When the Glazer siblings Joel, Avram and Bryan first arrived in London as the new owners of Manchester United, on Monday June 27, 2005, one of the first journeys the trio took was to Vodafone’s headquarters in Newbury, Berkshire.

Some say that it was the first on their list – going direct from Heathrow to see the mobile giant that was at the time very nervous over its £9.5 million annual shirt-sponsorship deal with the most successful club of the Premier League era.

Vodafone had been targeted by fans’ groups furious about the £790 million Glazer takeover of United. The Glazers were to meet with Peter Bamford, the Vodafone chief executive. No one at the club was sure how the siblings were going to play it. They assumed that there would be a degree of reassuring done. Perhaps some American schmoozing of this communications giant that was far bigger than United in terms of revenue, if not profile. The United team had worn Vodafone on their shirts since the 2001-02 season. It was now synonymous with the successes of David Beckham, since departed, as well as Roy Keane, Ryan Giggs and the new stars of the team, Cristiano Ronaldo and Wayne Rooney. It was the biggest shirt-sponsorship deal in the game.

But the Glazers took a different approach. “They were offhand to Vodafone,” one source tells Telegraph Sport. “They said, ‘We are going to make the club bigger’. They were confident; actually quite arrogant.”

Vodafone would exit the deal in August, citing a clause in the contract over a change of ownership at the club. The Glazers would prove effective at turning that public relations embarrassment into a bigger commercial opportunity with a more lucrative replacement. Their handling of the club’s football operation would prove much less sure-footed. But that early meeting, with their takeover barely a month old, was the first insight for many inside the club into this awkward, shy, secretive, family that had seized power at Old Trafford.

These three middle-aged bald, bespectacled US business executives were a puzzle for the club’s leading figures. The chief executive, David Gill, was accustomed to dealing with men like his manager, Sir Alex Ferguson. In other words, forceful personalities. This was English football in 2005, where most owners, with the exception of Roman Abramovich, whose wealth spoke for itself, were still predominantly British. They were often outspoken and their own business careers could be somewhat chequered. By contrast, the Glazers fitted no obvious template. The United board had spent the last nine months fighting a takeover from a family they knew little about with a business plan they hated. The fans were in no doubt: they reviled the Glazers from the start for the leveraged takeover of a club which previously had no major long-term debt.

In February, the same three – Joel, Avram and Bryan – had come to London to present their business plan to a sceptical board. The lawyer Mark Rawlinson, then a partner at Freshfield and a takeover expert, was there that day. Rawlinson, now retired, was a lifelong United fan, whose grandfather had played for the club’s reserves. Rawlinson himself had written to Gill that year to offer the United chief executive some pro-bono opinion on the club’s vulnerabilities and had been instructed soon after. He was now at board meetings as Gill, the chairman Roy Gardner and the directors tried to determine the strategy of the family from Florida who kept buying shares.

Rawlinson had worked on major takeovers. The following year he would lead the team advising cruise line P&O in its £3.9 billion takeover by Dubai Ports World. Later, he would advise beverage giant AB InBev on its $100 billion merger with SAB Miller. By comparison, United was a tiddler and yet it generated many more headlines and featured in many more news bulletins. “Some of the FTSE100 people you meet along the way are seriously impressive,” Rawlinson recalls. “That day in February, the Glazers didn’t even present. They had bankers to do that. They were trying to convince us of their business plan, with all its borrowing, and also to persuade us to allow them to do some limited due diligence.”

At the start, he recalls some small talk and one of the United party mentioned that two years earlier the Glazers’ NFL franchise, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, had won their first ever Super Bowl. “The three of them were delighted it had been mentioned,” Rawlinson said. “They were keen to show us their Super Bowl rings which they were wearing. It was not something that a chairman of a football club would do. It was hard to know what to say.”

