Wishing for a german structure where the club is owned by its supporters is like believing in Santa Claus. Name me one club worth over 1b euros in any sports who has gone from being owned by investors to being owned by the fans/supporters. It have not happened and will most likely never happen. A club needs to be organized that way from its creation or while its a lot smaller. So we have to compare apples to apples.
Never understood the hate for the Glazers since 2013
- Thread starter 432JuanMata
- Start date
Well I was one of the many PLC shareholders and was not happy when we were forced to sell by the Glazers so never been happy about their takeover - thankfully the worst case scenarios of rising debts and bankruptcy have never happened and plenty of money has been invested in the squad so I suppose it could be worse
Still there is a lot wrong in the boardroom nowadays - bad decisions on managers, transfers,. contracts etc and a lot of blame is definitely on the Glazers (and Woodward) as they have taken a bigger role on day to day running of the club since Fergie/Gill left.
Although I'm sure the Glazers did know how difficult it would be post Fergie, ultimately he was impossible to replace.
They do seem to have got lucky with Ole though, who is doing great work to improve the structure of the club on and off the field.
I'd like him to show that same passion for us but I wouldn't believe it for a second.
It feels like if we win something big, it's in spite of the Glazers not because of them.
Tweet
— Twitter API (@user) date
What a messed up situation where a team owner picks up the trophy. I know it’s the way here but it’s still bizarre.
Ridiculous thread. Ignore.
I don't care as long as the Club is professionally managed with adequate funding on new players.
I said professionally managed, just compared with Barca and RM, who spent 60% revenue on wages, while we are at 50%. Funding has been allocated on new players, it was the quality, and buying all the WRONG players, that trouble us.
I am not a hypocrite stating that we don't need Saudi blood money but on the other hand, welcome sugar daddy.
Because they're taking money out of the club & have saddled us with a huge debt, unnecessarily.
Because their poor running of the club didn't have any succession plan for SAF, and we've seen what trouble that caused (from Moyes and on onward a sh*tshow that still rumbles on)
That amount of money spent (which probably doesn't include paying off poor management appointments) is a sign of how bad the running of the club has been!
Arguably, SAF got us through those first few Glazer years as nothing needed to change (much). However, I believe the stagnation set in during that time. Not least as when he left, our squad was bloated and overdue change.
Just a bit more investment during those last couple of SAF years, the "there's no value in the market" years, might have made that marginal difference to get us into one more SAF CL Final. We were unlucky to get knocked out.
As has been pointed out, we're "lucky" club in that we earn our money and are one of the top earners. This positions us safely in respect of FFP, unlike say, City, who have had to break the rules to achieve success. So money spent has been our money. Nothing to do with the Glazers. They take money out, not put it in. Honestly, the more you look at leveraged buyouts, the more disgusting it is.
Do they get off scot free, just able to sit back & "own" the club? No, at some point, e.g. Woodward's failures, the buck has to stop somewhere & ultimately it's the owners.
Yes, I have an old friend who found himself in the same position; he sent back his season ticket, and so far as I know he has never set foot inside OT since; the last time I spoke to him he vowed he would never go back whilst these 'Yanks' are in charge... suffice to say he took it very hard!
Out of interest what do think the Glazers will do about OT, its becoming very antiquated? If they moved to another site we would lose the "Theatre of Dreams' and it would cost 'squillions' to build a modern/state of the art and similar capacity stadium?
Is this the point at which the Glazers 'bow out' do you think?
No chance they would make that investment
Two reasons to dislike the Glazers.
Firstly the money. This tweet sums it up (see lower down the thread)
In the last 5 years they took £200M out of the club. In the last 10 years they've taken well over £800M of cash from the club, either to themselves or to pay off the debt they put on us. Ask yourself where we could be with that money going into the first team or the stadium instead.
