Bayern Munich president criticises Glazers

Originally Posted by Redjazz

Indeed they would and have done .

The performance of the commercial depatment has been very good though, and the growth in tier 2 sponsorship has been excellent. Overall growth in commercial is running at c. 14% pa throughout the Glazer period. Barcelona (commercial) run at 19% pa over the 6 year period 2004 to 2010. I have no data yet for 2011. Madrid run at 10% over the same period. Given our standing (then and now) as the premier brand in world sport, the size of our fan base, the relative performance of the clubs on the international stage over the period, I would expect the club, PLC or Glazer owned, to be producing figures in the mid teens.
The Glazer approach started out rather slowly and began to pay real dividends from 2009 onwards. This fits with the creation and expansion of a dedicated commercial department in London. Commercial staff numbers have increased form 23 in 2009 to 53 in 2011.

As for the Glazer blueprint:

Commercial Director, Richard Arnold (in 2010 and 2011):

The Glazers are "willing to explore new things. They give us freedom and investment to try different ways of doing things. That has generated the results we are now seeing."
"In some ways the strategy that has been conceived has been three years in the making,'' Arnold added. "In the last six to nine months we have really seen the results of that."
“Our approach has evolved beyond a traditional sports club’s, to being far more like that of a conventional blue-chip company. To arrive at this position we have spoken to companies with reputations as the world’s leading marketing organizations to see how they approach promotion and sales.”

The LBO model does incentivise this expansion, investment in people, etc.
In 2006, The Glazers drew up a conservative forecast for future profits; you need to show bankers that, going forward, you have the ability to meet interest payments. The target for 2011 was 108m in cash profits. the actual delivered was 110m. Performance (and hence Media income and matchday) since was much better than the conservative plan, but the costs of running a football club were much higher than expected. It required greater than expected performance on the commercial side to bring the profit figure back on track.
Of course, the PLC would have faced its own pressures to amp up its commercial performance. As a business, the club had to return shareholder value, and I am sure that David Gill would have concentrated on the high growth, high margin commercial stream to accomplish that. Internal investment would certainly not be an issue. The second driver would be growth in costs (players' salaries in particular). If the club was to remain competitive, it would need to push commercial performance as Matchday has limited upside and Media is largely determined elsewhere. If the club wanted to keep TP below market price then the need to driver commercial is even greater. It makes no business sense to assume that the plc would persist with a benign ticket pricing without having strong commercial results to compensate.

Originally Posted by Rams

Some how I don't see them leaving the club anytime soon. It just wouldn't make sense all the effort being spent at the club commercially. The one thing they surely have done right is leaving the business with the business people and the football to the football people.
I'm certainly not happy with the way they put the debt in the club but you cannot deny they have always had a long term financial plan well worked out. As far as I am aware at the moment they may have the debt, but the club is worth approx 2x the amount of debt and the club is making a healthy profit every year. Not bad in this day & age eh?!