Manchester United Thread [2004-2005]

Watched Heinze play for Argentina against Uruguay today. He had a good game, dishing out those insane tackles of his.

The only blemish was he gave away a penalty which led to the Uruguayans second goal.

Also, silvestre looked shaky again for the French NT.

Well, I am not that bother how they perform for their country, just want them to come back injury-free.


On a serious note, Irish pair set to reject Glazer's bid

http://news.independent.co.uk/business/news/story.jsp?story=570461

great news

alienseaford what's a trawler? (re your sig)

Good news for Man Utd. about those shareholders.

a trawler is a fishing boat

http://soccernet.espn.go.com/headlinenews?id=312809&cc=4716

'Coolmore would consider Glazer offer'

DUBLIN, Oct 10 (Reuters) - Manchester United shareholders John Magnier and J.P. McManus would consider an offer for their large stake in the club, a source close to the Irish investors said on Sunday.

But the source dismissed as 'pure speculation' talk of the price the horse racing tycoons would be ready to accept.

'Business people will always consider a proposition, and what's happening now is that people are leaping between someone listening to a proposition and accepting a proposition,' the source told Reuters.

Representatives of U.S. sports mogul Malcolm Glazer have made an unsolicited approach to Cubic Expression - McManus' and Magnier's investment vehicle - sources said on Friday.

This follows an announcement by the world's richest club at the start of the week that it had received a bid approach and that it was unclear whether this would lead to a formal offer.

Two Sunday newspapers suggested Magnier and McManus would be prepared to accept an offer over 300 pence a share for their 28.9 percent holding in the club.

A source close to the situation told Reuters that Glazer is considering an offer price around 300p. A spokesman from Glazer declined to comment.

The club's shares closed at 272p on Friday, valuing it at 713 million pounds ($1.3 billion).

Magnier and McManus started building their stake four years ago at just over 100 pence a share.

The Sunday Times said the men would be prepared to sell at 310p, while the Independent on Sunday said a price of 320p had been mooted.

Glazer has so far not detailed his offer plans to Cubic Expression, the source close to the investors said, adding: 'We're still in the realm of pure speculation.'

Cubic Expression has repeatedly said it is a long-term investor in the club.

Separately the Observer newspaper said that Glazer faced a last-minute challenge to his bid, reporting that Keith Harris, chairman of stockbrokers Seymour Pierce, was considering an 800 million pound bid.

Another newspaper, the Sunday Express, said Manchester United chairman Roy Gardner would leave the club should Glazer take over. It added that chief executive David Gill and team manager Alex Ferguson would stay and that Ferguson would be offered a seat on the board.

News of the possible bid drew an angry reaction from United fans this week, who feared for the club's future if Glazer borrowed heavily to fund a takeover.

About 30 supporters from a group called the Manchester Education Committee staged a pitch invasion at a reserve team match on Thursday carrying a 'Not for Sale' banner.

Supporters opposed a planned buy-out of United in 1999 by BSkyB, the owners of Sky Television. Their protests prompted the government to refer the matter to the competition authority, which blocked the takeover.

The latest takeover approach came a week after the club warned of a 14 million pound hit to profits this year due to lower TV revenues and less money from European football after it finished third in the premier league in 2003-04.

tnx borat for answering for me

How many more shares need to be bought? I would be willing to put down about $300 if I could at some point later regain a portion of it.

Why they want United

We've read all about the fans' protests, but precious little about why an American multi-millionaire wants to buy Manchester United. The answer lies in the future - when United can rake in millions from selling their games on the Internet.

Denis Campbell
Sunday October 10, 2004
The Observer

Ten years ago English football was a different game. Fans could pay at the gate, grounds were often only two-thirds full, average attendance was 26,000 and not every Premiership stadium was all-seat. Sky Sports showed 40 live matches per season, and only on Sunday afternoons and Monday nights.

Fast-forward a decade. You must buy your ticket in advance, the average crowd is over 35,000, and across the season's 380 Premier League games, grounds are 95 per cent full. This season Sky will screen 138 fixtures live and there are three different kick-off times on Saturdays alone. The top players earn £80,000 to £100,000 a week: that would have been several months wages to most Premier League footballers in 1994.

