ImagesGetty ImagesWords Jonathan Fadugba
As of May 2022 the Glazers will have held the reins of power at Old Trafford for 17 tumultuous years.
We assess the impact of their first decade in charge and why their ownership is so controversialTEN YEARS OF
THE GLAZERSGLAZERS
The story of Malcolm Glazer at Manchester
United is one laced with contradiction.
Here was an intensely private man
who fought tooth and nail to own one
of sport’s biggest, most high-profile brands.
A man with a net worth of $4.4 billion who
continued to buy his trousers for $19.95,
even taking pleasure in the fact. A man who
irrevocably altered the history of Manchester
United, reportedly without ever having set
foot in Old Trafford. But who was Malcolm
Glazer and how did he come to own one of
the biggest football clubs on Earth?
Malcolm Glazer was born in 1928 in
Rochester, New York, the son of Lithuanian
immigrants. At the age of eight he went to
work for his father’s watch parts business,
taking over and expanding the firm after his
father died when he was 15. In the 1950s,
Glazer quit Rochester’s Sampson College
after just six weeks. Fiercely driven,
his goal was clear: set about building
a business empire that would make as
much money as possible. “All gamblers
die broke” was a favourite saying of his.
After leaving college, Glazer focused
his energy on the jewellery business he’d
been running in his spare time. He began
to turn a profit, eventually expanding
his portfolio by dipping into the property
market, buying holiday homes and staticcaravans in Rochester. Other business
interests included food-service equipment,
food packaging, food supplies, marine
protein, broadcasting, healthcare, real
estate, banking, natural gas and oil
production, stocks, bonds and government
securities. He had “an eye for value”
according to business and finance bible
Forbes. Such shrewd business acumen saw
Glazer turn to sports franchise ownership
in 1995, when he paid a then-record
$192 million to buy the Tampa Bay
Buccaneers. That they’re today valued at
$1.2 b illion tells its own story. Under Glazer,
the Bucs moved into a newly built stadium,
opened a huge, state-of-the-art training
facility and in 2002 won the Super Bowl for
the first time in their history. But it wasn’t all
roses and coronations. While Glazer “turned
this joke of a franchise into one of the most
valuable commodities in sports”, as Tampa
Bay Times reporter John Romano put it, he
earned a reputation as a hard-nosed,
shadowy figure who alienated many. “He
was an outsider who never sought our love
and, subsequently, never gained our trust,”
said Romano.
The Manchester United takeover wasn’t
the only bitter struggle of Glazer’s
professional career. He fought his siblings for
12 years over the rights to his mother’sestate after she died in 1980. And within
weeks of taking over at Tampa Bay he
threatened to up sticks and move the
franchise if a new stadium wasn’t built using
taxpayers’ money. “Glazer was a
businessman, not a public servant,” Romano
notes. The stadium was paid for with public
money to the tune of $194 million.
Judging by his prior dealings, there’s every
reason to believe that the principal
motivation behind Glazer’s purchase of
United was profit.
A £790-million leveraged buyout plunged
one of football’s most profitable football
clubs into a mountain of debt. But after the
Red Devils announced a new sponsorship
deal with Adidas, Wall Street afforded the
club a market value of $3 b illion – an
incredible return on their investment should
they ever sell up. According to Glazer’s son
Joel, who acts as club co-chairman with his
brother Avram, the family have long been
football fans. “I had a room-mate in college
who was from London, and who to this day
is still my best friend,” he told MUTV after the
takeover in 2005. “Every Saturday morning
he’d be there with his little radio trying to
pick up the Tottenham games.
It was infectious, and the more I learnt
about the game over here the more
passionate I got.”Below Arsenal
fans gleefully
mock United’s
new ownersFourFourTwo.com The Story of Man Utd 95