Monday, January 4, 2010

More Trouble for Glazers

A day after its football team finished off a 3-13 season, the Glazer family is facing mounting pressure from the other side of the Atlantic to sell its soccer team.

The Sunday Express in London says a fan group called MUST (the Manchester United Supporters' Trust) is pressuring the Glazers to sell the wildly popular soccer team. The paper reports the family was considering selling up to 600 million pounds ($973 million) of bonds to get its debt under control.

"The Glazers have taken us from being a club who were the richest in the world to the most indebted," said Duncan Drasdo, the CEO of MUST. "This is surely the time for the Glazers to exit and make way for a new investor interested in working with the supporters to build a stronger football club and business together."

The family purchased Manchester United in 2005 for approximately $1.3 billion, but most of that sum was borrowed money. Back in October, Dan Sileo suggested the Glazers - like so many homeowners who bought homes in 2005 - found themselves stretched too thin when the economy collapsed and they couldn't refinance their debt. The Glazers violently refuted parts of Sileo's story.

But the Express says the Glazers paid $112 million in debt alone last year, preactically negating the soccer team's $117 million operating profit. It's also not the first published report of the family's financial problems, as they sold their $24 million Palm Beach County home in December.

For more, continue reading here.

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