That said the idea to redevelop land around OT stadium is appealing. I think they'll also invest in the city centre/town as well.
Club Sale | It’s done!
- Thread starter JB08
- Start date
- Status
yes they do. Increasing the value of those clubs make the owners money. You don’t really think these investment firm invest in companies for shits and giggles right?
Newcastle aren’t looking to make a penny. It’s a sportswashing exercise. Abramovich was the same. As is City.
You do understand that as a point of principle, right?
Do you think more of the fanbase prefer Saudis or Qatar just because they have deeper pockets potentially?
This is all hypothetical, but if I look at the way they manage their businesses here and apply that to United, I would say: no dividends, no interest payments, but also no PSG-style spending sprees.
Your post is evidence of yes. It’s a huge thing.
He isn't if you'd bothered to read the articles. The club would be debt free and the risk would be on Ineos and himself.
He’s a Tory without morals. Hateful fella.
It is pretty funny seeing the amount of people on twitter (and here...) who don't understand basic economics and are losing their minds over the Ratcliffe debt thing. It's actually an incredibly generous thing to do for him to take on the clubs debt. It's essentially a £600m gift to the club.
Talk about irony... but please enlighten us
Well, i am not hiding that. Yes, i want ME owners. Because they are the richest and i think that they will be the best for the club.
Others; they will want profit. No matter how rich they are. They will look at us as a pure business investment. And could turn into next Glazers or FSG.
That is just an opinion of mine of course. Nobody knows how good or bad future owners will be. ME owners could end as a disaster too. We shall see...
He probably is. And the yanks interested won't be any better and the Saudis and Qataris are probably worse still.
There won't be any angels bidding for us mate. You do know this, right? In fact it's probably like the league of evil villains club getting together.
What'd happen with regards to Nice - would INEOS have to sell them?
People calling that ghoul ‘Sir Jim’ are the same type of folks as the Chelsea fans that called the fella ‘Roman’.
All our options right now look to be absolutely hateful. We should be railing against all of them.
People naive enough to think the debt will not be associated with the club in some way
He will penny pinch to cover up his debt and the high interest rate on his loan and in no time he will take large dividends to cover that.
If he takes over, it will be game over for the club.
Alright so quick economics lesson here...
When you (or a company) buy something (say a house), the buyer takes on a mortgage in the buyers name. You are liable to pay it. If you come into financial trouble, you sell the house at value, and the money from that sale pays off your debt so you are now debt free.
What the glazers did was buy a house, except the mortgage wasn't on their name, but the houses name. So if they sell that house, the new buyer still has the existing mortgage to pay off along with the value of the house he paid for. Hence why when they sell the club, they are entitled to 100% of the funds and leave 100% of the club debt with the club. So whoever buys the club, also buys the debt. So it is up to the buyer what they do with the debt. Taking on a loan personally to clear the clubs debt and putting all of it on himself, is a £600m gift (or however much). It means that if Ratcliffe goes bankrupt one day, that he just sells the club to a new owner and the club is unaffected. The club is suddenly in a very safe place if the new owner takes on the debts.
The club is an investment to whoever buys it. It gains in value over time (generally like a house). Rich people need things to put their money in to gain value over time, and football clubs are a pretty safe bet to gain in value over time, as the glazers found out.
Gift is a tad generous. But the hysteria over the mention of debt has to chill out.
Sure you will get the odd former Russian KGB agent and Arab oil state with money to burn in the bank but so many takeovers are financed and even the likes of Bezos have their wealth tied up in shares and assets rather than mountains of money under a mattress. People need to chill out over talk of banks being involved.
If he can't afford it then he needs to take a seat. We aren't trying to pay off our debt with even more debt. What a selfish, me-first line of reasoning exposing the club to that much liability. Doing this with a bank guarantees our revenue will go into servicing the debt. Banks don't give out loans as pet projects. And people think he's going to invest another billion in the stadium and let us run independent. I would rather not sell at all.
Who do we suspect are the interested two parties from the United States?
Haven’t heard anything from that side really but reports suggest there’s two..
Haven’t heard anything from that side really but reports suggest there’s two..
You are correct of course, but I want to know one thing…
… what is the house called?!
And you've determined the richest must therefore be the best automatically in your head. It's more complex than that.
There's no more sugar daddy spending getting by in football anymore anyway and we don't need to be the sports washing image of Qatar to be successful. Liverpool didn't need it and Arsenal haven't got it now and are top of the league and flying. We are arguably the biggest sports brand in the world.
