Hello and welcome to the Libro podcast. This is episode number 38. Football is the most important of the least important things, as Sean Connery said to Nicholas Cage in The Rock. Today, I'm joined by the great tagpanger of the New York Times and my colleague at The Athletic, very much a New York Times parent company, Jack DeBrook.

Today we are going to follow on from what John, Jonathan, and Rory spoke about on Tuesday,

which was the absolute state of Manchester United, they kind of stood over the

dead body of United, drew it, a chalk outline around it, put out some yellow cones,

amused about the cause of death. But before we kind of zip up the body bag, we are going to

check for a pulse, see if it's still breathing.

And if we can revive the great match in the United.

So, Terrick, I wanted to come to you first.

I mean, seeing Inios come in, by a stake in the club, but don't take over the club.

I mean, do you have any confidence that these guys know what they're doing,

given what we've seen over the last, what, nine months? Yeah, it's very hard to have any confidence based on what we have seen. And it seems to be another one of these kind of stories of, look, this guy's been extremely successful.

He's a billionaire.

He's done all of this.

Yeah, but that's in the petrochemical sector, lads.

And this kind of is, I think, a disrespect to football, which we have seen.

Like, because they're really good at this, they can do football, because football's

easy, right? And happens over and over again. It is a specialist industry, and it should be

treated that way. And I think, again, we've seen an example of it not happening. And what you

describe there, the purchase as well. The biggest winners out of

all of this are the glazers. If you think about how they own the club, was that leverage by

hardly any of their own money to buy Manchester United. They already had this huge windfall

without even selling it to the glazier. They made their money back multiple

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