Hmm ............
Man United's owners, who loaded the club with more than £700m in borrowings to fund their purchase, have taken £10m out of the club in "management and administration fees" and have personally borrowed a further £10m in the past year, it has emerged.
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That's our weekly wage bill a minute!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2010/jan/13/manchester-united-finances-glazer-family
http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/davidconn
To me, the fact that some businessmen can borrow a load of money, use it to buy a club, and then use the club's money to pay it off seems staggering. You would have thought Manchester United would have some way of stopping it, but I guess there wasn't.
They've massively increased ticket prices and received 80 million for Ronaldo, but they're unlikely to see much of that money on the pitch. It looks like it'll be going to a hedge fund somewhere
They're in the same situation as Liverpool - they HAVE to finish in the top four every year, and HAVE to qualify for the knockout stages of the chumpions' league just to get enough revenue in to keep income up to a level that their creditors consider appropriate. If they don't, they'll end up getting voted off the board of 'their' own club. It's a ridiculous situation. Anyone who has watched them in the last three months or so can see that they are winning games based on reputation alone. Take Rooney out of that side and they are very, very beatable - not to the same extent that the Mickeys are reliant on Gerrard and Torres, but certainly vulnerable enough to suggest that they aren't as nailed-on guaranteed a top four finish as they have been for donkeys' years. They've also looked average in Europe this season - and on some occasions downright shite.
Add to this the fact that their fans (the majority of whom are still extremely pissed off about selling out to the Glazers anyway) are disgruntled at the lack of a decent signing to replace Ronaldo, Ferguson's inability to bring anyone of any real worth through the youth system since the nineties, Scholes and Giggs coming to the end of their careers with no-one remotely capable of replacing them, the constant injuries to Ferdinand, the fact that Vidic seems to have completely fallen apart since Torres ruined his shit at Old Trafford last spring and the rumours that Ferguson won't be given a decent amount of money to sign anyone either in this window or the off-season and you have the recipe for a disaster of catastrophic proportions.
Of course, there's still the fact that Man City are the only club outside the (ahem) 'big four' who look like being able to mount a realistic challenge that lasts the whole season, the weekly Sky wankfest which seemingly guarantees that they'll get ten times as much money as everyone else from telly rights & coverage and the ridiculous revenue they generate from places where most 'supporters' can't pronounce the club's name - but even all those things are double-edged swords. Firstly, the gap between City and the 'big four' is as thin as a fag paper now - at least one of them stands a good chance of not qualifying for the Chumpions' League this season - even if it is only one, that could easily be United.
Secondly, if they do have a 'fall from grace' the telly bias (and associated uber-hype about failure) toward Newcastle dropping into the Championship will look like nothing compared to the glare United get put under if they finish outside the top four. Ferguson could easily throw his toys out the pram and walk away if he gets the blame for it.
Thirdly, No-one in Malaysia/Singapore/Korea/*<insert far-flung corner of the globe here> wants to support a team that isn't challenging for the premiership every year. Shirt sales will fall precipitously if that happens - and their major revenue stream will suffer hugely as a result
Of course - all that said it's highly unlikely to happen - but it's more realistic a possibility now than at any other time in the past 20 years - and all because of the Glazers and the greed of the OT board.
LOL. Not in the slightest. The bigger they are.......
Mind you they have got super (haha) Mikey Owen the 'bargain of the year' super striker. So all is not lost yet.
I think we should be careful what we wish for.
I dare say the (investment bankers) argument about losing the best players to other leagues will be made but will they really be such a great loss?
A more leveling playing field can only benefit a club like ours.
Let them go...or more likely they'll rein in their wage demands to something sustainable. If the Prem teams with access to Sky and CL money are running up ridiculous amount of debt then it demonstrates that the current business structure simply isn't economically viable. That's reality.
Leeds went belly-up and it didn't do a thing.
I read the other day that Chelsea have offered Joe Cole a new contract on 80k a week. Now Joe Cole is a multi millionaire, and has been injured a fair bit over the past year or so so you'd think he'd be happy to accept and continue playing for the team top of the league. Well you'd be wrong. He rejected it and apparently wants 120k a week. Greedy f*cking t0sser.
