Club Sale | It’s done!

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So, could the new owners clear the debt/build a new stadium/new training complex WITHOUT this impacting FFP? Had a couple of conflicting responses.

Reason I am interested is because many of our fans are very confused about our finances and think we are far more profitable than we actually are. Im not convinced even with trillionaire owners that we'd be able to spend £400/500m net on transfers regularly without putting FFP at risk
I'd also like to understand this. I read that under FFP owners could invest in infrastructure separately from FFP allowances but under the new financial rules infrastructure would take away from the transfer allowance.
 
I’m not interested in kudos , I’ve been to my fair share of games, I was at Brighton first game of the season and many others throughout the years am I a “match going fan”.

I live in London and have worked in Manchester many times.

I just think in 2023 there is still this little Britain attitude to the worldwide support of United and the 75k that go to United games week on week are somehow more entitled to decide or feel a certain way about the club.

I know at least 4 or 5 season ticket holders who live and work in London who often sell their ticket that they can’t go to are they “match going fans”.

It boils down to happening to live near by and being a United fan , what if they are thick as shit or only want big Jim cos Barry down the pub says he’s a Manc? Doesn’t matter , cos he’s local. Beggars belief.

There are many thousands of smart match going fans that don’t have that opinion and see how there is a much wider net of loyal fans that have just as important say on the club as they do.


We are on the same boat here, I'm Irish, I'm a 'foreign' fan too. Clearly there will be season ticket holders from outside of Manchester, our own club has a few season tickets too. But the fabric of the clubs constant game in-game out support is mostly Mancunians, and surrounding areas around or outside if be at as many if not most games.


No one is trying to downplay out status here, I'm just stating facts they are easily the most important aspect of the clubs support. It can't be argued. I wouldn't be getting the "blood boiled" over it.
 
You can't really compare like for like. Different levels of opportunity. Put Ratcliffe in the Emirs boots and I'm sure he'd be delighted for the extra slave labour. He's constantly trying to mess up his workers wages/pensions/jobs etc to save money, so he's just a scumbag with less opportunity for me. A country will generally do more damage than an individual in the present terms. That's not excusing Qatar at all though, just attempting to live with the reality.
You may be right, I'm not motivated to defend Ratcliffe. I'm sure he's a cnut, like most billionaires seem to be.

But we can only talk about what has actually been done, not hypothetical situations. And based on evidence, Qatar is much worse. And let's face it, this is likely a state backed bid, not an individual with zero state involvement.
 
English football sold itself to the World to make a bigger profit.

I'm not saying that is a noble cause. But it is totally different to sportswashing.

Not just profit, also to remove the stigma of hooliganism within English football and display this on a global scale.
I put it in quotes because I’m not entirely serious & it’s obviously not comparable, just a bit tongue in cheek because I think that word has snowballed.
 
English football sold its soul, in part, to change and clean its image from the previous decade. It wasn’t all about money and was as close to sports washing without it being sports washing.
It kind of worked. People always look back and say it was for the money but that was only one factor.
What does this mean?
 
English football sold its soul, in part, to change and clean its image from the previous decade. It wasn’t all about money and was as close to sports washing without it being sports washing.
It kind of worked. People always look back and say it was for the money but that was only one factor.
Sorry but you are wrong and mixing up 2 separate issues

The Premier League was created to prevent the top clubs from losing income to the lower leagues and gain a bigger share of TV rights which previously wa shared more evenly across all leagues. Which again, is not a noble cause and ruined income for small lower league clubs. But had zero impact from hooliganism which took much longer to clean up and needed work from police, clubs, fan groups and new laws.

Work on that started in the 80s but took some time to reduce hooligan activity. This was with the Public Order Act 1986 which permitted courts to ban supporters from grounds, and the Football Spectators Act 1989 which allowed banning of convicted hooligans from attending international matches.

I guess some of this post also answers @villain

In short the Premier league was like an English "Super League" designed to make more money and give more influence to clubs in that league. Please do not conflate with sportswashing by state owned football clubs. It is totally different.
 
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This. Fans boast we are the biggest club in the world then whinge about "tourists" from abroad at games. Most odd.
Yes, they think non local fans have less worthy opinions about the club compared to theirs. Its like non locals have class "A" shares with no voting powers and they (just like the glazers) have class B shares with the voting power :D.
 
