For Manchester United, controversial ownership is nothing new. In the 1980s,
they were subject to takeover attempts by Robert Maxwell and Michael Knighton.
And, in the early 2000s, they were even a brief object of interest for Colonel Gaddafi.
But it’s an attempted takeover from the late 1990s that’s probably the most famous:
this is the story of when Rupert Murdoch almost bought Manchester United.
Long before the Glazer family, and before most Manchester United fans had heard the term
‘leveraged buy-out’, their club was owned by the Edwards family.
Louis Edwards had purchased his share-holding and becoming a club director the day after the
Munich Air Disaster. He would become club chairman seven years later, in 1965, and hold the position
until 1980, when he died and when his shares and role passed to his son, Martin Edwards.
The younger Edwards would remain as chief executive until 2000
and as chairman until his resignation until 2002. As Andy Mitten wrote in British GQ in 2017,
Edwards jnr “inherited a commercially unsophisticated club, with an annual turnover
of £2m, a club where he discovered that the manager negotiated Manchester United’s kit deal.”
His era created tremendous change – and not just some of the most successful seasons in Manchester
United’s history, but any club in the game’s history. And yet his tenure was complicated.
Edwards had twice tried to sell part of his shareholding in the eighties,
first to the notorious Maxwell in ’84, then to Knighton in ’89. The response to Maxwell had
been revulsion amongst the fans. And, while Knighton was a wholly different character,
the toe-curling memory of him juggling a football on the Old Trafford pitch,
while dressed in a United tracksuit, is a source of embarrassment to this day.
In 1991, Edwards floated the club on the stock exchange. As the decade wore on, and United became
incontestably the biggest club in the country, he began a pattern of highly lucrative share sales.
Among others, in 1996, the Irish Times reported that he’d made around £10m
after selling 2.23m shares. In 1997, a further sale was claimed to have raised a further £3.9m.
Context is important: Manchester United of the 1990s were not a heavy spender, at least
not in relative terms. They were constrained by a strict wage ceiling and, at the time, were unable
to compete for some of the very best players in the game. In the summer of 1996, for instance,
when Newcastle broke the world transfer record to sign Alan Shearer, United signed five players for
£10m combined and their transfer record was still the £8m spent on Andy Cole in the winter of 1994.
This was a source of tremendous frustration among supporters and, in his series of autobiographies,
Alex Ferguson does little to disguise his own irritation with his club’s board. In
both cases, that hardly served to make Edwards a universally popular figure.
The other great development in English football in the 1990s was, of course,
the rise of television. Front and centre of that movement was Rupert Murdoch,
whose News Corp owned 40% of BSkyB. Sky had used football to sell its satellite dishes in the UK,
betting successfully on the game’s popularity and underwriting the
Premier League exponential rise with an increasingly decadent broadcasting contract.
However, while the Premier League was founded on the premise that television revenue should
be shared by its member clubs, the expectation within a few years of its launch was that the
biggest clubs would eventually negotiate their own contracts. And that fear was partly driven
by the growth of team like Manchester United – and not without due cause.
Prior to the story of BSkyB’s takeover breaking in the Sunday Telegraph in September 1998,
United and BSkyB had collaborated in the creation of MUTV, the club’s in-house television channel,
and the premise for the original meeting between the two parties,
with led to the attempted takeover and took place in July of 1998,
was a conversation about pay-per-view matches in British football. United weren’t the only club who
were minded that way and they weren’t even the first to launch their own television channel,
but it was representative of a growing trend and, most observers agreed, the future.
Television companies owning shares in football companies wasn’t new, either,
and BSkyB weren’t alone in their ambition. In the years prior and in those that would follow,
Granada television – which would later become ITV – held shares in Arsenal and Liverpool. And NTL,
a now-defunct satellite provider, owned holdings in Newcastle, Middlesbrough and Aston Villa.
But United and Sky was a different matter. When it was announced that a £623m deal had been agreed,
the hostility and opposition was almost instant. Rival clubs and fans, naturally,
feared an irreversible slanting to the league’s competitive balance,
but United’s own supporters quickly mobilised and anti-Murdoch and anti-Sky t-shirts became
a fixture at United games as Autumn turned to Winter in 1998.
In an anecdote which captures how strong the mood was, in an article for FourFourTwo magazine,
Gary Parkinson describes one fan group, the Independent Manchester United
Supporters’ Association, receiving a £10,000 donation from Queen drummer Roger Taylor.
Away from the fans, the media also had their concerns, with fears over preferential access
for the Murdoch-owned titles, The Sun and The Times, and denial of access in British football.
The then-editor of The Mirror, Piers Morgan, who famously mocked up Rupert Murdoch as a
devil on his frontpage in response to takeover story, was also the architect of one of the
saga’s more absurd moments. Ahead of a news conference featuring BSkyB CEO Mark Booth,
Morgan instructed one of his journalists to quiz the American and ask him to name
Manchester United’s starting left-back. Booth floundered uncomfortably, the press auditorium
rocked with mocking laughter and, somewhere, Denis Irwin was presumably quite offended.
But the takeover had bigger problems: the British government. One of the stranger details, which was
recalled by The Athletic’s Adam Crafton in March 2020, was that United manager Alex Ferguson first
heard news of the takeover via a voicemail from Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s press-secretary
of the time. It’s strange, but somehow still true. It was especially complicated for Blair, because
his New Labour had risen to power partly through the patronage of the Murdoch-owned media titles,
and was now being pressured to intervene. And, following examination by the Office
of Fair Trade, the takeover was referred to the Monopoly & Mergers Commission for review.
Then, in March 1999, after a four-month investigation,
it was announced by Stephen Byers, Secretary of State for Trade & Industry,
that the deal was being blocked on the basis that it was anti-competition.
“It would damage the quality of British football by reinforcing the trend towards
growing inequalities between the larger richer clubs and the smaller, poorer ones,”
read the report, which Martin Edwards would later say “could not have been more damaging”.
Several Murdoch papers ran damning editorials in response.
Mark Booth, the BSkyB CEO, was also scathing of the decision.
“This is a bad ruling for British football clubs,” he responded, “(as teams) will
have to compete in Europe against clubs who are backed by successful media companies.”
“Yet he was wrong” wrote Adam Crafton in his piece for The Athletic. “English clubs
would find alternative investment in abundance, while United’s value continued to sky-rocket.”
It was a classic sliding doors moment in English football. And yet interestingly,
it also came at a point before the game could contemplate the scale of resources
that the next generation of owners would make available.
For United specifically, however, it would hardly be the last time that ownership
would be a pressing and pertinent topic.