In an ideal world Chelsea will tell him to stick his demands but we all know he'll then be available on a free and someone (probably Man City) will give him the 120k a week.
Could be argued they did but only made things worse. The top clubs/PL made sure they got even more of the increased TV revenue to ensure (they thought) the same wouldn't happen to them.
Agree with you about Joe Cole. Hopefully he and the many others like him get a bit of a shock when told to do one. Man City are pretty unique at present in (seemimgly) having cash to burn. Like Chelsea in the past hopefully commonsense will prevail quickly. Not til they finish above Utd in the league though :-)
Where the hell do you get that figure from?
47k a minute in interest?
That is 2,820,000 an hour in interest.
Or 67,680,000.00 interest per day.
Can you please tell us your source.
Debt piling up
Joe Cole is a disgrace to football. He has consistently flattered to deceive after being hyped to oblivion in his younger days. He has creamed an absolute fortune off his inflated Chelsea contract and spent most of the time injured or below par (Remember Jose hooking him before the half hour mark at Craven Cottage not so long ago?).
Out of respect to the many true chelsea fans that there still are (believe it or not) he should be asking for reduced terms or a bonus-structured salary after his recent prolonged absence not holding Chelsea to ransom.
Where are players with the integrity, conscience, focus and heart of the likes of Cristian Vieri, Cristiano Lucarelli, Paolo di Canio, Lee Cook, Redondo? All players who negotiated lower salaries, froze their salaries, rejected bonuses and club privileges etc. in light of their own injury problems or the crises that blighted their own clubs.
Hopefully he f***s off somewhere else and flops, greedy barsteward.
The deal means the Premier League club will be able to pay off nearly all their outstanding debts of £509m.
They will face an annual interest bill of £45m a year on the bonds.
The sale comes after figures showed debts at the club's parent firm, Red Football Joint Venture, rose to £716.5m ($1.17bn) in the year to June 2009.
Pounds and dollars
The bond was sold in two tranches, one of £250m with a coupon rate - or interest rate - to bond holders of 8.75%, and another tranche of $425m with a coupon rate of 8.375%.
However, unlike the debt at present secured against the club, the seven-year bonds will not mature until 1 February 2017.
The annual interest bill on the bonds is close to the £41.2m in interest paid in the last financial year.
But by converting the money owed to banks into a bond, it means the club will be free of the potentially strict financial conditions imposed by lenders.
On Thursday, it was confirmed that the club had signed a three-year sponsorship deal with Turkish Airlines to take over as the club's official carrier.
At the very least you'd want to be breaking even before playing sales, with any player sales funding player purchases. In Man Utd's situation you'd want to be in profit as they need to spend big in the summer just to keep their squad at it's current level (Giggs and Scholes are retiring, they clearly need to improve their defense, and they probably need a goal scoring and a dominant midfielder).
I can't see what this bond issue has done apart from delay the inevitable implosion, unless they can find new buyers, or investment (i.e. real cash, not a variety of debts)
This sounds the same logic as Chelsea running the club on 'prudent grounds' to make a profit in 2010 by Peter Kenyon, Non-Executive Director:in a press conference a couple of years ago......
Ridiculous
Now that would not be a bad thing. (as long as they survive etc etc, back to the real fans etc etc)
Sympathy can be argued for the "genuine" fans, but the majority are there because they jumped on the commercial/success bandwagon. They weren't protesting when Man u first went PLC and loads of money rolled in so little right to moan now that someone is taking advantage of it. If they want to make a point then stop going to games and spending fortunes on merchandise, Man u are a financial institution so the only thing that will effect them is finances. But the fans wont do that, they feel wearing a Norwich scarf will have the same effect.
Man u fans (and the other trendy clubs) are also a big reason why football is in the state it's in for us smaller clubs and they obviously couldn't care less about that, so why should i care about them.
That said, a few people on here convincingly argued that we should want Palace to survive because if they died, it'd put pressure on us to pay back our loans immediately. If Man Utd went into administration, never mind going bust, that could obliterate several clubs in the process - clubs in debt would be the worst affected, and clubs in the lower tiers would be the most likely to collapse.