There have been similarly radical changes in the communications industry. Britain's 60 million citizens own 56.2m mobile phones; in 1994 it was just a few million. A decade ago few Britons had even heard of text messages; last year we sent 20.5 billion of them. Sky had 3.6m subscribers, fewer than half the number in 2004. And back then the world somehow coped without the as-yet-uninvented joys of photo-messaging, video-phones and Freeview set-top boxes.

It is in this context of dramatic change in football, lifestyle and technology that Malcolm Glazer's bid to buy Manchester United makes sense, especially given the similarly dizzying upheaval still to come in those areas. When the takeover approach was confirmed last week, most business analysts were sceptical. How, they asked, could the 76-year-old American hope to make a serious profit on an investment of about £800m? Nobody seemed to know.


The answer lies in what football and telecommunications might be like in 2014. If the changes over the next 10 years are as significant as they have been since 1994, Glazer's move might make him a fortune. The booming popularity of broadband internet - which lets fans watch TV-quality pictures on a personal computer, and allows every club to act as its own TV station - is the key.

Privately, many United insiders are sceptical about Glazer's chances of making even bigger profits. 'How do you sweat what is probably football's dampest asset?' asked one. 'How would you do that except in the ways United are already doing it?' Understandably, the sceptics point to United's status as the world's most profitable football club. Their annual profits may have dropped from £39.35m to £27.91m last year because of their relatively poor performance in both the Premiership and Champions League, but that £27.91m is still far more than any English or top European club made.

It is no coincidence, however, that both Glazer and the Cubic Expression duo of John Magnier and JP McManus - the Irish investors who own 29 per cent of United, and whose stake Glazer wants to buy, to add to his own 19 per cent holding - see Old Trafford as a superb commercial asset that, in City parlance, is significantly under-exploited. Inevitably, perhaps, for characters who are businessmen first and lovers of sport second, the trio believe that United are in effect a slot-machine that in different hands could and should deliver bigger Carlos*pots.

'Malcolm Glazer and his sons want to own United for a number of reasons,' explains one source close to the American's plans. 'They are genuinely interested in sport; they think they could bring stability to the club; they have very smart marketing skills; they want to make the team even stronger and more successful football-wise, to make it unrivalled; and, yes, they want to make it more successful off the pitch too.'

That last reason is the most important. There are plenty of ways in which United under the Glazer family's control could quickly start making even more money. Carlos*ing up ticket prices, while unpopular, would scarcely affect United's drawing power: they were the only Premier League club to record 25 sell-outs from 25 home games last season. More of Old Trafford's 67,900 seats could be sold to corporate visitors willing to pay £100 or more a time, or many of the extra 7,700 new places that will be installed as part of Old Trafford's planned expansion could become 'executive' seats.

Selling the stadium naming rights, as Arsenal have just done for their new home, would be easily the biggest money-spinner of that sort in football history. If the airline is prepared to pay £40m-£60m over 15 years to have the Gunners' new home called The Emirates Stadium, how much would Nike or Coca-Cola stump up to have Old Trafford renamed? Gambling would also provide a lucrative new revenue stream. Some football finance analysts believe United could use their worldwide popularity and their manutd.com website to become, in effect, an online global bookie. Their existing arrangement to have Ladbrokes as their 'official gaming partner' has only skimmed the surface of the huge potential there. United's best opportunity to make huge profits, though, is to get control of their own broadcasting rights and then use the ongoing revolution in broadband internet access to fully exploit the club's global popularity by persuading fans to pay to watch Wayne Rooney, Ruud van Nistelrooy and the rest live on a United website.

The resulting revenue could reach £100m a year or more, and would destroy the competitiveness of not just the Premier league but the Champions League too - unless, of course, other super-clubs were doing the same. For United, broadband offers the chance to create a massive worldwide network of fans who pay a monthly or annual subscription to watch action from Old Trafford on personal computers or computer-fed TV including, crucially, live Premiership games. And if they can pull off that trick, then Liverpool, Juventus, Real Madrid and other clubs will quickly follow. Initially TV cameras will provide the pictures seen by broadband, but ultimately broadband could replace television altogether. Technological advances will soon end the inferior quality of pictures seen on the internet compared with TV.

'If Malcolm Glazer got control of United and put exclusive club content on broadband, he could charge people to watch goals, highlights, archive games, player interviews, training sessions and, if things changed in the future, live Premier League games. Any club with a decent following abroad could monetise those people that way,' explains Shifty Markham of Octagon, the sports marketing group.

