Manchester United
There's been a lot of consternation about Malcolm Glazer's now victorious bid for Manchester United, with much of it of the sort 'it shows football clubs shouldn't be quoted on the stock exchange'.Well yes, it probably does. Then again however the alternative financing system preferred by football fans, and the only other suggested one on the table, that vast amounts of mineral rights all across Russia are given to a few men who then spend some of it on football clubs, is not particularly edifying either. Or particularly easily to replicate across all clubs.
Football financing has always been strange. I read on holiday Jimmy Greaves' rather good biography, "Greavsie" (would you have guessed it) and aside from the generally shocking way top clubs treated their players in those days, I was also struck at the mystery of where all the money went. In the 1950s attendance at First division matches was in the order of 20m to 30m a year. If you assume a gate price of say five shillings this is an income of about 5m to 6m a year, yet the players were on a maximum wage of something like a £1000 a year. Clubs didn't have the huge staffs they do now, so total wage bills were probably considerably less than £50,000 a year for the clubs, or no more than £1m for the whole dvision. Next-to-nothing was spent on the grounds, or foreign travel, or even transfer fees.
Update: The football industry is a classic example of the good government intervention can do. For years the industry had completely failed to use the vast sums of money available to it to improve the standards of the service it provided, safe in its captured market of local monopolies. Indeed it often took the opposite course. Fearful of losing its 'amateur' link it even rejected the idea of copyrighting its fixture list used by the pools for years, at one point even attempting (in 1936) to destroy the football pools industry. Staggering on in this fashion its stadia became increasingly decrepit and squalid until sadly it took the disaster of Hillsborough for the government to finally intervene and sort things out.
posted by Matthew @ 6/13/2005 02:54:00 PM
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