Fans could buy the club if the price is right

Football finance expert Keith Harris is working with angry Manchester United fans to try and raise enough capital to takeover the club and rid it of the Glazer family.

The Glazer’s have funnelled hundreds of millions of pounds out of the club in loans, “management fees” and interest repayments on the huge loans they took out to buy the club.

The real state of the finances was revealed a couple of weeks ago to the astonishment of many fans and it gave rise to a second wind of the anti-Glazer movement, headed by the “Green & Gold ’til the Club is Sold” started by Chatmaster of Red Issue forums.

The Manchester United Supporters Trust (MUST) have contacted Harris and together they’re working to drum up enough money so they can give the club back to the fans.

“Yes, we have been approached,” Harris told the BBC’s Football Focus. “We can lend our weight to doing something for the good of United and for the good of football – none of the takeovers that I have been involved in have involved any debt. They’ve been takeovers by people who’ve wanted to be involved for reasons other than money.”

Harris refused to name any of the potential investors, instead referring to them only as “The Red Knights’, but he feels that the time is right for a change at Old Trafford and that the investors are serious in their proposals.

“A number of people have been to see me and I’ve had long chats with them,” he said. “I know there are one or two people in senior positions in the financial services that have access to capital. We don’t know if the Glazers can be made to listen, but there is serious intent on the part of people who have support in their hearts. The time feels right.”

Harris, a United fan, is angry that the Glazer’s are damaging one of the biggest club’s in the world by addling it with huge debts and syphoning money from it to pay interest bills.

“(The Glazers) are playing with an icon of football, one of the most respected brands in the world, and it is in danger,” he said. “Seventy-five pence of every pound (fans) are spending is now going to the Glazers either for themselves or to pay debts.”

“If these rumblings become a revolution and (fans) stop going – as difficult as it is for them not to go – and the pounds stop coming in, there is real peril.”

A Glazer family spokesman told Football Focus that they have no interest in selling the club, but Harris believes they could be persuaded to change their minds if the price was right.

“It depends on the Glazers’ attitude but we’ve got to think that their businesses in America haven’t done well – nobody’s businesses in America have done well – and they’re probably highly geared to those businesses. If this is an opportunity for them to take money and go then you have to think they would listen to that.”