Keith Harris: One Orville for Man Utd?
Looks like the Red Knights have to up their ante considerably if they want to wrest Man Utd from the Glazers.
Why would anyone give the Red Knights control over Man Utd? It would be like replacing one Barbarian at the gate with another. And do the 150,000 who form the MUST, the group supporting the Red Knights think that they will get any better transparency or reduce debt when the Glazers are ousted?
The notion of returning to Newton Heath is noble but outmoded. It’s like every election ploy. “Washington is broken, vote me in because I will fight the special interests and bring back accountability.” The reality is the world of football business has moved on to the point of no return. There is now and next.
What do the 150,000 get? This is not a one share, one vote situation like they have in Barcelona. This is 40 men investing their own money. The supporters recruited through MUST are useful foot soldiers in whipping up discontent against the Glazers and buying gold and green scarves for a club of rich and well connected men staging a coup. If you read Keith Harris’s profile, he is the quintessential insider, double dipping in the football world and the world of finance. “Incapable of running a kebab shop” is not exactly inspiring.
One would think that the fact many in the Red Knights work in the same sort of financial sphere as Goldman Sachs would be cause for pause. GS faces a plethora of investigations for securities fraud. Selling and profiting from CDOs consisting of mortgage securities in a market that GS knew was risky through their inside source in ratings companies. They bought insurance against their own products and when the housing market collapsed in a mountain of debt, they enriched themselves with billions from AIG payments.
Many in the Red Knights work for similar banking enterprises and hedge funds who deal in the unregulated derivatives market that is worth an estimated $600 trillion. A lack of transparency is essential to its success.
Lets put it this way. A hypothetical. If GS owned a football club and if derivatives included football securities and they knew that the football market was swimming in debt, they would bet against the club and make off with the payoff. Perfectly legal avarice. Transparency? Debt reduction? In New York, they would say fuggedaboutit.