**facepalm**
Look at how many Newcastle fans dress up as Saudis these days... Of course it is a thing. There is nothing more cult like than sports teams, and fans will ignore anything so long as they are good on the pitch.
Yes.
New opinion piece in The Guardian about the Qatari interest:
https://www.theguardian.com/footbal...-from-manchester-united-than-glazers-ever-did
https://www.theguardian.com/footbal...-from-manchester-united-than-glazers-ever-did
Qatari owners would take more from Manchester United than Glazers ever did
Jonathan Liew
Ownership by one of the world’s most savage governments would forever tarnish the legacy of Britain’s most famous club
Perhaps, in a way, this had to happen eventually. Football’s narrative arc demanded nothing less. The numbers simply made too little sense. Perhaps like Batman v Superman, Godzilla v Kong, the cronut, Manchester United and Qatar was simply a crossover concept begging to be brought into existence. Indulge me for a second. I’m thinking pre-season tours to Doha. I’m thinking an Mbappé/Rashford reality TV job-swap. I’m thinking luxury party barges on Manchester Ship Canal. A hologrammatic New Trafford to sit directly above the old one. A Phil Jones mural visible from space.
And so to the news that Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani – a private Qatari individual with no direct connection to Qatar itself, unless you churlishly count the fact that he is its head of state – is interested in purchasing United. Or perhaps simply a stake in United rather than a full takeover. Or, according to which report you read, not necessarily Thani himself but a fund linked to the royal family, or perhaps the Qatar Investment Authority sovereign wealth fund.
This is pretty much all we know at this stage, which one suspects is exactly how the Qataris want it. Interested enough to test the water, to perform due diligence, to gauge the reaction from fans and the wider game; deniable enough that they can still pull out. One potential sticking point appears to be the valuation of between £6bn and £8bn being imposed by the Glazer family. Once you add investment to the squad and the exorbitant cost of redeveloping Old Trafford and Carrington, you’re close to an 11-figure sum before you’ve even landed in the country.
In short: we are not talking another Paris here. It is easily forgotten amid the maelstrom that followed, but Qatar’s initial investment in Paris Saint-Germain was minuscule by comparison: an initial 70% stake that valued the club at less than £100m. Financially speaking, it was a no-brainer. Paris was a failing club with a knockdown price, enormous potential, unfettered access to one of the richest markets in Europe, no close rivals and a medium-strength league that could easily be brought to heel.
None of these advantages exists with United. For all the travails on the pitch, it remains one of the sport’s most successful businesses: a paradigmatic example of how the modern sports club can lucratively leverage its brand and its advertising space without ever needing to trouble a trophy engraver. The Premier League will not simply be bought and bidden as Qatar did with Ligue 1, trapping it in an irresistible pincer movement of unmatchable transfer spending and beIN broadcast rights. If you’re in charge of the sovereign wealth fund of an autocratic nation with a virtually limitless credit facility, you want cast-iron guarantees. Lumbered with an eye-watering price tag and surrounded by predators, United offer very few.
So what might Qatar want from United? Perhaps the same thing that it wanted from Harrods, from Heathrow airport and Sainsbury’s, all of which it either owns or owns significant portions of: immediate identification with a cherished global brand, almost a stake in British society itself. Among cultural entities not even Liverpool or Arsenal can offer the same level of name recognition, the ability to print money simply by being who you are.
And as Saudi Arabia discovered with Newcastle, buying a football club earns you an army of pliant bots desperate to do your bidding for you. Before the last World Cup, Qatar surreptitiously paid hundreds of football fans to promote the tournament for them online, rewarding them with free flights and tickets. It’s a bit like that, really, but instead of free flights and tickets it’s Jude Bellingham and Harry Kane.
The really interesting question here, by contrast, is what United fans can possibly want out of Qatar. Spending money? If any club can offer a salutary lesson in the dangers of brainlessly flinging resources at the transfer market, then surely it is the club that has spent more than £1bn in transfer fees in the past decade and won a grand total of zero league titles and reached zero Champions League semi-finals. The redevelopment of Old Trafford is long overdue, but anybody who visited the grotesque and soulless domes of Qatar’s World Cup will testify that money can buy you a lot of things, but it doesn’t buy you taste.
There are no palatable options on the table here. There is no queue of ethical multibillionaires out there scrambling to claim a piece of one of the world’s dirtiest sports. Nobody has ever accumulated the sums of money required to buy a football club of Manchester United’s size without some form of widespread exploitation: exploitation of the planet, exploitation of human rights, exploitation of some of the world’s poorest and least powerful people. Just because the Glazers were terrible, parasitic owners does not mean the next guys will be any better.