Broadband is spreading fast; very fast. While only some 100m people worldwide will have access to it by the end of 2004, numbers are going up rapidly in Asia, North America and parts of Europe. Only 3.2m households in the UK have it now, but that is predicted to rise to 5m by next year. The stunning growth in recent years of what were once niche markets - multi-channel TV, text messaging, even mobile phones - shows the potential rewards for any sports club or league who can 'monetise' by broadband.

'Being American, and given the fact that America already has 30m homes with broadband, Glazer could start a United subscription broadband service there first,' says Markham. 'You have a potential market of tens of millions there and United are already a powerful brand there.' They could then seek to repeat the trick in China, Japan and beyond. Kevin Roberts, editorial direc tor of Sport Business , says: 'United are one of the few clubs that have the global fan base you need to make this a serious business proposition. Once broadband really takes off, United could cash in on their status as the only truly established international superbrand in English football and eventually make maybe £2m or £3m per match, adding perhaps as much as £70m a season to their income.'

What will happen if Europe's superclubs succeed in this? The trouble, as Markham and Roberts point out, is that their domestic leagues will become even more uncompetitive. And the on-off idea of creating a European Super League, if not a global league, could finally be realised. If all this sounds fanciful, consider that in America, one million baseball fans now pay $2.95 a day, $14.95 a month or $80 a season to watch up to 15 Major League Baseball matches live every day on a broadband website. Last year it was 500,000. During Euro 2004, fans wanting to see 10-minute highlight packages of games from Portugal soon after the final whistle paid €14.99 to do just that on the euro2004.com action broadband service. The site had more than two million visits during the tournament, but Uefa will not reveal how many people subscribed.

In England, most of the 20 Premier League clubs operate a subscription-based broadband internet service where fans can, for a small fee, watch highlights, interviews and behind-the-scenes material. Between them they have about 100,000 subscribers worldwide. Since 2003 Sky Sports have been offering subscribers in the UK and Ireland highlights of events such as the Champions League, Ryder Cup and Premier League via broadband.

'I can't tell you how many subscribers we have except that it's growing rapidly, but off a low base,' says Steve Nuttall, head of enterprises at Sky Sports.

In all these ventures, what industry experts call 'displaced fans' - a Liverpool supporter living in Thailand, a New York Yankees follower on a trip to Seattle, an English cricket enthusiast on work placement in Australia - are the main target. While home-based fans can usually see what they want through domestic television, those outside the country often cannot. But thanks to the rapid globalisation of football, there are more and more 'displaced fans'. A recent survey by sports sponsorship agency Sport + Markt calculated that Real Madrid had 490m fans or potential fans around the world, with United second on 350m. Turning those fans into subscribers to a dedicated club broadband service could generate vast wealth.

Nobody pretends that webcasting - offering live sporting action or highlights via broadband internet - is yet a serious money-spinner. But then, who in 1994 would have predicted games kicking off at lunchtime, 3pm and teatime on Saturdays? And who in 1991-92 really believed that the then Big Five clubs would dare to break away and form their own league, the Premier League?

The problem for United in seeking to go down this road, whoever owns the club, is that the Premier League control their, and the other 19 clubs', broadcasting rights. In Italy and Spain, clubs sell their rights individually; here the league does it collectively. 'The only rights which United control are those to friendlies, testimonials, tours, Uefa Cup games and matches they play in the final qualifying round of the Champions League. The value of those is nothing compared to being able to show live Premiership games, which is where they could make really serious money,' stresses Roberts.

While the 20 clubs have taken back more and more rights to exploit themselves with each new Sky contract, they can still show only highlights or full-match delayed reruns, not live games. When the Premier League chairmen sit down in 2006 to discuss the shape of the deal that will start in August 2007, Roman Abramovich's Chelsea, Liverpool - with a significant fan base in Asia - and Arsenal could all join United in seeking that concession, if not more.

United have long been frus trated at earning far less from the Premier League's collective TV deals at home and abroad than they arguably deserve, given the large number of viewers they deliver. Last season, for instance, the League distributed to its 20 clubs £457.7m from the domestic broadcasting contract with Sky, of which United got £31.3m, or 6.8 per cent. It was the same with the share-out of the £65m from foreign television companies. United, despite being English football's undisputed big attraction, got the same £2.83m as the other 19 clubs. Yet they provide, by common agreement, at least 25 per cent of all fans who tune in.