That artlessness in social situations would surface later at Old Trafford, when the Glazers first visited at the end of that last week in June as furious fans protested outside chanting “Die Glazer, Die”. The Glazers then, as later when they visited Manchester, would openly leave with bags and bags of merchandise run through the tills of the club shop but for which no payment was taken. They took delight in picking up the replica shirts and souvenirs – for who or what back in Florida no one was quite sure. Yet they never occupied a permanent place at Old Trafford running the day-to-day business of a club they have now owned for 20 years.

In that time the question of how much the Glazers have extracted from United is difficult to place exactly. Considering the total from the partial flotation on the New York Stock Exchange in 2012 and then the sale of 28.94 per cent to Sir Jim Ratcliffe 11 years later, it is estimated that the six Glazer siblings, heirs to the late patriarch Malcolm, have made around £1 billion. In addition, in excess of £1 billion has been spent on servicing the interest on the borrowings that have enabled them to own the club, as well as dividends, management and consultancy fees, and a small capital repayment. At the same time they have presided over the collapse of United’s pre-eminent position in the English game, the failures of the post-Ferguson era and now the 2025 tribulations of Ineos’ minority shareholding, majority influence, operation of the club.

As United have declined on the pitch and now find themselves burdened by losses and snookered by financial controls – much a result of their own incompetence – so the Glazers have got richer. Much, much richer. In 2005, the family, led by Malcolm, presided over a property portfolio of provincial US shopping malls that had been leveraged heavily in the mortgage markets that predated the 2008 financial crash. In 2005, they were not even regarded as one of the wealthiest NFL franchise-owning families. Now, with one more Super Bowl success in 2020, they can be considered wealthy. Although that is chiefly a result of the punt they took on United 20 years ago, and the extraction of capital from an asset that has grown to a market capitalisation of around £2.4 billion. On the basis of the price Ratcliffe paid for his share, it was valued at twice that.

Telegraph Sport has spoken to those who were there at the time when one of the greatest – if not the greatest – sporting entities in the world was captured by a family virtually unknown outside of Florida, or their original base in Rochester, upstate New York. Malcolm had built the Glazer family businesses on debt. His five sons and one daughter would apply that playbook on a global stage. Buying Manchester United with borrowed money and then using the club’s huge fame and success, with some commercial re-tuning of their own, to pay that debt. As an investment it has been extraordinary. For United fans, it remains the nightmare that never ends. In 2005, 16 per cent of the club was in the hands of shareholders with just a few shares – mainly fans. The Glazers’ 20-year reign began in rancour, and continues that way to this day.

For all that has happened, the New York IPO and the arrival on the scene of Ratcliffe, Britain’s richest man, it can be easy to forget the basic story has never changed. The Glazers still control the destiny of Manchester United.

United in rude health – on and off the field of play

At the end of 2004, Manchester United was a fraught place. Not though, the financial results. They were excellent: profit before tax of £58 million, £36 million cash in hand and debts of just £44 million of which around a quarter was payable on transfer fees. The club’s results for the year ended July 31 were boosted by the sale of Beckham the previous summer and the staging of the Champions League final that same year. The contract with Nike was in the second of 13 years. Vodafone had been renewed one year earlier for four years. Wages were just 45 per cent of the £169 million revenue. The chairman, Gardner, heralded the signing, which had come too late for the financial year in question, of “the most exciting young English player of the last decade”. He would not be wrong about Wayne Rooney.

Behind the scenes, United was not quite as slick a business as the report for shareholders had outlined. Nike was frustrated with the deal it had signed. One member of the United commercial staff had agreed to secondary deals that the American sportswear giant believed at the time cut across its own inventory of rights. Fujifilm had been allowed a stand in the Old Trafford megastore which was supposed to be exclusively the preserve of Nike. There had been an incident when a megastore customer had been injured by a faulty piece of equipment. The Nike executive David Daly, now a board member at Fulham Football Club, was dispatched to ensure things ran a little more smoothly.