Secondly, the running of the team. We've had three poor managerial appointments and tens of millions wasted on dreadful recruitment and terrible contract decisions. It takes a special kind of incompetence to continually outspend nearly all your opponents on both salaries and transfer fees, and still finish on average 23 points behind the title winners over 7 straight seasons. Even if you take the money out of it, they've shown themselves to be completely incapable of running the club well.
Firstly the money. This tweet sums it up (see lower down the thread)
Tweet
— Twitter API (@user) date
In the last 5 years they took £200M out of the club. In the last 10 years they've taken well over £800M of cash from the club, either to themselves or to pay off the debt they put on us. Ask yourself where we could be with that money going into the first team or the stadium instead.
Secondly, the running of the team. We've had three poor managerial appointments and tens of millions wasted on dreadful recruitment and terrible contract decisions. It takes a special kind of incompetence to continually outspend nearly all your opponents on both salaries and transfer fees, and still finish on average 23 points behind the title winners over 7 straight seasons. Even if you take the money out of it, they've shown themselves to be completely incapable of running the club well.
They bought the club with a loan and used the clubs profits to pay of that loan. It's obviously set us back.
If you don't understand the hate for the Glazers then you haven't been paying attention and can barely call yourself a United fan.
They have taken over £1 billion out of the club. Imagine the players that could've been invested in with that. Would we have had 7 years in the wilderness is they had put the clubs money spent on their personal debt on players instead? Or upgrading Old Trafford even.
We are doing well in this moment despite the Glazers, not because of them.
On that note,I am out, I won't be held responsible for bumping a ridiculous OP anymore.
They have taken over £1 billion out of the club. Imagine the players that could've been invested in with that. Would we have had 7 years in the wilderness is they had put the clubs money spent on their personal debt on players instead? Or upgrading Old Trafford even.
We are doing well in this moment despite the Glazers, not because of them.
On that note,I am out, I won't be held responsible for bumping a ridiculous OP anymore.
Very few will pay that much money for a club without leverage; I think people will have to accept this. A lot of people don't know this, but leveraged buyouts are the norm for professionals that deal with selling and buying shares. They do not usually buy the shares purely with their own money; it is just not done.
What the Glazer's did when they bought the club is normal in terms of purchasing shares. There isn't anything wrong here no matter what people say; it is just normal practice.
I don't really know what people are expecting regarding dividends. Are you expecting an owner to plough in £750m with no leverage and no returns? Are you expecting an investor now to buy the club for £2bn with no leverage and expecting no returns? That is unrealistic, especially with how much the club is worth now.
In the end, we have spent over £1.1bn in terms of transfers since 2013. That is plenty. People are saying we haven't spent on the training facilities, but what will this do? Do other clubs have magical facilities that make their teams better? No, they won't be any better; they will just be newer and may look more trendy. In the end, a gym is a gym and a football pitch is a football pitch.
I don't see much to complain about really.
What the Glazer's did when they bought the club is normal in terms of purchasing shares. There isn't anything wrong here no matter what people say; it is just normal practice.
I don't really know what people are expecting regarding dividends. Are you expecting an owner to plough in £750m with no leverage and no returns? Are you expecting an investor now to buy the club for £2bn with no leverage and expecting no returns? That is unrealistic, especially with how much the club is worth now.
In the end, we have spent over £1.1bn in terms of transfers since 2013. That is plenty. People are saying we haven't spent on the training facilities, but what will this do? Do other clubs have magical facilities that make their teams better? No, they won't be any better; they will just be newer and may look more trendy. In the end, a gym is a gym and a football pitch is a football pitch.
I don't see much to complain about really.
Stop patronising fans with this nonsense, anyone on here is fully aware of it.
Don't compare United to a normal business because its not, just clueless.
The Glazers could have slowed the rise of city if they actually invested in the squad when we sold Ronaldo. Instead we saw the likes of Silva, Yaya and Aguero go to city while Sir Alex complained there was no value in the market. The rest of the points have all been repeated. There has been been very little benefit of the Glazers ownership.
