To be clear I don’t think the Glazers themselves brought the commercial nous but I do believe out of necessity we’ve been commercially managed well.
Now you make excellent points regarding relative growth or rate of growth and I was wondering when this would be brought up for debate.
Absolutely other clubs are catching up but a lot of that is down to their improvements from such poor states in short spaces of time on the commercial front. It’s a lot harder for us to find new commercial revenue streams as we have if you’ll excuse a David Brent saying “fingers in many pies”.
I’ll have a look tomorrow to find the grow rate comparison chart and if not I’ll make one but you’re absolutely correct Liverpool and City are gaining on us. But crucially we are still considerably ahead and I don’t see us falling behind. Instead what would be expected is their growth rate to decline. It’s a bit like some of the covid graphs you see
Logarithmic scales eventually the rate flattens out.
I do think they need some credit for being able to service an enormous amount of debt and still post record revenue figures year on year. This is purely from a financial management perspective.
Agree, I think the Glazers have done a great job managing the debt, although I think things could've been rather different if SAF had decided to retire earlier.
What I find incredibly frustrating at this stage is not the debt and the vast sums of money lost servicing their debt (that money is gone forever), it's the fact that the Glazers continue to take money out of the club with £20 million dividends each year. On top of that they charge themselves several million each year for consultancy work. Haven't they taken enough money already? It shows where their priorities lie.
Of course they're owners and they're free to do as they like, however, the Glazers have already made billions of profit at the clubs expense. It's just bloody annoying seeing rival clubs with ambitious owners injecting money into their clubs at a time when our owners are constantly looking at creative ways to take money out.
The Glazers are the only owners to pay themselves dividends in the league and I personally don't think they should be taking so much money out when a) the club still has vast amounts of debt that will eventually need paying, b) OT needs serious investment, c) we're underachieving on the pitch, and d) the league is more competitive that ever. For all these reasons we need all the money that we've got to remain competitive.
Vast sums of money have been leaking out the club throughout the Glazers ownership and it's about time the Glazers start showing serious investment intent, rather than pocketing the money for themselves or using the money to prop up the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.