It didn’t matter, in the end, that the buyout was secured with a loan that was secured against the club, and that the club would pay the interest. Glazer made no public remarks, but his money did the talking. The following month, he bought the club’s remaining stock. Further protesting would be futile.

We are now 20 years into the Glazer ownership. Malcolm died in 2014, but his sons Bryan, Avram and Joel took over as co-chairmen. And, if cash returns is your metric, the family’s two-decade reign has been a triumph. Turnover, which was £221 million when Malcolm bought out the racing tycoons, is now £662m. In buying the club, Glazer correctly called the rise of sporting globalization, rode the tiger of potentially ruinous loans, and gambled successfully on the club’s untapped commercial potential.

As a result, he has made billionaires of his progeny. Last year, Sir Jim Ratcliffe bought a 27% stake last year, with each Glazer sibling pocketing, on average, £125m. Ratcliffe’s purchase valued the club at £4.6 billion — a near-sixfold increase on the £790 million at which it was valued when Glazer bought it in 2005.

On the downside, United were once perennial Premier League champions but haven’t won that trophy since 2013. Since reaching the final of the Champions League, football’s top club tournament, in 2011, they have featured only intermittently in the competition and never as serious contenders. This season they have reached a further nadir: 15th in the Premier League, three-quarters of the way down a league they used to dominate.

Were it not for those pesky league tables, the Glazers could claim this as one of the great leveraged buyouts of the century. The roots of that financial instrument whereby you purchase a company not with your own money but by borrowing on the value of the acquired asset, go back to the 1950s, but its popularity soared in the roaring Eighties. It was back in fashion again in the loose-lending 2000s, prior to the financial crash, which is precisely when the Glazers exploited United’s vulnerability.

Malcolm Glazer, famously, publicly uttered a mere 39 words about his ownership of that cultural institution, and only when he was doorstepped by a reporter. McManus, one of the two horseracing tycoons beaten to the club’s ownership, was a little more voluble.

“Why are you so interested?” Jim O’Neill, then a United board member and Goldman Sachs man, asked McManus.

“It’s just so cash-rich with no debt! It’s unbelievable!” replied McManus.

More from this author

Newcastle's poisoned chalice

By Rob Draper

To run a publicly-owned company as though it were a sensible social enterprise was like trailing a bloodied corpse behind your yacht in the Gulf of Mexico. It was shark bait.

O’Neill tried to persuade the United board to launch their own leveraged buyout, just with a different end purpose but in vain because the Glazers had a head start.

The real asset for them was not the club’s bricks-and-mortar. Even the combined powers of the club’s legendary manager, Sir Alex Ferguson, and his charges, such as Wayne Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo, were not what made United so desired by the Glazers. What was really valuable was the club’s fans. Some might call them stakeholders; others would regard them as willing dupes, easily monetized.

When you buy, as Glazer did, something that other people consider priceless, you are buying the ability to print money. A chronicler of the Glazer ownership, Chris Blackhurst, pointedly called his book The World’s Biggest Cash Machine. That’s a good approximation for the Glazers’ treatment of United. Since 2012, they have extracted £969m from the club in order to pay the interest on that initial loan. They have also taken £167 million in dividends.

Meanwhile, the Glazers have invested none of their own money. When the sun shone, and United’s revenues were the biggest in the league, they did not fix the roof. Now the Old Trafford roof is in such a poor state that match-goers have been drenched by cascades of rain. That £969 million could have paid for a whole new stadium.

Yet the fans will keep coming. United games might not sell out so easily, but the club remains, to millions of its fans, irreplaceable. To the Glazers, though, these fans are fungible economic units. And in this respect, the purchase of the club seems a product of its era. The mid-Noughties were a simpler period in modern age of globalization, one where markets were opening up and popular dissent was not yet made manifest at the ballot box. Those who worked in manufacturing, though, were finding that their labor could be undercut. The markets, and their countries, had deemed them replaceable.

United’s fans were to make a similar discovery. Older fans would have recalled the 1958 Munich air disaster, which claimed the lives of 23, including eight players. The fans who attended the annual memorial ceremony might quite reasonably have felt their relationship to the club to be more than transactional. So might the fans who simply supported the club through the trauma and cheered the success that followed. But they, too, were replaceable, of no more value to the Glazers than were replica shirt buyers in Malaysia. It took 16 years for a Glazer to meet a fan group, and this took place only when the political winds had changed. The owners of the top English football clubs became so greedy they attempted to join a European Super League, which gave founder clubs like United guaranteed access. The founding Super League documents made it clear they were less bothered about what they dismissively deemed “legacy fans” and much keener on “fans of the future”: by which they meant malleable, younger, less revolting global followers on social media.

Given United’s patchy record in qualifying on merit for the Champions League, the Super League might have been an elegant move, were it not for the unexpected backlash from fans and then Prime Minister Boris Johnson. The Glazers had manifestly failed to read the room, not understanding that, whatever assurances they thought they had, a populist, Brexit-empowered PM was no longer guaranteed to side with global finance.