United signed their first car manufacturer deal in 2004 – with the German Audi brand. United were the third club Audi had partnered with, after Real Madrid and Bayern Munich, and it was considered so significant to the Germans that Audi’s global CEO came to the Bentley car plant in Crewe to sign the deal in person. It was the first time that Audi’s British CEO had met his ultimate boss. The club considered Audi one of its four leading “platinum” sponsorships. All that was to change when the commercial programme was supercharged by the new Americans in control.

The club had so much cash. In March 2004 it had approved a £39 million plan to build what was known as the quadrants, the last major work to date on Old Trafford, at the northern end of the ground. It added 7,600 to the capacity, taking it to its current total of 75,600. The in-house broadcaster MUTV, which operated largely like a Soviet-style propaganda unit, was taken under exclusive ownership – United buying out the shares owned by Sky and ITV. Half of United’s online and mobile business had been sold by previous chief executive Peter Kenyon to the media company IMG which United bought back for around £6.5 million.

Spending the cash on assets or stadium improvement was considered much more preferable to the United board than facing pressure to pay shareholders dividends. United looked at other potential investments. One was the purchase of a major chain of five-a-side venues across the country. From the US, Major League Soccer suggested the club buy a franchise at a time when no one but a few hardy American investors were interested.

But there had been mistakes, too. The 2003 transfer window, that coincided with the summer of Abramovich’s Chelsea takeover, was regarded as a disaster. It would in hindsight be viewed more positively with the development of one of the five arrivals, the teenage Ronaldo, late in the window. But the rest of the signings, and the nature of the deals that would bring them to Old Trafford, were to be the subject of intense scrutiny and of particular interest to two of United’s biggest shareholders. Why was part of a £700,000 payment to an Italian agent for the transfer of the American goalkeeper Tim Howard from Major League Soccer then transferred to third parties? Why was the agency Elite Sports, co-owned by one of Ferguson’s three sons, Jason, involved directly or through associates in deals for Howard, the Brazilian Kleberson and the French winger David Bellion? Why were they involved in the sale of Jaap Stam to Lazio in 2001?

Usually, United would be powerful enough to resolve these problems, but there was immense pressure from a major shareholder. The billionaire Irish investors John Magnier and JP McManus owned 28.89 per cent of the club and they had been in a legal dispute with Ferguson that had changed the dynamic entirely. That infamous case, over the stud rights of the great racehorse Rock of Gibraltar, is worthy of its own movie. It had been settled in March 2004 with a £2.5 million tax-free payment to Ferguson from Magnier. The dispute had begun around the time of the Rock’s retirement at the end of 2002 and had reached a crescendo one year later when Ferguson instructed a Dublin barrister. A struggle had ensued, and unexpected consequences had flowed from it. Among those were the United fans invading the racecourse at Hereford when some of the Irish investors’ horses were running, all in the name of supporting Ferguson. They threatened to do the same at Cheltenham. For their part, McManus and Magnier instructed the corporate investigator Kroll to go through United’s transfer dealings.

From that they posed what became known as “the 99 questions” about the club’s business, including the involvement of Jason in the transfer dealings of the club. The letter to the United board became the biggest football story of the year when it was reported by Charles Sale in the Daily Mail in January 2004. Ferguson and his son denied any wrongdoing. “I have nothing to do with agents,” Ferguson said at the end of that month. “I never talk to agents, pick them, employ them or pay them.” He added that had been the case since the club became a plc in January 1991.

With a BBC documentary about Ferguson, Elite and Jason about to be broadcast in May 2004, United grasped the nettle and released the recommendations that flowed from their own internal investigation into the episode. It was based on a report that Rawlinson had been privately asked to undertake by Gill and from which the board established new guidelines for transfer dealings. Among them was the resolution that Elite should take on no new representation of United players. They already had 13 under contract. The club cleared themselves, Ferguson, Jason and Elite of any wrongdoing.The embarrassment for United and their manager was acute.

