In 2005, the Glazer family bought Manchester United with a mountain of debt and a wave of protests at their backs. Two decades later, the club’s value has multiplied, the family has taken dividends, and the asset is still standing. So was this just a lucky gamble on football’s future – or something colder and more calculated?
ELOXA • Long read
1. “You Can’t Buy a Club 100% on Debt” – Until Someone Does
One of the common claims at the time of the takeover was simple: “You can’t buy a football club with that much debt. It’s too risky.”
The logic sounded sensible. A club’s income felt tied to volatile things: league position, Champions League qualification, trophies, managers, injuries, and luck. You don’t load an unpredictable asset with predictable repayments.
The Glazers disagreed. Or more precisely: they believed that by 2005, football was no longer just football. It was becoming a predictable, contract-based media rights business – and media cashflows can carry a lot more debt than matchday ticket sales ever could.
The takeover didn’t prove that “anything can be bought 100% leveraged”. It proved something narrower and more uncomfortable: if the cashflows are stable enough, you can put a football club on the same financial diet as a private-equity portfolio company.
2. The Timing: A Ride on the Globalisation Wave
Between the mid-2000s and the early 2020s, the Premier League stopped being a domestic sporting competition with some overseas interest and turned into a global content machine:
- Overseas TV rights exploded in value.
- Smartphones and social media globalised fanbases in Asia, Africa and North America.
- Clubs became 24/7 content brands, not just weekend events.
- The Premier League collectively sold reliability: guaranteed fixtures, guaranteed stars, guaranteed narrative.
The Glazers acquired the most commercially powerful club in the league just as this transformation gathered pace. They didn’t have to build the wave. They only had to surf it.
In effect they bought, with borrowed money, the top asset in what would become the world’s fastest-growing sports entertainment property. If broadcast and sponsorship revenues rose as expected, the debt became more manageable every year.
3. The Cashflow Engine: When the Football Matters Less Than the Brand
A lot of supporters still anchor their emotional analysis in results: bad signings, failed managers, trophy droughts.
But the debt was never secured on vibes. It was secured on cashflow. And United had that:
- Record kit deals (e.g. long-term Adidas agreements).
- High-value shirt sponsorships from global brands.
- A conveyor belt of “official partners” in every imaginable category.
- One of the largest stadiums in Europe, with strong matchday revenue.
- Minimal existential risk: no realistic chance of relegation.
Even when the football deteriorated, the commercial machine kept running. Debt repayments are not emotional. As long as the commercial growth curve stayed above the cost of servicing the loans, the structure worked.
This is the uncomfortable truth: Manchester United’s ability to pay its creditors was never primarily about what happened on the pitch.
4. Drawings, Dividends and Extraction While the Asset Grew
The second part of the story is not just that the Glazers held a rising asset. It’s that they extracted value on the way up:
- Regular dividends to the family.
- Management fees and related-party costs.
- Refinancings to smooth out the debt profile.
- Partial share sales at higher valuations.
If you strip out the football language, this is a familiar pattern: use the target company’s own cashflow to both service the acquisition debt and pay the new owners.
The bet would have hurt badly if the club’s commercial revenues had flatlined or shrunk. Instead, football valuations rose across the board and Premier League broadcasting became a global fixture. The Glazers were paid while they waited for that re-rating.
5. Was It Really a “Gamble”? Yes – but the Risk Was Asymmetric
From a fan’s perspective, it looked reckless: drowning a club in debt, loading it with interest, and hoping for the best.
From a financial engineering perspective, it looked different:
- The debt sat on the club, not on the family’s personal balance sheet.
- If things went badly, the downside was largely limited to their equity stake.
- If things went well, they captured a rising, leveraged upside.
That’s classic leveraged buyout logic. The key phrase is asymmetric risk: limited downside, exaggerated upside, with someone else (in this case, the club and its future income) carrying much of the burden.
So yes, it was a gamble – but not in the way fans think. The Glazers were never betting their lives on United. They were betting United on the future growth of football.
6. Why Nobody Stopped Them
One of the clearest lessons from the takeover is not about the Glazers at all. It’s about football governance.
At the time:
- The Premier League’s owners’ and directors’ tests were weak.
- There were no hard limits on leverage for club acquisitions.
- Financial transparency requirements were minimal.
- No serious regulator asked whether loading a cultural asset with this level of debt was wise.
The Glazers did not hack a system. They simply used the system that existed. The takeover exposed how lightly regulated English football actually was once serious money arrived.
7. Could This Playbook Be Repeated Today?
Repeating the exact same move would be much harder now:
- Valuations are higher – the “cheap” phase has gone.
- Profitability and sustainability rules (FFP/PSR-style) constrain what clubs can do with their money.
- Public and political scrutiny of owners is more intense.
- Some of the easy commercial growth has already been harvested.
You can still use leverage in football. But the combination of a relatively underpriced asset, rapid globalisation, weak governance and low scrutiny that existed in 2005 is unlikely to be recreated in the same way.
8. So Did the Glazers “Win”?
On a narrow financial scorecard, yes. They acquired a club largely with borrowed money, extracted value over time, and held an asset that appreciated dramatically in a booming market.
But the more interesting conclusion isn’t about whether they were “right” or “wrong”. It’s about what their success reveals:
The Glazers didn’t just gamble on football. They correctly read that elite football was no longer a local sport with unpredictable income, but an underpriced global media rights business.
Once you accept that framing, the takeover stops looking like madness and starts looking like a straightforward private-equity trade: identify an undervalued cashflow machine, leverage it, hold it through a growth phase, and get paid along the way.
The uncomfortable part for supporters is that this logic works whether or not the football is good.
Manchester United became the proving ground for a bigger idea: once sport becomes a global media asset, the people who benefit most are those who understand debt, contracts and cashflows – not those who understand tactics and history.