Whether you like it or not, it is a business. Manutd is a limited company that was listed publicly. You cannot call something clueless just because you can't accept facts. That is just the way it is; you just have to accept it.
What makes it different to any other entertainment business? It makes money from viewers. How is that different to watching films, shows, festivals etc. The answer is that people think football clubs should be treated as special when they are not.
Its not about whether a leveraged buyout is normal or not, that's a red herring. The real question is, are we better or worse off, as a result that buyout?
Getting jammy about interest rates crashing due to a recession is not great planning. The Glazers were very, very lucky that happened otherwise the debt would have been seriously unmanageable. Why else did we not invest the Ronaldo money? That was the start of the rot.
I can't really say it is bad. Our ability to spend hasn't really been hampered (evidenced by the £1.1bn spend) and our revenue has grown massively. You could argue Woodward could have been replaced, but we don't know whether the replacement would have been better or worse. Even then, it could be the transfer committee that was to blame for the poor transfers, which seems to have undergone some changes. Scouting has had some changes at least.
You cannot prove it is better either because you don't know what would have happened with different owners. We may have replicated the revenue growth or perhaps Manutd wouldn't have taken advantage of marketing as well Manutd have. You may have had an owner that ploughed money into the club or you may have had an owner that allows far less expenditure.
Outside of financials, you could have had owners that pushed for sacking managers with little time given. This is something a lot of fans on here don't like, but the Glazers have given managers time.
In the end, they are pretty hands-off owners. They don't really meddle in the running of the club; they don't sack managers with little time given; they have been pretty flexible in how the club is run. I wouldn't say that is bad, to be honest.
How many other footballs clubs owners have cost them over £1bn for the privilege of being owned by them? I can tell you the answer - 0.
You're applying a business practice to a football club - and yes, a football club is a business and they were well within their rights to take advantage of that but while this is normal in the business world it is not a norm in the football world.
I said this on an earlier page and it is just as relevant to your points:
"Ask yourself what kind of position would the football club be in now if it had had the £1bn that being owned by them has cost us? We wouldn't have had to let the squad decay between 09-13, so what difference would that have made to on-field success post-Fergie? How would the stadium look now - considering it was in almost constant renovations to remain the biggest & best stadium in the country until barely a penny was spent on it in the first 12/13 years of Glazer ownership. How different would the various youth levels of the club have look? Again an area that was constantly changing to find the best local talent ahead of City/Liverpool etc that was largely ignored under Glazer ownership until just a couple of years ago."
I never gave up my ST and didnt agree with the whole FCUM thing either - I was worried when the Glazers first came in but I think some fans over reacted TBH but each to their own, like I said, the worst case scenarios of unmanageable debts and bankruptcy never came came to pass.
I doubt the Glazers would consider building a new stadium - there is simply no value in doing so and the only reason other clubs do it is to get more capacity, which we probably dont need and could extend the South Stand if needed anyway. OT needs some improvement works but its not falling apart as some might suggest and there is a lot of value in the history.
I thought the Glazers might try and sell when Fergie left, they did sell some of the club and you can buy shares again but only a small amount - looks like they are here for the long term or it needs some sovereign wealth fund to offer something they cant refuse but thats unlikely
We spent £1.1bn. It could have been £2bn. Personally I think that would have been preferable.
Arguing that I cant prove a hypothetical is another red herring. Look at every other comparable club in Europe and see out how much worse we are than them. We spend comparable amounts to City, Bayern, Barca, Real, Liverpool & PSG each year. But while they've all been divvying up league titles & the Champions League among themselves every season, we struggle to make the top 4 most seasons.
So yes, in some other reality we could have even worse owners. But in this reality, their performance has been incredibly poor.