But already that problem was being overtaken by a more profound issue. If there was a hint at the anxiety the board felt in late 2004 it was there in the strapline across the chairman’s message in the December financial results: “Running a football club as a business”. The club was being stalked.

The board had spent much of the second half of the year trying to divine the intentions of the Glazer family. As the journalist Chris Blackhurst described in his excellent book on the Glazers’ United ownership, The World’s Biggest Cash Machine, in those desperate days of 2003 and early 2004, the United board had courted the Florida family as a bloc against the Irish. But once a peace deal was struck between Ferguson and his erstwhile friends, the concerns of Gill and Gardner turned to the motives of those they had previously considered allies.

By the time that the club prepared for an annual general meeting in November 2004, Gill and the finance director, Nick Humby, had flown to Florida in September to meet with the Glazers. Having met Malcolm, who died in 2014, and a collection of the siblings, they returned concerned. In the next few weeks, the shape of the Glazer plan began to emerge: a leveraged buyout that would borrow against the club and use the revenue generated by United to service that debt. The supporters’ groups, hostile to the Glazers already, erupted in fury. Their bankers JP Morgan, the City lawyers Allen & Overy and the communications company Brunswick were targeted. Pizza deliveries were ordered for their offices. Refuse skips mysteriously appeared outside. The veteran United director and club lawyer, the late Maurice Watkins, had his Jaguar and Audi cars covered in red paint after he sold £2.5 million worth of shares to the Glazers.

“For most of 2004, the board did not really know what the Glazers were going to do, and the Glazers themselves were very careful as to what they said,” Rawlinson says. “They knew that any suggestion they were going to bid for the whole club would bind them under the takeover rules. For the British lawyers and bankers whom they had instructed, it was carnage.”

The Glazer plan for a United takeover in late 2004 was roughly a third of equity, a third of normal borrowing from the banks secured on the asset and a third from three hedge funds in what became the first iteration of the high-interest PIK (payment in kind) loans in which interest would be rolled up to as high as 16.25 per cent. Rawlinson describes the mood among United’s board. “It was like, ‘Oh my God, the interest bill is going to be horrendous’. United had never had any leverage.” At the time he says the United board – like many major English clubs – was consumed by the shocking decline of Leeds United. Champions League semi-finalists in 2001, who had borrowed heavily against future television revenue that failed to materialise when performances declined, Leeds crashed out of the Premier League in 2004 after they were forced to sell players to meet liabilities.

“People thought then: leverage and football do not mix,” Rawlinson says. “The Glazers did not want to do a hostile takeover. They wanted the board’s recommendation to avoid being seen as the bad guys. However, if the Irish wanted to sell it would be easier for them to gain control without that recommendation.” The board rejected the proposal outright as being not in the best interests of the club because of the high levels of borrowing. The supporters were delighted. But there was a problem for the board bound by its fiduciary duty. The £3 offer the Glazers had proposed for each of those shares they did not own from the 262 million total was, the board was forced to admit in private, a good price.

Old Trafford boardroom inches towards civil war

The Glazers did not turn up for the United AGM in November 2004, but they wreaked havoc nonetheless. Attending on their behalf was Allen & Overy partner Andrew Ballheimer who, Rawlinson recalls, was accompanied by one of his burliest young solicitors. They were there to vote against every proposal the United board had tabled. They even voted against what should have been a simple item of corporate housekeeping, the re-election of three directors. That was the commercial director Andy Anson; Watkins; and the independent Philip Yea. “They wanted to vote against three directors,” Rawlinson recalls, “but they were concerned that if the chairman called for a vote with a show of hands the massed ranks of United fans could be very hostile. So I said, ‘OK, there will be no funny business’. We said we would vote privately by a poll and then they could get out by a side door.”

