Football: Glazer family to sell more shares in Manchester United
By Simon Collingham barrister and director of VII Law Ltd London United Kingdom
Association Football continues to dominate the sporting as well as the general news headlines around the world, living up to its general claim that it is not only the world’s most popular sport, but also its most lucrative one.
Take, for example, the recent transfer of Neymar from Barcelona to Paris St Germain for a world record transfer fee of £200 million! See GSLTR post of 8 August for details and comment.
Following closely on the heels of this mind-boggling football financial news is the reported sale by the Glazer family of around 2% of their shares in Manchester United Football Club.
The family is expected to earn around US$72.89 million (£56.04 million) when the sale of these shares on the New York Stock Exchange is completed on 15 August. The value of the shares is based on the share price of US$17.15 (£13.19) as quoted on the NYSE on 9 August.
The current sale brings the total number of shares in Manchester United, which carry only limited voting rights, sold by the Glazer family to around 20%, since they bought the Club in 2005 for US$1.34 billion (£790 million).
A nice windfall for the Glazer family, but the Club itself will not receive anything at all from the sale of the shares!
However, when it comes to net worth, the Glazers are the poor men in the wealth stakes of English Premiership football club owners. They are reputedly worth US$4.5 billion; whereas other Premier League owners, such as Roman Abramovich (Chelsea FC) and Sheik Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan (Manchester City FC), are reputedly worth US$13.6 billion (£10.47 billion) and US$31 billion (£23.84 billion) respectively!
Simon Collingham may be contacted by e-mail at ‘This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. ’
