How many people want to buy out the Glazers?!?! Yes, Michael Knighton, Sir Jim Ratcliffe, and even Elon Musk have all come out this week and said they want to buy Manchester United from the Glazer family.
This has been the craziest time in Manchester United history since I’ve been a fan (which was in 2009), and it has definitely been the most toxic one too. Everywhere you turn you see new reports about how players are unhappy, Richard Arnold and John Murdough, are flying to X place to sign X player, Erik ten Hag is furious with the board, Cristiano Ronaldo wants out, and United have missed out on yet another transfer target.
Everything and everyone have gone insane.
And now the craziness has been turned up to a whole new level as three multi-millionaires and billionaires, Michael Knighton, Sir Jim Ratcliffe, and Elon Musk, have all come out in some form or another to express their interest to buying this mess of a football club.
Alright, let me get the less serious ownership bid out of the way first. No, sadly, Elon Musk isn’t going to buy Manchester United. Even though he put out a tweet saying, “I’m going to buy Manchester United”, there’s no way he’s actually going to buy the club. Right? Now, don’t get me wrong, I’d be thrilled if Elon became the new Manchester United owner, but I don’t see why he would want to do it given how his Twitter buyout fell through.
Yes, buying United would be a much simpler deal, but with a much simpler reward. Twitter could have earned Elon billions, while United would hard pressed to make $750M a season. It just doesn’t make sense for him to buy the club, unless he’s a fan, as a business revenue.
Anyway, the real joke bid is from Michael Knighton. Knighton, a real estate mogul, has already tried buying Man United before (back in the late 1980’s), though his bid failed, and he went on to buy (and then ruin) Carlise United. His estimated net worth is around €15M, which is a hefty sum (and far more than I have). Though, when you see that United’s current net worth is $4.2B, the math of him outright buying the club from the Glazers just doesn’t add up.
He’s not going to be the owner of the club.
Okay, and this leads me to Sir Jim Ratcliffe, the most likely potential buyer of the football club. Unlike Musk and Knighton, he has the motivation and more than enough money to buy the club from the Glazer family. With him being a founder of the mega-chemical conglomerate Ineos Group, his estimated net worth is over $13B.
Yeah, that’s a lot of money.
And with his involvement as one of the bidders for Chelsea a few months ago, I’d say he’s shown that he has an invested interest in owning an English football club.
We’ll have to wait and see if the Glazers wish to sell Manchester United and who they decided to sell it to. Whoever the owner of Man United will be, I just hope they restore this club to its past glory and take it out of this depravity it has been sucked into.
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