But United fans have always liked to think of their club as an exemplar. As somehow more cherished and noble than any other. How stirring it would be if, as in 2005 when they furiously protested against the Glazer takeover, they chose to evoke that sense of exceptionalism for the greater good of the sport. To resist the prostitution of their club to one of the world’s most savage governments. To demand better. The Glazers took hundreds of millions of pounds out of United. A Qatari takeover would take more still: something unique and elemental and important, something that it could never, ever replace.
Jonathan Liew
Ownership by one of the world’s most savage governments would forever tarnish the legacy of Britain’s most famous club
Perhaps, in a way, this had to happen eventually. Football’s narrative arc demanded nothing less. The numbers simply made too little sense. Perhaps like Batman v Superman, Godzilla v Kong, the cronut, Manchester United and Qatar was simply a crossover concept begging to be brought into existence. Indulge me for a second. I’m thinking pre-season tours to Doha. I’m thinking an Mbappé/Rashford reality TV job-swap. I’m thinking luxury party barges on Manchester Ship Canal. A hologrammatic New Trafford to sit directly above the old one. A Phil Jones mural visible from space.
And so to the news that Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani – a private Qatari individual with no direct connection to Qatar itself, unless you churlishly count the fact that he is its head of state – is interested in purchasing United. Or perhaps simply a stake in United rather than a full takeover. Or, according to which report you read, not necessarily Thani himself but a fund linked to the royal family, or perhaps the Qatar Investment Authority sovereign wealth fund.
This is pretty much all we know at this stage, which one suspects is exactly how the Qataris want it. Interested enough to test the water, to perform due diligence, to gauge the reaction from fans and the wider game; deniable enough that they can still pull out. One potential sticking point appears to be the valuation of between £6bn and £8bn being imposed by the Glazer family. Once you add investment to the squad and the exorbitant cost of redeveloping Old Trafford and Carrington, you’re close to an 11-figure sum before you’ve even landed in the country.
In short: we are not talking another Paris here. It is easily forgotten amid the maelstrom that followed, but Qatar’s initial investment in Paris Saint-Germain was minuscule by comparison: an initial 70% stake that valued the club at less than £100m. Financially speaking, it was a no-brainer. Paris was a failing club with a knockdown price, enormous potential, unfettered access to one of the richest markets in Europe, no close rivals and a medium-strength league that could easily be brought to heel.
None of these advantages exists with United. For all the travails on the pitch, it remains one of the sport’s most successful businesses: a paradigmatic example of how the modern sports club can lucratively leverage its brand and its advertising space without ever needing to trouble a trophy engraver. The Premier League will not simply be bought and bidden as Qatar did with Ligue 1, trapping it in an irresistible pincer movement of unmatchable transfer spending and beIN broadcast rights. If you’re in charge of the sovereign wealth fund of an autocratic nation with a virtually limitless credit facility, you want cast-iron guarantees. Lumbered with an eye-watering price tag and surrounded by predators, United offer very few.
So what might Qatar want from United? Perhaps the same thing that it wanted from Harrods, from Heathrow airport and Sainsbury’s, all of which it either owns or owns significant portions of: immediate identification with a cherished global brand, almost a stake in British society itself. Among cultural entities not even Liverpool or Arsenal can offer the same level of name recognition, the ability to print money simply by being who you are.
And as Saudi Arabia discovered with Newcastle, buying a football club earns you an army of pliant bots desperate to do your bidding for you. Before the last World Cup, Qatar surreptitiously paid hundreds of football fans to promote the tournament for them online, rewarding them with free flights and tickets. It’s a bit like that, really, but instead of free flights and tickets it’s Jude Bellingham and Harry Kane.
The really interesting question here, by contrast, is what United fans can possibly want out of Qatar. Spending money? If any club can offer a salutary lesson in the dangers of brainlessly flinging resources at the transfer market, then surely it is the club that has spent more than £1bn in transfer fees in the past decade and won a grand total of zero league titles and reached zero Champions League semi-finals. The redevelopment of Old Trafford is long overdue, but anybody who visited the grotesque and soulless domes of Qatar’s World Cup will testify that money can buy you a lot of things, but it doesn’t buy you taste.