You're not crazy and I actually agree with you. It will always be an unpopular opinion for some reason though even if objectively we are better at many things off the pitch with them than we were during the plc years and debt is quite commonplace when business are taken over. Even fergie seems to agree when he has no reason to which oddly makes the doubting Thomases double down on blaming the glazers for everything they deem to be wrong at the club.
Yes that's pretty much my take on things as well.
They could do some improvements internally, improve facilities, some seating changes and perhaps a big screen or two, but the real problems are external, especially access/egress to the main car parks, only one bridge over the canal to the main Car Parks that has to take both vehicles and pedestrians causes havoc at the end of the match. There is certainly value in history and ours is a rich history with tremendous highs and lows, long may it continue at the 'theatre of dreams'.
Can you say Real Madrid and Barcelona's spending has been good recently, though? Their transfer business has been abysmal over the last four/five seasons. They may still be one of the top teams in their league, but that is due to the league having far less competitiveness on a financial basis. Most teams cannot take advantage of them being a lot weaker, aside from Atletico Madrid.
Real Madrid and Barcelona have been living off signings made almost 5 to 10 seasons ago, some even longer than that. I would not say the way they have been run has been good at all in the present. Barcelona has had massive financial difficulties, as well. I am not sure I would want Manutd to be run like either club at this moment.
PSG and Bayern are too financially dominant in their leagues not to be top. It is almost criminal whenever they fail to get first place.
Depends on how you spent that extra £1bn. I mean you can quite clearly see that Barcelona's, Real Madrid's, and our massive expenditure has largely been ineffectual. It is far from a guaranteed success, and to up the spend by that much you would have to have some hefty figures in there.
Real Madrid is only just updating their stadium, which is going to cost €800m. There is also the potential for it to cost more with how these things go. So, if we chose to update the stadium, likely most of that £1bn would have potentially been used up for stadium renovations. But would that have brought us more success? No. The likelihood is that people will be complaining as to why we are spending so much money on a stadium when we could sign more players, anyway. So, a lot of people wouldn't be happy with this.
The perception of the owners probably wouldn't be all that much better.
I’m not sure they do. German football is held up as something wonderful but in reality is ultra uncompetitive and sterile and impossible for clubs to match or even compete with Bayern
People cite ticket prices but effectively by the big sides having low ticket prices it removes economic leverage from others. If Bayern are charging fiver it severely limits the economic viability of smaller clubs to charge more. But Bayern don’t need to charge more as they have ginormous sponsorship deals. Which is why it’s mainland Europe’s version of the SPL
German football benefits a lot from the assumption that it must be better because it’s German
for me its about time Uefa, Fifa, Premiership stop this farce of letting teams keep going with these massive amounts of debt, there is more then enough money around football, even still with the current time that no club should be running with Debt, I no it ain't just United but majority of the big clubs in Europe run with debt.
Real Madrid have neglected their stadium hence they are completely renovating it. In the 20 years prior to the takeover Old Trafford was continually being renovated, bit by bit on a continual loop. As such it would not have been completely untouched for 15 years and as a result we would likely have a larger, if not then certainly a more modern inside the concourses etc, Old Trafford already. And it certainly wouldn't have cost €800m to continue the expansion plan that was in place.
You are almost entirely missing the point. We largely missed out on the expenditure when it was an almost guaranteed success, and we got away with it mostly because we were ran by a genius. Between 2009-13 our squad was badly neglected because the money simply was not there to spend. This was despite us winning the Champions League in 08 and reaching finals in 09 and 11, winning the league in 09, 11 and 13, selling Ronaldo for what was a world record fee at the time etc, yet we barely spent. This was in an era where £400m took City from the bottom half to champions in 5 years. The squad in 13, while still a great team in itself, had been squeezed to breaking point by the time SAF retired with its most critical players almost at the end of their careers. If we'd had the money to spend, no way would the manager following Ferguson inherited such an aging squad as that was not his way at all.