This is why their former chairman, Sir Roland Smith, once suggested that the Premier League should let United sell their own TV rights and then pay a 'tax' on the resulting income as compensation to the other 19. Nothing changed. And when the new three-year broadcasting contracts were being discussed by the clubs early last year, Peter Kenyon, then still United's chief executive, again tried to get United more money. He requested the introduction of a 'weighting system' for the distribution of revenue generated from selling live Premier League games abroad, with payments linked to popularity. Unsurprisingly, the club chairmen rejected the proposal 19-1. If the Glazers get control of Old Trafford, United are unlikely to accept the rejection of such demands.

The defining trends of European football in the past decade have been globalisation, commercialisation, broadcasting and elitism. Harnessing the worldwide popularity of football's lucky few clubs through broadband technology draws all those together perfectly.

The Glazers know that, even if most others don't yet.

I don't like the sound of some of those "plans".

Dont like the sound of anything on there! Especially the way Glazer is going to try and win us United fans over. I will never like the man, only interested in money and knows nothing about football....How can he try to buy us and then take us straight into debt! Bloody twat!

I think the club should not be run for the profit of shareholders and owners the club would be so much better off if all money made was reinvested in the club . A lot of the plans mentioned would be harmful to football as well , i think the sport would lose popularity if it was completely dominated by several clubs.

Originally posted by manutd4eva
I don't like the sound of some of those "plans".

Click to expand...

Neither do I, that f*cker would ruin everything.

Originally posted by Thelonious
I think the club should not be run for the profit of shareholders and owners the club would be so much better off if all money made was reinvested in the club . A lot of the plans mentioned would be harmful to football as well , i think the sport would lose popularity if it was completely dominated by several clubs.

Click to expand...

dominated by several clubs?

like, say,

United, Real, Barca, Inter, AC, Juve, Roma, Ajax, Bayren, Arsenal, Chelsea, etc...?

There's really only a handful of powerful clubs already.

They dont always win though , did you watch last seasons champions league , but i think if the top epl clubs get their own tv rights the epl will be less competative , its already bad enough , look at arsenals run . I wouldnt want to see a superleague though it would be bad for football.

Keane injured?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/internationals/3732628.stm

United linked with Downing move, Phil as bait?

http://www.sportinglife.com/footbal...cer/04/10/11/manual_090615.html&TEAMHD=soccer

The guy, Glazer, is 75 years old so I predict he only has another 10 years max. to live. Then what happens?

Originally posted by pazzo
The guy, Glazer, is 75 years old so I predict he only has another 10 years max. to live. Then what happens?

Click to expand...

then maybe his son will inherit his share and take control of United....

M & M should be banished from earth.how on earth did we get into this mess that the future of our beloved club hangs on the decision whether M & M sells to glazer,Man utd shares should be owned by united fans and no one else,all those greedy fellas can buy into arsenal.

Monday October 11, 10:01 PM
Schwarzer flattered to be linked to Manchester United
Australian captain and goalkeeper Mark Schwarzer said he was flattered to be linked with a move to English Premier League football giants Manchester United.

But Schwarzer said any talk of a transfer from his current club Middlesbrough when the premiership transfer window opens in January would be speculation.

Schwarzer is out of contract at the season's end and has yet to sign a new contract, which could mean he will leave Middlesbrough for nothing under the Bosman free transfer rule.

Middlesbrough could instead choose to cash in on 32-year-old Schwarzer -- valued at about five million Australian dollars (3.6 million US) -- if he does not sign a new deal by January and sell him while he remains under contract.

"It's all speculation -- when you have eight months to go on your contract, it's always going to lead to speculation," Schwarzer said here on Monday ahead of Australia's Oceania Nations Cup final match with the Solomon Islands on Tuesday.

"It's very flattering (to be linked with Manchester United).

"I've been around the premiership for a while now and had some good performances so that tends to get your name put around a bit.

"But in all honesty, I'm not sure what's going to happen."

There is speculation that Manchester United may offer England defender Phil Neville to Middlesbrough in a part-exchange deal to land Schwarzer.

Van Der Sar is out of contract at the end of the year aswell, he'd be a better deal