By Nick Toms
Those of you who really know me will know that one of the great passions of my life has been Manchester United. I’ve supported them for around 55 years. I’ve watched them in the old First Division, Second Division and during the Premier League era. For a while I had a season ticket at Old Trafford.
My Dad’s family is from Salford and we had a family connection to the club as my great uncle played for them – Billy Toms. My uncle was a ground steward.
Football clubs historically were owned by local businessmen effectively as custodians for their local community. This was because UK property law does not recognise collective ownership. This began to change with the arrival of people like the Edwards family, who saw the commercial potential in football.
Louis Edwards bought Manchester United for around £30,000, by purchasing shares off the widows of former shareholders and directors for a few thousand pounds, plus a freezer of meat from his butchery business. He built up his business by selling dodgy meat to Lancashire schools, through bribing council officials. He was exposed on Panorama and died a week or so later from a heart attack in the bath.
Appointed himself chief executive
Edwards’ son, Martin, inherited the club and started to look for ways to make money out of football. He appointed himself salaried chief executive. He tried to sell the club most spectacularly to Michael Knighton who turned out not to have the £15 million asking price. He then hit upon the wheeze of public company status and sold shares in tranches.
He nearly sold out to BSkyB and Murdoch. I helped represent the Independent Manchester Utd Supporters Association at the Competition Commission, which blocked their bid. However, disaster was round the corner with Ferguson falling out with major Irish shareholders over a race-horse and they sold out to the Glazers. The Glazers then bought the club outright, including my £20-worth of shares which I had to sell under UK company law. MU eventually made Edwards a very, very, rich man.
The Glazers didn’t have the money – a familiar story – but the weak FA allowed them to buy the club by borrowing, a hugely leveraged buyout. They then transferred their loans at exorbitant rates of interest to the club and the fans have been paying the vast amounts of interest ever since.
A club preyed upon by vultures and parasites
The interest payments amount to around £1 billion and that doesn’t take into account the ‘consultancy fees’ and dividends paid to the Glazers – millions and millions every year. Unlike other clubs, MU have never had a rich benefactor. Instead, they have been preyed upon by vultures and parasites like the Edwards and the Glazers.
It was perhaps inevitable that the Glazers would lead the charge into the Super League. They don’t care about our national sport and relegation is not good for the business model. The FA and Premier League are to blame as they allowed people like the Glazers to buy up our sporting institutions.
This is profoundly sad and distressing. If this goes through, I will stop supporting Manchester United. That may not mean much to you, but MU are one of the great loves of my life. I used to cry when they lost when back in the 1970s. I am crying for the club now as it is destroyed by greed.
I can think of nothing too bad for the Glazers, their hireling Woodward, and their compatriots at the other clubs. They are destroying the dreams of our children. They are destroying my dreams. They are bastards pure and simple.
[note: the new European Super League is intended to have twenty clubs, with the fifteen rich founding clubs as permanent members, always in the League, whatever their standard of play in any particular season. Only the remaining five places will be available to other European football clubs, on ‘merit’]
