Manchester, the city of romance. Sir Jim Ratcliffe represents a first strike against the despised ownership of Manchester United by the Glazer family. One small step for Ratcliffe, one giant leap for supporters yearning for an end to an association with American owners spanning 18 years.
To what degree Ratcliffe might shape United’s destiny will be contained in the detail. Assuming Britain’s richest man has not lost his marbles, there must be some upside for shelling £1.4bn for a 25 per cent stake, which was twice the market value when the deal was agreed, a little less after the share price dropped on Monday morning.
The euphoria over Ratcliffe’s involvement is understandable across the United diaspora, which has seen its place in the order of things eroded in the decade since the end of empire. Whilst the deal sees one commercial player acquire shares from another, it is on balance a better option than being subsumed by the state apparatus of another expansionist royal family from the Middle East scarred by a toxic human rights record.
Moreover, since the independence of the mysterious Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad al Thani from the ruling Qatari regime was hard to establish, an unwanted layer of duplicity has been avoided. The nature of the proposed deal arrived at with Ratcliffe demonstrates how the club was always about profit and not glory for the Glazers, an admission that they had no sense of the emotional contract with the fans once central to football ownership.
That Ratcliffe does understand that emotional connection is his big selling point among the fans. And though he is, first and foremost, a man of commerce, it is in this wider understanding of the culture of United that hope resides. Ratcliffe hails from Failsworth, a satellite barrio along the main artery from Manchester north east to Oldham, a route that connected the commercial centre of cotton manufacture to the industrial bits where cloth was made. He is, therefore, immersed in United lore.
The wise men unpicking the details of the deal advise that the six members of the Glazer family own 67 per cent of the club, whilst a third is in the hands of myriad financial investors. However the division of shares into Class A and B gives them 95 per cent of the voting rights. Only Class A shares are traded on the stock exchange. Class B shares can only be traded between Glazer affiliates, presumed to be family members. It is in Class B shares, which carry ten times the voting rights of Class A shares, that power resides and which the Ratcliffe bid is targeting.
How he achieves that will come to light when the vote by 12 board members on Thursday rubber stamp his offer. The assumption is the Glazers will authorise a rule change to permit the transfer of Class B goods. Acquiring control of football operations is ultimately the mechanism by which to achieve the absolute removal of the Glazers. It would appear this will happen incrementally, with Ratcliffe taking an ever-increasing share of the club over an agreed period.
That in itself will not be enough to restore United to the summit of the game. The fans understand this but are investing in Ratcliffe’s sensitivity to the primacy of the team in driving the business, born of a romantic connection that the Glazers never had.
Already there is talk of Ratcliffe upgrading the technical department, starting with a new sporting director, rumoured to be Paul Mitchell, ex of Southampton, Tottenham Hotspur, RB Leipzig and latterly Monaco. Infrastructure improvements to a leaky Old Trafford and an outdated Carrington training complex, are also part of the dreamscape.
Ownership is only ever an issue when times are bad, of course. In the first eight years of Glazer control United won five Premier League titles and appeared in three Champions League finals, winning one and losing two to peak Barcelona. There were no green and gold protests then.
Subsequent events revealed them to be the speculators they always were, the nature of their ownership geared only to returning profit not trophies. The game has changed since the Glazers assumed control in 2005, an acquisition sandwiched between the purchase in 2003 of Chelsea by Roman Abramovic and of Manchester City in 2008 by the Abu Dhabi royal family, transactions which flooded the football market with unaccountable billions.
Neither Chelsea nor City had to take account of the bottom line. United were about little else, debt payments on borrowings now approaching £1bn coming from profits once the envy of other clubs. Even in that domain United are now threatened by City.
In addition to his ownership of the Ineos Grenadiers cycling squad and his shares in the Mercedes F1 team, Ratcliffe has a football portfolio that includes FC Lausanne in Switzerland and OGC Nice of France. In none of these associations has Ratcliffe proved to be the alchemist of sporting dreams. But hope costs nothing, and any move that lessens the Glazers’ hold on Old Trafford is manna in Manchester.
from Football - inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/DKqgilS
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