The Glazers had made their point, and with the Irish investors abstaining, so the names of Anson, Watkins and Yea were duly missing from the directors’ list in the next match-day programme. But there was a new name among the directors in November 2004. A man put on the board at the request of Magnier and McManus and himself something of a giant in the world of international finance. Jim O’Neill – now Baron O’Neill of Gatley – was a Goldman Sachs chief economist, one of the shrewdest readers of international currency markets, a Manchester boy and a huge United fan. Goldman had acted as a broker for the Irish acquisition of shares. The Irish felt that O’Neill would bring scrutiny to United’s dealings and he duly became chairman of the club’s audit committee. He had met the two Irish investors through another client, Joe Lewis, the Barbados-based British billionaire who controlled Tottenham Hotspur. That was until last year when his guilty plea to insider-trading charges forced Lewis, now 88, to place his share of the club’s controlling company in a family trust.

While Ferguson was initially suspicious of O’Neill for his connection with the United manager’s avowed enemies, Gill and Gardner were delighted. Their preoccupation was now fully with the Glazers. In O’Neill, they had a major corporate figure who gave them an insight into the Irish and was a potential ally in defeating the Glazer takeover. O’Neill was avowedly opposed to a leveraged takeover of United. At the end of 2004, JP Morgan and Brunswick resigned from the Glazer account. On the face of it, the board’s stubbornness and fan activism seemed to have won the day. The board knew better. The Glazers would be back.

Fan activism spooked the Irish

The question was what the Irish might do with their shareholding. In their limited discussions, and in spite of the leverage it had given them in the dispute with Ferguson, Magnier and McManus had always claimed to be long-term investors. Sometimes the United board wondered whether the Irish, genuinely wealthy men, might be prepared to wait the Glazers out and then pounce on their holding when the price of United shares collapsed. While the Glazers had no prospect of buying the Irish stake in United, they had no prospect of owning the club. But the fan activism at Hereford and the threat to racing’s marquee event, Cheltenham, seemed to have spooked even as tough a pair of businessmen as Magnier and McManus. The protest against the Irishmen, that reached into the insular, private world of horse racing, might have inadvertently sealed the decision of Magnier and McManus to sell.

When the Glazers came back to present a new takeover proposal in February, this time with the bankers Rothschild, members of the United board were once more struck by their social awkwardness. It was on this occasion that the brothers proudly brandished their Super Bowl rings. In those early days it was not clear that Joel, then 37, would take the lead. In the months that followed it became evident that he was what passed for the family’s statesman. Avram was its financial engineer. Bryan, the self-styled commercial mind. As for Edward, Kevin and sister Darcie – very little was known about them. What intelligence the board could glean from contacts in the US who had dealings with the family suggested that the Glazers were by no means among the richest clients.

Among the team the Glazers retained was JP Morgan who had merged with United’s former bankers, Cazenove, which meant they were no longer working with the club. Among the JP Morgan bankers was a 33-year-old Ed Woodward, soon to be a very powerful figure in the club.

Woodward was among those trying to persuade the board in early 2005 to back the leveraged buyout plan. As the board felt the walls closing in again, one of them suggested the possibility of “a white knight”, City parlance for a friendly rescue bid in a hostile takeover. “Surely a red knight?” O’Neill shot back. The name would stick. Five years later, O’Neill and Rawlinson would be involved in the Red Knights, the proposal to form a consortium of wealthy United fans across the world who had registered their interest and were prepared to put up the money to buy United from the Glazers. For a few days, it was the biggest story in football. But the Glazers never even acknowledged the Red Knights, let alone entertained any discussion on a price.

Back in 2005, O’Neill suggested to the board an idea that Lewis had floated when he owned Christie’s, the famous auctioneers. He had wanted to turn it into a private members club of 50 of the richest people in the US who were interested in art. Christie’s had the brand and the allure, Lewis had thought, to be owned by a small group. O’Neill suggested the same for United. The board’s position was not as helpless as it looked. If the Irish could be persuaded not to sell to the Glazers then the Glazers could not buy United. A consortium of wealthy fans would be able to use their own equity and borrow to raise funds. It would have been an arrangement not unlike the current ownership structure of Chelsea. A management buyout of sorts. At the time it was considered too ambitious by the board. Once the Glazers had control, it would be too late.