Economic globalization was no longer seen as an unalloyed good, as President Trump’s administration has now made clear, even if he persistently comes up with the wrong answers to the right questions. Tariffs are catnip for a despairing industrial working class but factories in the USA and UK aren’t going to be reopened. And United will never have the same relationship with its supporters. Even now the Glazers have turned over the running of the club to Sir Jim Ratcliffe, it has only deepened the gulf between legacy fans and management. Season ticket concessions for pensioners and kids have been removed and ticket price increased,

The left-behind fans, the “little people” of Stretford and Salford, who cherish their club and enjoyed watching it succeed, might drown their sorrows with Boddingtons Bitter. But even then, they are no longer sharing in a local institution. In 2004, Strangeways Brewery, which produced the beer, was acquired by AB InBev, owned by Belgian families and Brazilian private equity; in 2005, the year that the Glazers bought United, the brewery was closed.

Still, somewhere in Tampa or Palm Beach, Florida, where Avram Glazer, Joel and their siblings Darcie, Kevin, Bryan and Edward have their homes, they will surely be raising a toast to their stunning success. It doesn’t matter that they and their placemen still have no idea how to run a football club. Once Sir Alex and his sidekick David Gill left, in 2013, things fell apart. The club became the epitome of what European clubs call “stupid English money.” Since 2013, without Sir Alex’s guiding hand, they have spent $1.5 billion net on player transfers, considerably more than any other Premier League club, and registered only one decent signing in that time: Bruno Fernandes.

As a result of this poor sporting performance, the club’s on-field losses have turned into financial losses. A club whose revenues were by far the largest in the Premier League now risks breaking financial sustainability rules.

Suggested reading

Why I never gave up on Manchester United

By Hanif Kureishi

All this is a far cry from the way the club was run before Malcolm Glazer arrived. The old board had to provide shareholders a return and was never loved by fans but they had invested in assets such as the stadium, built bridges with the community, and saved up financial reserves for difficult days ahead. The club was, self-consciously, a legacy business, looking to hand over a cultural institution to the next generation.

Jim O’Neill, the erstwhile board member and now Baron O’Neill of Gatley, campaigns for “profit with a purpose” in the global economy these days and invests in tech and science start-ups in the North of England. United, in contrast, have become a totem of what we could term “purposeless profit”: a cash machine rather than a community institution.

The inexorable pull of commerce has engulfed the club and hollowed it out, just as it has to so many other once-singular organizations. Thames Water customers will be familiar with this story, as will consumers of Cadbury’s chocolate, another victim of the dreaded leveraged buyout. Cadbury’s was acquired by US confectionery conglomerate Kraft in 2010, which promised not to close down the company’s Bristol factory, before promptly doing just that and moving production to Poland. The 19th-century founders of Cadbury’s were Quaker capitalists who would have intuitively understood O’Neill’s notion of “profit with a purpose”. They got rich, but they also built the village of Bournville, outside of Birmingham, to “alleviate the evils of modern cramped living conditions” so that their employees had decent homes, good education and green space in which to thrive.

In the era of globalization, those acts of corporate kindness would have put the company at a serious disadvantage. It is an age in which we have been encouraged to trade our local or national identity in exchange for rising living standards. It shouldn’t be a shock to politicians that once the trade-off failed to deliver, people hankered after old tribal loyalties in order to make more sense of life. The dislocation of capital to far-off lands means that the have-yachts can toast their profits while factory workers lose their jobs, water companies flood their customers with effluent, and loyal football supporters are treated like cash machines. That would have been anathema to the likes of Cadbury. Ungodly, even. Though you can almost hear today’s billionaires snigger at their naïveté.

It had been 70 years since that FA Cup victory in 1955, 70 years in which a once-mighty club had swapped trophies for atrophy. It was a story all the more poignant for it mirroring the simultaneous industrial decline of the city and region. And now the story had a happy ending.

This is a city whose football club is its spiritual heart. Walk out of Central Station and you will see St James’ Park, a vertiginous and imposing old stadium, towering over you. In Newcastle, the club is at the center of civic life. As Wembley basked in the glow of regional pride, one could imagine Sir Bobby Charlton, his brother Jack, his uncle Jackie Milburn as well as the likes of Sir Bobby Robson, English football legends all, looking down with pleasure. Nobody could have appreciated this victory more than Newcastle United fans. Only an extreme curmudgeon, or a Sunderland fan, would have remained unmoved.

We might never know whether the news of Newcastle’s win reached Malaz Prison, in Riyadh. Here, the fitness instructor Manahel al-Otaibi is serving 11 years, some of it in solitary confinement, for opposing male guardianship, campaigning against the hijab, and, according to her prosecutors, “going to the shops without wearing an abaya, photographing this, and publishing it on Snapchat”.

So much for the reforms promised by Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince. MBS. His close ally, Yasir al-Rumayyan, is the governor of the kingdom’s Public Investment Fund and the chairman of Newcastle United. As al-Otaibi sat in jail, al-Rumayyan lifted the League Cup.