It’s still a non issue though, if they weren’t allowed to rent stadiums etc there would be such an uproar and panic about it now.
They can’t police what the owners do outside of the club, if they want to build a stadium they can. There’s nothing that would go through the United books for UEFA to analyse.
From what I read the big rule change is it can’t go through the clubs without ffp anymore because an owner building a new stadium under club credit is just as bad, if not worse, than going all out on players and fecking off.

City are in the middle of a fraud case with the EPL right now for doing exactly this. [offbook activity] You have to declare everything.

(and it should be ok to go through a club if the owners inject $$$ to cover it)

They probably can do it through the club with ffp, because presumably equity injection will cover it.
You may be right, I'm not motivated to defend Ratcliffe. I'm sure he's a cnut, like most billionaires seem to be.

But we can only talk about what has actually been done, not hypothetical situations. And based on evidence, Qatar is much worse. And let's face it, this is likely a state backed bid, not an individual with zero state involvement.

Absolutely. But we are powerless either way. so may as well accept they are both utter cnuts and try to live with it. What else can we do? I don't think there's much value in playing the 'who is worse' morality game. (even though the answer is Qatar) - Qatar not buying us won't hurt them, or help anyone they hurt. Ditto to Ratcliffe.
 
City are in the middle of a fraud case with the EPL right now for doing exactly this. [offbook activity] You have to declare everything.

(and it should be ok to go through a club if the owners inject $$$ to cover it)

They probably can do it through the club with ffp, because presumably equity injection will cover it.


Absolutely. But we are powerless either way. so may as well accept they are both utter cnuts and try to live with it. What else can we do? I don't think there's much value in playing the 'who is worse' morality game. (even though the answer is Qatar) - Qatar not buying us won't hurt them, or help anyone they hurt. Ditto to Ratcliffe.
Fraud isn’t infrastructure though. It literally can’t be fraud because it’s not illegal to rent a stadium that the club didn’t build.
it’s just not against the rules. That would mean Qatar could never build another building again while owning United without the club getting ffp over it.
It simply doesn’t make sense.
 
I think the vast majority feel like this. If there was a poll asking what you’d prefer - Qatar purchase United or Qatar get blocked and the owners of PSG, Newcastle and City are forced to sell - I think most would take the latter. It isn’t happening though is it? The horse has bolted. Instead of people going around judging their fellow United fans for wanting owners who will invest in the club after 18 years of an ownership model that took 1.5bn out of it maybe judge the U.K. government, the EPL and UEFA who have got us all into this mess.
Great Post.
 
I think Keegan has given the daily mail writers a rollicking as they have updated their article

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I personally don’t even think about the state’s human rights etc. I simply think State ownership should have never been allowed, it’s brought the game into total disrepute.
I’ve said it before, but I’d be against Norway buying us also.


You're absolutely right but what can you do about it? The choices we can make are either staying or going. Suppose we can protest but it's hardly a potential French revolution. Most fans will settle down and start getting involved in the games. Like always.
 
Fraud isn’t infrastructure though. It literally can’t be fraud because it’s not illegal to rent a stadium that the club didn’t build.
it’s just not against the rules. That would mean Qatar could never build another building again while owning United without the club getting ffp over it.
It simply doesn’t make sense.

It's against the rules to not list the rental as an expense. It's against the rules to pay significantly less than market value for it. And that expense counts towards FFP.

And I literally just said that they can cover builds with equity injection.
Eg.

a) Man Utd builds New Trafford. It costs 2bn. The owners inject 2Bn equity into the club. - This is allowed and does not impact FS.*
b) Man Utd builds New Trafford. It costs 2bn. The owners borrow to do this. - This now impacts FS. (Aka Spurs stadium)**
c) Man Utd builds New Trafford. It costs 2bn. The owners provide an interest free loan over 50 (or 500) years. This impacts FS, but obviously in a much lesser way.

*The current reading of the article states that you'd need to do this kinda via c), but it's probably just clumsily worded. (As in dripfeed it over x years to pay the interest free loan)
** It won't impact spurs as they built under old FFP rules
 
Would it be unreasonable to expect to hear which bid is looking the most favourable in the next week or so?