Glazers take control in summer of discontent

Quite who was the go-between for the Irish investors Magnier and McManus on one side and the Glazers on the other, no one to this day is sure. It may simply have been the Glazers’ bankers who went out in pursuit of the two Irishmen. The October 2004 meeting between the Glazers and the board, then the February meeting four months later and another Glazer proposal, on April 8, 2005, laid out variations on the core plan to leverage United aggressively. As Gardner would later tell shareholders, in a letter written from the board in July 2005, United’s directors assessed the Glazer offer as dangerous. It contained, it said “more leverage than the board considered prudent and that, as a consequence, there was likely to be significant financial strain on the business”.

By July it was purely academic. On May 12, 2005, the Irish sold their stake of 28.89 per cent to the Glazers for a profit of around £100 million. The Glazers controlled 76.2 per cent of the company and delisted the following month. Yet Gardner’s letter to shareholders explaining the board’s position on the offer rings as true now as it did then. “When a football club is under financial pressure, some of the key assets which it can sell are its players,” it said. “Such sales are likely to make playing performance worse. Too much leverage could therefore drive a downward spiral in both team and financial performance.” It noted major concerns in terms of the Glazers’ “capital structure and the business plan”. The offer of £3 a share was, the board believed, fair. But its gloomy prognosis for the future was, in the circumstances, prescient.

The Glazers had put up £272 million of their own cash, they said. Bank borrowing would total £265 million and there were the high-interest PIKs of £275 million which were not secured against the club. Although it was the board’s view that “the repayment or refinancing of these securities may put additional indirect pressure on the business”.

The first day for the Glazers at Old Trafford as United owners – Joel, Avram and Bryan – ended with them being taken out of the stadium in a police van. Others say it might have been the back of an ambulance. But either way, the Greater Manchester Police advised they had to leave incognito. They had arrived in people carriers at the back of the Stretford End and then been driven into the Munich tunnel of the South Stand. The gates had been closed across the eastern end of the tunnel which is where the supporters had gathered to shout threats at the Americans who now owned the club.

For one individual who was there, the moment that the Glazers stepped out of their car for the first time at the club they now owned felt surreal. “David Gill stepped forward to shake their hand and from the end of the tunnel you could hear the anti-Glazer abuse and the shouts of ‘Judas Gill’.” The Glazers, some of their advisers and the United executives went upstairs for a meal at what was then the club’s Platinum Lounge. Midway through it, the police advised that a nearby road had been blocked by fans with a steel girder and their departure would be delayed. It would be around 11.30pm that the Glazers finally left Old Trafford.

Among the first things the Glazers did was to promise Gill and board-level executives they would double their salaries to stay. They immediately sought out Ferguson, who was supportive from the start, no doubt relieved to see the back of the Irish. Some suspected that without Ferguson and Gill the banks might have got so anxious about their exposure on United that they could have backed out. All the directors beneath board level were given one year’s salary as a bonus. The Glazers demanded that the club immediately save £3 million from the bottom line. It did so quite easily by cutting the player pool. Previously the pool had been used to pay players for commercial work or MUTV interviews that were not covered by their contracts. The players would decide who got what for which duties and could also vote to donate payments from the pool to charity. New universal contracts, approved by the players’ union, the PFA, made those additional duties part of contractual obligation.

The players were not happy about the decision to cut another luxury: the club Prada blazer jackets and trousers with matching Prada overcoats for squad, staff and directors that were ordered from Manchester’s flagship Flannels store every year at no small cost. Instead, the club switched to Roy Robson, a cheaper menswear option.

