Can a Football Club Be Worth £5 Billion?

Leaders with Francine Lacqua

Bloomberg

Management, Business, Careers, Entrepreneurship

4.6 • 64 Ratings

🗓️ 2 March 2023

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Manchester United bidding war has focused a lot of attention on the eye-watering prices attached to certain football clubs.

A member of the Qatari royal family and Britain’s richest man submitted offers for the English football giant. The Qataris’ opening offer—roughly £5 billion ($6 billion)—might break records. But still, it may not be enough. This week news broke that the current owners, the Glazer family, think the latest offers could be too low.

In this week’s episode of In the City, reporter David Hellier joins hosts David Merritt and Francine Lacqua for a conversation about the competition to own Manchester United. He says don’t be surprised if more bids surface, and reflects on why the race to own the team feels different from last year’s competition to own Chelsea.

We’re also joined by Dan Jones, a sports business adviser and former Global Lead Partner for Sports Business and Head of Sports Business Group at Deloitte, and Christina Philippou, principal lecturer in accounting, economics and finance at the University of Portsmouth. They discuss why buyers are so confident in their investments, whether prices will keep growing and where Wall Street banks fit in.

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Transcript

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0:54.9	now on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you listen. Hi, Francine. Hi, Dave. So, look, I know everyone's
1:02.7	talking about, it's the Northern Ireland Protocol. Brexit, I actually want to talk about football.
1:07.4	Do you? I mean, I think everybody wants to talk about football. I know there's a Windsor framework that was the news of the week, but actually it's all about United, isn't it? Yeah. Winthropal, you know, Manchester United. And, you know, it is, we're around a year, I think, since the Chelsea bidding war kicked off last year. And, and, you know, now we're all talking talking about Manchester United but the world obviously feels
1:27.6	like a very different place and the circumstances around that bid feel very different as well.
1:33.0	We've seen the share price of Manu tank in the last few days as people have thought maybe this
1:38.2	whole process is getting too frothy. The valuations are really getting out of control.
1:42.0	United really is one of the most exciting bidding wars I I think, for one of the biggest names in sports.
1:47.4	And we're trying to figure out whether this is about the money or whether it's a fan,
1:52.0	a trophy asset that people want to own, even if it's loss-making in the future.
1:56.2	Yeah, I'm just reading a great story implement from the David Rubinstein show with the Qatari Sheikh, whose son
	...

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