(Or of course to hear if non of them are favourable.)
 
I think the vast majority feel like this. If there was a poll asking what you’d prefer - Qatar purchase United or Qatar get blocked and the owners of PSG, Newcastle and City are forced to sell - I think most would take the latter. It isn’t happening though is it? The horse has bolted. Instead of people going around judging their fellow United fans for wanting owners who will invest in the club after 18 years of an ownership model that took 1.5bn out of it maybe judge the U.K. government, the EPL and UEFA who have got us all into this mess.

Plus, lest we forget, United fans campaigned incredibly hard (and successfully) against the BSkyB takeover, even though it would have given us a massive advantage, and we campaigned against the Glazers.

We literally fought for football and warned people that this would happen, but folk were too bogged down in their petty tribalism to understand the implications and rivals fans just took the piss....so i say...f**k em!

And....as you say, we're "owed" about £1.5/2BN, if we're talking about sporting merit....
 
It is laughable that some united fans does not know how popular Manchester United was in the ME and Asia before 1992 :lol:.
Yes, they think non local fans have less worthy opinions about the club compared to theirs. Its like non locals have class "A" shares with no voting powers and they (just like the glazers) have class B shares with the voting power :D.
The overcompensating is getting cringey now.
 
I don't know how the Glazers can not accept the Qatar offer, that is unless they never really had any intention of selling all of the club, in which case they'd better have some spectacular PR lined up to smooth it over when they annouce it.

I don't think ' But they only offered £5 billion', will quite cut it.
 
I don't know how the Glazers can not accept the Qatar offer, that is unless they never really had any intention of selling, in which case they'd better have some spectacular PR lined up to smooth it over when they annouce it.

I don't think ' But they only offered £5 billion', will quite cut it.

Theres a lot of people involved in the decision making which could cause issues
 
SJR has fudged the first statement after the bid.
Has media clowns scrambling around to give us more information but comes across like there’s something being hidden.

The feedback from Nice is that he made a bunch of promises and went back on them.

The communication so far from the Sheik has been clear and concise.

At this point it’s clear the UK media have a bias towards SJR but his comments and comms have been nothing short of incompetent and muddled which reminds me of our current owners.

Again Qatar must win the bidding , I hope they do.
 
I think Keegan has given the daily mail writers a rollicking as they have updated their article

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Some of the journos have been proper cringe over this.

The crux of the article seems to be, no way could he have supported United before we won our first title under Fergie and obviously the cash is linked to the state of Qatar.
 
I don't know how the Glazers can not accept the Qatar offer, that is unless they never really had any intention of selling all of the club, in which case they'd better have some spectacular PR lined up to smooth it over when they annouce it.

I don't think ' But they only offered £5 billion', will quite cut it.
There’s no way they aren’t selling. If they don’t sell the protests will be larger than anything seen so far - they’ve just ensured everyone now knows they could sell as there are at least two viable offers. They will also have wasted lots of very rich and powerful peoples time - including Raine - which will impact them if they tried to sell in the future.
 
Some of the journos have been proper cringe over this.

The crux of the article seems to be, no way could he have supported United before we won our first title under Fergie and obviously the cash is linked to the state of Qatar.
Yeah the insinuation seems to be that all non Mancunian United fans are essentially glory hunters who started supporting after the success came in.
 
I mean who cares if Jassim is a United fan or not, it barely seems relevant.

I don't think it's relevant in the slightest.

But the reality is that anyone trying to buy the club will try to promote the idea that they're a United and football fan if they can, because it's basic PR spin. And it works too, insofar as I've seen a lot of people here and online reference him being a United fan as a plus.

In itself that cynical approach in appealing to fans is so basic that it wouldn't even be worth commenting on. But when someone appears to effectively be a front for a state-backed purchase of the club, any suggestion that their claimed motives for buying the club may be disingenuous feeds into that larger story.
 
Yeah the insinuation seems to be that all non Mancunian United fans are essentially glory hunters who started supporting after the success came in.
I mean as a 10 year old from a different country, it's not that far fetched, is it? How many 10 year old English folks do you know who support Gladbach or Valencia?
 
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