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The Scoreboard team is gathering today for our fifth annual Business of Football Summit, where we’ll be discussing investing, valuations, multi-club ownership, regulation, and all the other big financial questions facing the world’s most loved sport. Among the top names joining us are Crystal Palace manager Patrick Vieira, Premier League chief executive Richard Masters, super agent Rafaela Pimenta, and Atalanta owner Stephen Pagliuca.
To mark the occasion we thought we’d treat readers to an extra midweek edition, so we could highlight our recent coverage of the biggest story in sport right now: the battle for Manchester United.
We kick-off with a look at how stock market traders have been caught off guard by the unusually quiet bidding process. Do read on — Josh Noble, sports editor
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Manchester United: a tough trade for investors
Manchester United was billed as the most sought after asset in sport. But right now, the market appears more concerned that a bidding war for the Premier League football club might fall flat.
In November, the Glazer family said they’d consider selling the club as part of a strategic review that would assess a variety of options. The New York-listed shares had been hovering around $13.
The company warned at the time that there was no guarantee of a transaction, but the share price jumped anyway, reaching a 52-week high of $27.34 on February 16.
United’s devoted fans want the Glazers out for loading the club with debt after family patriarch Malcolm led a £790mn leveraged buyout in 2005.
There are traders, too, who would prefer to see the Glazers sell. Enticed by the prospect of a competitive auction, perhaps between oil-rich Gulf states, investment firms bet that a juicy deal would happen.
But the mood around the shares has started to sour. The stock closed at $20.78 on Monday, giving the company an equity value of $3.4bn, after the FT reported that takeover bids by Qatari Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad al-Thani and British billionaire Sir Jim Ratcliffe were not high enough to convince the Glazers to sell .
No other bidders have gone public so far, worrying traders who’d thought there would be intense competition for the asset.
The big fear for fans and traders is that the Glazers decide not to sell. It’s a long way down from the top.
Highlights of our Manchester United coverage
Bid battle: Qatari Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad al-Thani and British billionaire Sir Jim Ratcliffe are the only two buyers to have gone public with their offers © FT montage/Bloomberg/Reuters
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Both Sheikh Jassim and Sir Jim Ratcliffe have been told to up their offers for Manchester United in order to convince the Glazers to sell up.
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Who is Sheikh Jassim? We profile the Qatari bidder with his sights on Manchester United.
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What is Manchester United actually worth? The FT’s Lex team pore over the numbers.
Scoreboard is written by Josh Noble, Samuel Agini and Arash Massoudi in London, Sara Germano, James Fontanella-Khan, and Anna Nicolaou in New York, with contributions from the team that produce the Due Diligence newsletter, the FT’s global network of correspondents and data visualization team
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