American Football

This week's New Yorker has a long article (not online) about Malcolm Glazer's takeover of Manchester United Football Club. It's written by the magazine's very good economics and business correspondent, John Cassidy, but we found it just, well, boring -- the perils perhaps of reading a general interest piece about something we follow closely. So rather than take issue with Cassidy, who gets all the facts right (and admits to being a Leeds Utd fan), just a few postscripts.

The mystery is why Glazer bought the team. His pattern with the NFL's Tampa Bay Buccaneers was to buy a bad team at a relatively low price and make it a good one. But MU was already riding a 15-year wave of success and hype when he bought in. Furthermore, his buy-in was facilitated because the Oirishmen holding a key 30% shareholding decided to sell to him, the timeline suggesting that they see more money in healthcare than in football. Prompting the question: what profitability angle did Glazer see that they didn't?

On the other hand, Glazer's apparently prosaic strategy for running the club has some advantages. Consider for example the case of Chelsea FC, which for now has replaced MU as the dominant English Premiership team. For the year ending in June 2005, the club lost £140m -- well over $200m. Now while owner Roman Abramovich partially views himself as having the choice of spending his money or have Pootie-Poot get it, even someone at his level of wealth notices $200m walk out the door. So simply by avoiding huge losses, Glazer might outlast some of his competitors. [Especially if Chelsea tumble out of the Champions League, facing Barcelona in the next round].

It may be in fact that Glazer's strategy is to field a talented but not super-expensive team, and hope for the occasional bit of luck that even great teams need to win championships. Even MU's historic 1998-99 season did involve several very late comebacks; had anything gone slightly astray with the heroics, the perspective on their record now would be quite different. Finally, we think the New Yorker would have gotten a livelier article by profiling the team's former captain, Roy Keane, rather than Malcolm Glazer.