This is somewhat material news, but a bit undersold for once by the media:
“[Ineos] are not, however, the first to register their interest with the New York merchant bank overseeing the sale, with groups from America, the Middle East and Asia already formally entering the process to undertake due diligence.“
A due diligence in a bigger auction like this will include a so called Vendor Due Diligence. In a VDD, the seller (vendor) commission external independent advisors to conduct a review of a company and highlight potential issues etc. The “normal” way is of course that it is the buyers’ lawyers and financial advisor who gets access to and reviews a target. The advantage with a VDD is of course if you have a bigger number of potential buyers, you can’t have them all interview management and requesting every possible type of document. It’s just too time consuming for the management of target company, it becomes a circus.
The buyer still conducts its own DD, of course. But on the basis of the report put together in the VDD and publicly available information. I would guess that more or less 90% of all relevant information for a potential buyer of Man Utd is available online. You might want to look at some sponsor deals, perhaps some minutes from Premier League owners meeting. Perhaps something relating to the stadium. What are the biggest issues? It’s probably (a) the EU initiative to ban geo blocking of broadcasting and (b) the UK initiative to govern sports. That is available. The financial reporting is state of the art. So that process don’t have to be that long.