It is an uneasy contrast, and the imprisonment of al-Otaibi is only one example of the MBS regime behaving barbarically. Take the dismemberment, in 2018, of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi: an operation approved, according to the USA’s Director of National Intelligence, by MBS. Or the 2017 “Sheikh-down”, when the nation’s billionaires and captains of industry were corralled into Riyadh’s Ritz Carlton hotel. Amid accusations of abuse and torture, they handed over their assets and paid fines to the state, now embodied by its Crown Prince, in return for their freedom.

Al-Rumayyan is the Crown Prince’s henchman in matters of sport, in which the Saudis are heavily invested. There is the LIV golf tour, viewed by critics as a hostile takeover of the sport, and there was the successful bid to host the 2034 Football World Cup. The kingdom has thrown money at the Saudi Pro League, signing expensive luminaries such as Cristiano Ronaldo, and has hosted numerous boxing world title fights and Formula 1 Grands Prix. One of MBS’ ambitions appears to be that young Saudi nationals — 60% of the population is under 30 — consume sport as a quasi-religion, it being a safer opiate than the extreme Islam that forged the nation’s most famous citizen, Osama bin Laden. Adherents of this kind of worldview might ask awkward questions about the legitimacy of the al-Saud dynasty.

Given that all this is taking place in a faraway land over which we have little influence, it is hard for football fans to know what to feel. Is the appropriate response revulsion at the sight of another British cultural institution being hawked to the highest bidder, regardless of human rights concerns, as the nation accepts its status as a post-imperial supplicant? Or should fans accept that they can’t change these circumstances and allow themselves to revel in a glorious sporting storyline?

Understandably, most Newcastle fans settle for the latter. A few, including the lifelong fan John Hird, have set up a campaign group called NUFC Fans Against Sportswashing, which campaigns for al-Otaibi and the like. The group holds vigils outside St James’ Park – vigils that are often lonely.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is playing a central role in current geo-political stakes. Last week, in the run-up to the final, Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, was meeting Mohammed bin Salman, and Saudi Arabia was hosting talks between US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the Ukraine delegation. The Saudis, in short, were brokering peace between Russia and the West. In that context, the Carabao Cup seems a tiny footnote in the kingdom’s broader project.

In keeping with this central role for Saudi, President Trump directed his first phone call after his election victory to MBS. Trump’s first foreign trip, as it was in 2017, is likely to be to Riyadh. The world genuflects at the court of MBS, including the former human rights lawyer Keir Starmer. The Prime Minister, who visited in December, has said his “No 1 mission is for economic growth and for that we need Saudi Arabia”. Indeed we do, especially in a volatile world of Trumpian tariffs and a downgraded economic forecast from the OECD.

Suggested reading

How MBS won the peace talks

By Malise Ruthven

Newcastle fans, though, have been burdened with the outsourced moral angst of a nation. Governments can sup with the Saudis with near-impunity, but football is held to a higher standard, castigated when it joins the gold rush to Riyadh. Naturally, Newcastle fans resent those questioning their joy. The country accepts Saudi money for its regeneration projects in the north of England, clean energy investments and stakes in Uber, Heathrow and Selfridges. Newcastle United happens to be the most visible target.

Newcastle City Council, controlled by Labour until a spate of resignations last November, recently met ALQST, a Saudi-focused human rights organization. But we shouldn’t expect the council to issue excoriations of the city’s new overlords. Aside from needing the votes of Newcastle United fans, the council is hoping that the Saudi state might emulate what Abu Dhabi did in east Manchester when the emirate bought Manchester City.  The area around the City of Manchester Stadium has been transformed: new housing, a health center, and sports facilities, as well as the Co-op Live Arena. The projected PIF takeover of Newcastle Airport may be the first local dividend outside of the football club.

Five years ago, when campaigners tore down the statue of slave trader and philanthropist Edward Colston in Bristol, many cheered, not least those on the Left concerned with human rights. It is easy to be clear-sighted, 300 years later, about the awful contradiction of taking money from slavers to build wonderful churches, schools and civic amenities; it is harder to turn down Saudi money now. That money might improve the lives of ordinary people and regenerate the local economy – just as Colston’s money once did in the South-West.

Though Britain can seem a mere vassal state, the relationship isn’t quite as clear-cut as it appears. In his book States of Play, Miguel Delaney quotes the human rights activist Iyad el-Baghdadi on MBS. “He wants to be loved. And he wants his image [as a reformer] back.”  Another campaigner told me: “The Saudi authorities really don’t like it when you write about human rights issues. They want to be seen as reformers.”

Therein lies the contradiction. Saudi Arabia looks to Mecca in its prayers, but for investment assets and a degree of approval, it looks to London, New York and Paris. This approval is the only leverage that remains. Resisting the lure of Saudi money is like shouting at the moon: all well and good for purists, but ineffectual. Newcastle fans, being impotent, have little option other than to enjoy their moment. But our society should ask tougher questions of the Saudis, and we should not give in to the temptation to ignore the kingdom’s manifold human rights abuses. It is that Saudi longing for approval that provides the best hope of change.

In a sober moment, after the cup final hangovers have faded, perhaps we can remind ourselves that we have been here before. Not so long ago, we embraced an exciting geopolitical and trade partner. Its leaders’ henchmen were investing in soccer clubs and transforming London’s economy. That President Putin seemed such a nice guy.