The legacy the Glazers will leave behind at Manchester United will be ‘wholly negative’, according to Mirror Sport columnist Stan Collymore.
The family confirmed this week that United are up for sale with New York-based Raine Group, the firm which handled the sale of Chelsea from Roman Abramovich to the Todd Boehly-led consortium, have been instructed to find would-be buyers or investors.And the Glazers are understood to want around £7billion to sell the club, for which they paid £790million 17 years ago.
During their reign, United have won four Premier League titles, an FA Cup, four EFL Cups, one Champions League and one Europa League. However, all but three of those trophies came before the summer of 2013, when legendary boss Sir Alex Ferguson retired, and since that summer they have failed to finish in the top four on five occasions.
The decline has led to major frustrations amongst supporters, many of whom were already furious that the Glazers’ ownership of the club was based on the leveraging debt in the first place. And news that they were willing to relinquish control has been welcomed by the vast majority of the Old Trafford faithful.
Collymore said: “In a world where some countries and states have investment funds that run into trillions of pounds and dollars, the Glazers won’t struggle to find a buyer for Manchester United. And for £7billion-odd, one of the world’s most iconic sporting organisations would be a bit of a steal.
"There’s already talk about such as Amazon, Meta or Apple being interested as well, and for any of those companies to be able to launch one of their products at Old Trafford on a matchday, they will have got their hands on one of the smartest marketing tools ever and it will have been cheap at half the price.
“As for the Glazers’ legacy, it has been wholly negative, mostly of the Green and Gold campaign, leveraging debt and leaving one of the great on-pitch legacies, that of Sir Alex Ferguson, almost in tatters.
"The on-pitch decline has been dreadful and their ownership of United is proof positive that football clubs should only ever be bought by companies or people who won’t seek to leverage debt on the club to feather their own nest.
“The Glazers knew they could keep wracking up the debts and it would never be called in because Manchester United would always be competitive and the global fanbase would keep the tills ringing.
"And the sad reality is that if the Glazers walk out having pocketed £5bn-plus after buying the club for less than £800m, what you will see is a lot of people around the world saying, ‘Oh, I’ll buy, say, Aston Villa or Leeds United for £1bn and heap lots of debt on them but walk out when burgeoning countries come and spend silly figures to buy them from me’."