There are no palatable options on the table here. There is no queue of ethical multibillionaires out there scrambling to claim a piece of one of the world’s dirtiest sports. Nobody has ever accumulated the sums of money required to buy a football club of Manchester United’s size without some form of widespread exploitation: exploitation of the planet, exploitation of human rights, exploitation of some of the world’s poorest and least powerful people. Just because the Glazers were terrible, parasitic owners does not mean the next guys will be any better.
But United fans have always liked to think of their club as an exemplar. As somehow more cherished and noble than any other. How stirring it would be if, as in 2005 when they furiously protested against the Glazer takeover, they chose to evoke that sense of exceptionalism for the greater good of the sport. To resist the prostitution of their club to one of the world’s most savage governments. To demand better. The Glazers took hundreds of millions of pounds out of United. A Qatari takeover would take more still: something unique and elemental and important, something that it could never, ever replace.
For me the best ownership is one that will harbour ambitions of wanting to see United compete on all fronts. And when you have ownership that will have the drive and ambition to make us the best, then accountability will return to the club and it will seep down from the top to the bottom. And when there's accountability at the club, a best in class environment will be created by default and whoever isn't pulling their weight will be removed/replaced.
And if I'm honest with you, the best ownership from a purely footballing perspective is probably the Qatari investors from the groups mentioned in the media. I want to look forward to watching United after a long hard working week and it would be great to see us compete on all fronts again. But as you know, we need someone with real deep pockets who will look to compete in the transfer market and upgrade the infrastructure at the club. And that's on top of buying the club for about £5bn. So it's about making a difference and not just about making up the numbers.
Football is a release for many of us from the stresses and strains of everyday life. So like I've said above, I hope we get the best owner from a football perspective and hope we get back to being a genuine force again.
You haven't contributed a single thing on this page. Just acting up at anyone who isn't deluded. This thing is glaring and your head is still this far buried in sand. Can't wait to hear what naivety you'll come up with to defend taking out yet another loan to burden us.
Thats the key appeal for me. I'm not bothered about spending big on transfers (though I would prefer us to have enough cash flow to not rely on loan signings), I just want to see investment in and around the club with a new stadium and redeveloped land. I don't expect or even want the Boehly silliness.
Did you ask yourself, who is paying for the interest for the huge debt he puts on himself?
There isn’t enough bandwidth for the laughing emojis this deserves.
It's much more complex than that. Well at least for most people. Some people just don't care as long as they are filthy rich clearly.
First of all we have matched City for transfer spending under even the Glazers so we have had enough to compete. That's not to say they are good owners of course because they have made some unforgivable decisions.
No there are no rules against one individual/group/company owning two clubs. The only rule is they can't both play in the same UEFA competition in the same year. But I doubt there's much danger of Nice being in the CL any time soon anyway though.
You are correct of course, but I want to know one thing…
… what is the house called?!
Do you seriously believe that SJR will take on c. £600m of United's debt on personally and it should be considered as a gift to the club ?? Am I reading that correctly?
A) How is this £600m going to be financed?
B) There's the other small issue of the other c. £4.5b for the purchase of the club and how he/they are planning to finance all that.
This all reeks of another Glazer type purchase. Maybe not loading the debt directly onto the clubs books like the Glazers did, but spread across parent companies etc.
The sums involved in this would make the Glazers debt look like pocket change.
Thanks for the reply. I agree with you 100%
Unfortunately I was worried about this also. Let's hope he isn't successful in his bid.
Yeah, I think they'll make sure the investment into city centre infrastructure will continue. In the next five years we'll have around 50 100m+ buildings. I love watching the skyline improving. I suspect they'd add to it.
The money to pay off the debt would 100% come out the club to some extent if Jim has his way. He’ll say it’s just business.
Qatar is the way to go.
Qatar is the way to go.
People think SJR will let his other businesses run at huge losses while the multibillion pound asset that caused the situation stays unaffected. It's almost illiteracy to think this is even possible.
Him and his company? Who gives a feck? It's not on the club anymore, and there is 0 reason for them to take money out of the club to pay off that debt. That just wouldn't make any business sense.
United's total yearly revenue would account for just 1% of the yearly revenue of INEOS. They aren't buying the club to be a money maker. It's an investment. It grows in value over time for them. Smart management of an asset you own is not to bleed your asset dry. It's to watch it grow properly.
But on the flip side he doesn't have links to a royal family who have just let thousands of migrant workers die in horrendous conditions to build stadia for a world cup that they bribed their way to host.
This is not just about the deepest pockets. At least it's not for me and lots of other reds either.
- Status