Archives for January 2010

Manchester United fans, I've got some bad news.

Experts have clambered all over your team's accounts, got their calculators out and decided the whole shebang - the massive debt, the not-too-distant retirement of your inspirational "CEO", the reliance on one key performer and the growing threat from rival brands at home and abroad - is just about sustainable.

So, sorry, you're stuck with the Glazers. They've gone to the well again and drawn another £504m in IOUs.

It gets worse. Those experts didn't give you an unequivocal thumbs-up. They looked at the numbers, winced like car mechanics and said 'yeah, we can fix that, but it will cost you'. And I mean you - the tangible fans at Old Trafford and the intangible fans in Bangalore and beyond.

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If fans of Portsmouth FC have not acquainted themselves with the recent history of King's Lynn FC they might want to take a crash course now. The seemingly tenuous links between the two clubs are getting painfully close and the next three weeks could decide if they make the ultimate connection.

Non-league King's Lynn became a non-club last month when Her Majesty's Revenues and Custom (HMRC) gained a winding-up order from the High Court. The taxman was tired of IOUs and wanted his unpaid PAYE, NI and VAT - £77,000 of it.

The club, with total debts of more than £200,000, couldn't pay and that was that. 130 years after their formation, the Linnets were no more. It was a cruel end for a relatively well-supported club but it was entirely avoidable.

King's Lynn had been living considerably beyond their means for years. This was compounded by a failure (not entirely their own) to upgrade their stadium. Sound familiar?

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While Sir Alex Ferguson gets on with the job of getting his players ready to face Birmingham City's challenge on Saturday (frozen turnstiles permitting), far more significant preparations are being made elsewhere in the Manchester United empire.

United's key fixtures this month will not be at St Andrew's, the City of Manchester Stadium, the Emirates or even Old Trafford, no matter what clash-of-civilizations hyperbole the footie scribes attribute to those Manchester derbies.

No, the real action will take place over breakfast at Claridge's or at a long lunch at a City institution (the London kind, not the Gallagher brothers) - somewhere private, somewhere a dozen business acquaintances can eat, drink and discuss the sale of £600m-worth debt.

The type of players who replace Giggs, Neville and Scholes, how much of the Ronaldo windfall can be reinvested, what Fergie does about the minted arrivistes at Eastlands and how he closes the skills gap to Barca, all this and more will be decided by blokes (for the most part) in suits over the next week or so. Welcome to British football in 2010.

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