For all this talk of our "massive expenditure" since SAF retired, between 09-19, Chelsea and City both spent more than United, even Liverpool weren't far behind. Now obviously we have underachieved for that spend but ultimately since SAF retired we have had no footballing plan at the club until now. We've brought in a manager, spent big backing him, sacked him & rinse repeat. It appears they may finally waking up to the fact that a proper footballing vision is not only the way to bring success but also the way to continue that success without having to spend a fortune every couple of years rebooting the cycle.
But as for you, making up theoretical situations to defend the parasites that have literally cost the football club over a billion pounds, I can only presume you're a very bad WUM.
Real Madrid & Barcelona have won 5 of the last 7 Champions Leagues. We've only won 2 knockout matches in the last 7 years. That really doesn't stand up to any sort of comparison. I can't imagine why you're defending that kind of long term performance.
But they don't look like they are going to win one again for a long time. Barcelona has €1.1bn of debt with their ageing team hitting the end of their careers. They are now desperately scampering for young players to replace the likes of Busquets etc. that have hung around the club. This is not good management; there has been no succession plan to their past team and it could hit them hard for a while.
The only reason these two are still near the top of their table is that, aside from Atletico, there is no other club that can take advantage due to lack of finances. In the Premier League, there are many clubs that have far bigger resources. Leicester, Tottenham, Arsenal, Liverpool, City, and Chelsea are all very rich clubs and a few of them at least will take advantage of our weaknesses.
Put them in the Premier League and both clubs would be facing the same issues we have been. So, I don't think they are great examples at all.
On a wider point, the main argument against the Glazers from match going fans at least was always of a romantic one. People thought the soul of the club had gone. There was also a lot building up before, the Glazers were a symbol for others of everything wrong with modern football. High ticket prices being one of the biggest problems.
On topic of the thread, there were similar conversations being had between August 2006 and May 2009.
There has essentially been different eras since the Glazers took control.
Era 1- Essentially the 2005/2006 season. I'm not really sure about this lot. I didn't want them to takeover but what can we do really to stop them?
Era 2 - August 2006 - May 2009. The Glazers are fine, they've let Fergie get on with everything and whilst ticket prices have increased, who cares about that and the debt when we're winning everything.
Era 3 - Summer 2009 - May 2013. Ok maybe the Glazers aren't perfect. We should have spent the Ronaldo money and I'm gonna wear a green & gold scarf to show I'm not happy but... we're still challenging for trophies and winning a few so everything is ok really.
Era 4 - May 2013 - December 2019. God I hate the Glazers. Woodward is clueless and the club keeps appointing the wrong manager. Ole? Another cheap option. Oh what's that? Linked with Bruno Fernandes? That will never happen. Imagine them spending 50 million?
Era 5 - January 2020 onwards. Everything is fine. The Glazers have let Ole get on with it and what a signing Bruno was. They've even spent 45 million on a back up midfielder. United are back!
On topic of the thread, there were similar conversations being had between August 2006 and May 2009.
There has essentially been different eras since the Glazers took control.
Era 1- Essentially the 2005/2006 season. I'm not really sure about this lot. I didn't want them to takeover but what can we do really to stop them?
Era 2 - August 2006 - May 2009. The Glazers are fine, they've let Fergie get on with everything and whilst ticket prices have increased, who cares about that and the debt when we're winning everything.
Era 3 - Summer 2009 - May 2013. Ok maybe the Glazers aren't perfect. We should have spent the Ronaldo money and I'm gonna wear a green & gold scarf to show I'm not happy but... we're still challenging for trophies and winning a few so everything is ok really.
Era 4 - May 2013 - December 2019. God I hate the Glazers. Woodward is clueless and the club keeps appointing the wrong manager. Ole? Another cheap option. Oh what's that? Linked with Bruno Fernandes? That will never happen. Imagine them spending 50 million?
Era 5 - January 2020 onwards. Everything is fine. The Glazers have let Ole get on with it and what a signing Bruno was. They've even spent 45 million on a back up midfielder. United are back!