Timing shows Glazer is on the ball

For better or worse, Malcolm Glazer knows a great deal about football, writes Richard Williams

The general belief that Malcolm Glazer knows nothing about football, an important weapon in his opponents' armoury, may turn out to be wide of the mark. This week he knew enough to ensure the deals that increased his holding in Manchester United from 28 to more than 70 per cent were delayed until a couple of days after the club had played their last match at Old Trafford this season. Otherwise the Premier League might have been confronted by the alarming prospect of a 15-times champion club failing to complete its home programme.

His shrewd timing means the members of Shareholders United and their fellow activists will not easily locate a meaningful target for their wrath.

The reverberations from a half-time demonstration against Chelsea, the new champions, on Tuesday night - a less decorous version of the peaceful pitch invasions by the fans of Fulham and Queens Park Rangers to avert a proposed merger in 1986 - would have been felt around the world. Marching around an empty stadium, as hundreds of United's fans did within hours of hearing the news of Glazer's gambit on Thursday, could never have the same effect. And by disrupting an FA Cup final, as some are promising to do next Saturday, they would risk incurring the disapproval of the rest of the football world without producing any significant gain.

Glazer, who is known to be averse to personal publicity, will keep his head down. Everything about his career suggests he understands the dynamics of conflict between unequal forces and is used to operating on the basis that power and money will always outlast righteous indignation. Nor, in any case, is he afraid of being disliked.

Nothing stands in his way except the anger of those who feel the true owners of a football club are its supporters. Six years ago Shareholders United orchestrated the fuss that drew attention to a previous takeover attempt, but the anti-monopoly rules that prevented Rupert Murdoch taking control then don't apply in this instance. Under the rules of free-market capitalism and public limited companies, Glazer simply cannot be stopped.

The owner of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers may have what some might consider the misfortune to resemble John McCririck, minus the fancy dress, and accounts of his business practices do nothing to enhance his charisma. But the late Louis Edwards, who made his fortune from meat packaging before Matt Busby suggested he might like to rebuild Manchester United from the wreckage of the Munich crash, was hardly to everyone's taste, either. And it was Edwards's family who, until JP McManus and John Magnier cashed in their chips this week, extracted the greatest financial benefit from the club.

Glazer's sons are likely to avoid making their presence felt until the initial furore has quietened down and United's followers have become used, if not reconciled, to the change of ownership. By the time the players return to the Carrington training centre on June 27th for pre-season training, an announcement of Alex Ferguson's decision to stay and a dramatic transfer coup funded by Glazer's promised £20 million may have changed the mood. A good start to United's domestic programme - something better, anyway, than the 1-0 home defeat by Chelsea that blunted their championship aspirations on the very first weekend of last season - could sweep away the bulk of the remaining misgivings.

And if, as seems inevitable, he obtains more than 75 per cent of the shares, Glazer may well decide to take the company back into private ownership and let the minor shareholders either accept his price or be left hanging on to what would then be worthless pieces of paper. In a most ironic turnaround, this would underline the misgivings of those who believe football clubs have no business turning themselves into plcs.

Yet there is more than one way to run a football club. They can be dictatorships, like Chelsea under Roman Abramovich or Milan under Silvio Berlusconi. Few Chelsea fans complained when their team wrapped up their first league title in 50 years in the Russian oligarch's second season as sole owner, and even fewer Milanisti would moan about the four European Cups and seven Serie A titles acquired since Berlusconi assumed total control 19 years ago.

Or clubs can exist as virtual hereditary monarchies, which is what Juventus have been since 1923, when Edoardo Agnelli became the first of three members of his family to monopolise the presidency, an unbroken 81-year reign responsible for 26 league titles.

As for the notion of foreign interests owning an English league club, Abramovich was not the first - just the most successful. Mohamed al Fayed took Fulham into the Premiership. The old Wimbledon were run, or run down, by Norwegians, while Stoke City have been in Icelandic hands for some years.

The difference between Abramovich and Glazer is that the former needed no loans to buy control - and knowledge of the damage debt can do is behind the fears of United's fans, in particular those who remember Leeds United's disastrous experiment with "securitisation".

No doubt a Glazer or an Abramovich would respond to the fans' demand to play a part in the affairs of their club by pointing out that the purchase of tickets to see Sylvie Guillem at Covent Garden does not give the buyer the right to a say in the Royal Ballet's artistic policy. The only way to exert influence in a free market is to stay away, a decision some fans are threatening to take. No doubt there will be plenty of others waiting to take their places.

But, being neither simply business nor an art form, sport is not susceptible to their rules of organisation. It is about a different sort of identification, a sense of emotional belonging that is both easily agitated and fundamentally unbreakable. And in the end the best way to run a football club, by far, is through the ownership of its members.

This is the structure used by Real Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern Munich and AFC Wimbledon, the club formed by fans alienated by the old Wimbledon. The two Spanish giants, with memberships of 85,000 and 102,000 respectively, are non-profit and fully democratic organisations, holding quadrennial elections at which a president is mandated to run affairs. AFC Wimbledon are run by a trust that aims to control at least 75 per cent of shares.

Apart from enfranchising fans, the system appears to hold down costs. Membership of Real Madrid costs around 100, with a season ticket on top at about 250, and all members have equal voting rights. None of that, one imagines, would appeal much to Malcolm Glazer.