The major commercial sale strategy embarked upon by the Glazers to drive up revenue and service the huge debt they had placed on the club had an inauspicious start. The club suspected, correctly, that Vodafone would activate the break clause which they did in August, giving United just 12 months to find a replacement. The Glazers advocated for volume when it came to selling the famous United shirt front. More than 200 companies were approached – a number that would be dwarfed by the sales operations of later years. The Glazers never wanted one option, they wanted multiple options who would be played off against one another. Jeffrey Ajluni, then the marketing director at the Glazers’ NFL franchise, was called in to advise.

United had interest from insurers AIG; the Malaysian Air Asia airline; online gambling house Mansion Bet; and LG Electronics, the Korean electronics manufacturer. All were bidding around £14-15 million annually – much more than Vodafone had paid and for much fewer rights than had previously been afforded. All of them may have thought that at some point they had the deal in the bag – that was the Glazer way. Indeed, Mansion, in April of the next year, was so indignant about its treatment it went public with what it alleged was “double dealing” by United. LG Electronics was the Glazers’ preferred choice but it pulled out. United’s sources believed LG could not risk the loss of face potentially involved in United coming second to Chelsea. The London club, who won their first Premier League title in 2005, had LG’s great domestic electronics rival Samsung on their shirts. United agreed a deal with AIG.

By the time United landed the giant Chevrolet shirt sponsor, a seven-year, £53 million annual deal which began in 2014 and immediately sparked an inquest at the US car manufacturer, their approach had become even more aggressive. Operating out of the club’s London office was the club’s chief salesman, Richard Arnold, who built the team that underpinned United’s surge in commercial revenue under the Glazers. Later chief executive, Arnold would demand his sales team target 2,000 companies on its biggest commercial deals. Each would receive a presentation wooden box with a new iPad that detailed the pitch and a United shirt with the name of the targeted company’s CEO on the back. Extra-large, just in case.

In the summer of 2005, United toured Asia and, among a series of games, played in Beijing in a stadium that was not even half-full. For the first time the club felt the fury of their new owners. The Glazers made clear that United should never play in anything less than a full stadium. The agency responsible for staging the game was told in no uncertain terms. United ended the 2005-06 season, the Glazers’ first, in second place. But they would go on to be Premier League champions three seasons in a row, and win the Champions League under Ferguson for a second time in 2008. The Glazers had Gill and Ferguson on board and the team were winning. The debts were huge and the fans remained angry – but what could they do? This elusive family had taken control at an opportune moment in the club’s history.

A closer look at the Glazer family finances

Andy Green’s United season ticket is in the Stretford End and when he is not watching United he is the head of investment at Rockpool Investments, which specialises in private equity and private debt. In 2010, after the Glazers refinanced their debt on United with a £500 million bond issue, Green decided to take a look at the finances of the family who had barely said a word to United fans since their takeover five years earlier. No simple task given how little requirement for disclosure there is made of private companies in the US. What he discovered was extraordinary.

Green went through each of the borrowings on the 64 shopping centres and malls that the Glazers owned under the auspices of the First Allied Corporation that had been established by Malcolm. By tracing which county the mortgages were registered in – a county being an administrative subdivision of a state – he could establish whether the borrowing was under a financial instrument known as a CMBS.

A CMBS – commercial mortgage-backed security – was created by bundling a number of similar mortgages and selling them to investors as a bond that offered a yield. Because of the riskier nature of the CMBS, more disclosure was required and so Green was able, painstakingly, to build an accurate picture of the Glazers’ property empire.

It was property development that was considered to be the Glazers’ expertise. NFL franchises they knew a little about, British football clubs even less – but shopping malls and office blocks in anonymous American suburbs was their core business. Green discovered that 63 of the 64 properties had CMBS mortgages on them. They had been leveraged to such a degree that after rental income the portfolio returned less than $10 million in profit before tax. Some of the shopping centres had gone bust but because of the structure of First Allied, each was parked in its own subsidiary so one failure would not collapse the entire company.

