Posted by unregistered user: Geno
Dannii, you’re probably right about Fergie’s concept of value, although given that he used to set British transfer records when there was more money in the kitty, I don’t know if I’m completely convinced.
I’m absolutely not with you on “the Glazers aren’t the worst” (hope that’s not an unfair characterisation of your argument) as there seem to be plenty of rich owners who don’t interfere in team operations. Take Joe Lewis at Spurs, Peter Coates at Stoke and Eddie Davies at Bolton – don’t think Arry, Pulis or Coyle have any complaints on that score.
Take Peter Coates – he is far from the richest man in Britain, but he manages to put money INTO Stoke as opposed to taking money out. Man Utd is an absolute cashcow and we don’t need a Russian oligarch or an Arab sheik, but someone who doesn’t suck money OUT of the club would be nice.
Yeah, look, could be worse – we could be saddled with the Venkys. (Whose team beat us on the weekend
… )
On your 3rd para, I have no problem with Utd being owned by a rich businessman, as long as it’s the right rich businessman. I’m not a proponent of fan ownership for a club as big and complex at Utd…I’m a MUST member now but only until the Glazers go and assuming the next lot are better I won’t be renewing my membership.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens to RM and Barca. 18 months ago, when things were looking dicey in Europe but before it really looked like going tits up, I was reading an article in the FT where the author (think it was John Gapper) was arguing that RM’s 3 main external bank lenders (Santander, who own Abbey obviously, and 2 others who I can’t recall) were fools to lend money to RM as the loans were effectively unrecallable. His argument was that it didn’t matter what the loan contracts said, if the 3 banks called in the loans and put RM into financial strife, Generalissimo Fiorentino Perez would immediately call on any RM supporter who had a bank a/c with any of those banks to withdraw their funds immediately. RM has enough fans that if enough of them took him seriously, it would f*ck the banks.
(BTW I know King Eric tried something similar in France in 2010 with no impact whatsoever, but I would suggest there’s a couple of differences:
A. I don’t actually think King Eric’s that big in France, unlike amongst Man Utd fans; and
B. He was calling for fans to stick the cash under their mattresses – never going to happen. Perez would just get RM fans to move the money to another bank – not that hard if you’re motivated enough.)
Anyway, the point of raising this is that I wonder whether any government in Spain would have the balls to piss off RM and Barca by asking for repayment. I could see the subsidies being cut but not sure about getting the cash back – not if the ruling party wants to win the next election.