had no choice but to show Murdoch the red card. Significantly, the announcement was taken without reference to Downing Street.
Whether the decision will lead to Murdoch and Blair's divorce remains to be seen. But the tycoon will be incandescent at being thwarted in a takeover in Britain for the first time. The key question is: will he blame new Labour?
It is more likely that he will vent his rage on the BSkyB executives, and Booth in particular, though it is Murdoch's style to leave a cooling-off period before making such changes.
In terms of breaking BSkyB's grip on top-flight live football coverage, the decision may prove less important than the outcome of the OFT's legal action against the Premier League, which will end soon. The worst outcome for BSkyB would be a ruling that prevented the league selling rights en bloc in future, and declared BSkyB's current four-year £743m contract illegal. Sources close to the case say this is highly unlikely.
If all clubs can sell their own rights, there will be a feverish TV rights free-for-all in which BSkyB will end up paying far more for far fewer games. Screening a crucial United game could cost £10m, rather than £250,000.
For fans as consumers and viewers, the MMC decision is good news. The move for fans to pay more money to watch matches more often has, for the moment, been stalled.
As fans gather for today's crucial FA Cup semi-final between United and Arsenal, the United end will be cheering Murdoch's defeat. The rest of us will be watching. On Sky.
You mean to tell me that something bought 18 years ago hasn’t quintupled due to inflation?