“It was a lot of digging but I got a picture of the whole portfolio and it was awful,” Green says of his days in 2010 chasing the source of the Glazers’ wealth. “Several of the shopping centres had gone bust. The Glazers had made a massive bet on the property market that wasn’t very good.”

What was important to note was that the Glazers were not developing the shopping centres – many of which were notably shabby. They were borrowing as much as they could against them in a pre-2008 world of cheap debt. Green noticed that in the months leading up to the 2005 takeover, many of the properties were re-mortgaged. The question lingers as to the source of the £272 million that the Glazers had used as equity for United. Was the only cash element of the most infamous leveraged buyout in English football itself the borrowings on a collection of out-of-town US shopping malls? The Glazers have never said. Green’s research cast the 2005 deal and the family itself in a new light.

‘When they were buying shares in United they weren’t rich’

“They are a rich family – but a rich family who live by maxing out the credit card,” Green says “They are incredibly wealthy now – it’s all worked for them but when they were buying shares in Manchester United in the early 2000s they weren’t rich. The takeover was a moment in time, a club that was undervalued and in dispute with a significant shareholder. The American economy was booming and the Glazers came up with a plan. They re-mortgaged crappy shopping centres, persuaded the banks and hedge funds to put up money and got Gill and Ferguson onside. If any one of those had not come off, maybe the whole thing would never have happened or the banks would have pulled it. For eight years Fergie managed it for them. The debt was a pain, of course, but as long as they were in the Champions League it wasn’t a problem.”

It is hard to fathom the leap those owners of a collection of US shopping malls have made to owners of one of the world’s most famous football clubs. It has given them wealth and a profile in a sport they barely knew or even now watch in person. Lest it be forgotten, Joel was for a brief period vice-chairman of the European Super League, before its disintegration. These shy men, who could barely make small-talk and deferred to their bankers, have nevertheless proved impervious to the disapproval – and downright hatred – of millions of fans, for two decades. They may say they love United, but it is clear what they love even more is owning United, and the wealth, power and prestige that flows from that. That they have made such a bad job of it, that they have played leading roles in the failed Project Big Picture and the Super League, seems to matter very little. They just plough onwards.

Joel, those who know him say, takes an age to make decisions. He will, however, stop whatever he is doing, wherever in the world, when United are playing to watch the game. Avram, who was in the running to buy one of the Hundred cricket franchises this year, but ultimately failed, is said to be just as enthusiastic about the club. His tiny bald man’s ponytail marked him out as the closest thing the preppy, buttoned-down Glazers have to a family maverick. Bryan, a source said, had a tendency in commercial negotiations to ask for a price much in excess of the one for which it had been agreed the club should pitch. In the years after the takeover, he faded from the picture and left the other two in control. Edward still attends games at Old Trafford.

Green has his own Glazer story. Sometime after 2010, he was in Mayfair, central London, near Stratton Street where United had an office for a period. He glanced across the road and saw a group of men whom he recognised with gleaming scalps and Wall Street-style overcoats. He had just bought a present for his son, a boxset of Star Wars books and with those in his hand he crossed the road to make his approach to the Glazers. “I introduced myself and they immediately said, ‘Oh Mr Green, we know who you are! You’re a smart guy!’ Americans sometimes have that disarming politeness.”

Contemplating the Glazer brothers who had cast such a shadow over his life and the lives of hundreds of thousands – millions – of United fans, Green thought about what he could reasonably say. “At the time United had broken off all contact with the fans’ groups [Green is now treasurer of the supporters’ trust] so I said to them, ‘Look you really should communicate with the fans’.” They murmured their assent. “Then one of them looked down at the books in my hand and pointed to them. In a friendly way, he said, ‘Hey, who likes Star Wars’?” Green looked down momentarily at the books. When he looked up they were already walking away, waving a farewell, slipping into a waiting car.

The Glazers have been approached for comment.

  Save story