Highly profitable club with a global fan base

The club's assets: Malcolm Glazer's Red Football Ltd is on the verge of making an offer for Manchester United plc that will value it at over €1 billion.

As Mr Glazer already owns just over 28 per cent of the company, he will actually be paying around €700 million for the outstanding shares.

Over the last two years he paid an estimated €240 million for his existing stake, so he will have effectively paid around €950 million to own the world's richest and best-known soccer club.

Manchester United plc was floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1991. It was the first of several to go down this route and is in real terms the only one that has remained profitable since then.

The plc owns three entities, Manchester United Football Club, Manchester United Catering (an agency company) and Manchester United interactive, which runs the electronic commerce elements of its website.

Alongside that it holds a 33.3 per cent share in the club's dedicated television station MUTV. The other shareholders are UK independent television producer Granada (which produces Coronation Street) and British Sky Broadcasting, which held a 12 per cent stake in the plc up to October 2003, when it sold the stake to Cubic Expression.

The central element to all this is the football club, and its fans, who can be found in all corners of the world, most of them with no visible link to its original geographic base of Manchester and Salford in northwestern England.

It is estimated that every second soccer fan in this country supports Man United, while it is said to have 20 million fans in the Far East. All these people are a ready market for tickets, merchandise and the club's various multimedia products.

In the year to the end of July 2004 (the year it won the English FA Cup, but nothing else) it had sales of €250 million.

Around €90 million of this came from match days, that is sales of daily and season tickets to its matches. The television rights for screening those games earned around €92 million.

The balance, a figure approaching €70 million, came from its commercial activities. These would include the sale of corporate boxes, sponsorship and the merchandising of jerseys, scarves and all the other branded products that soccer fans buy.

Last year the club's board conceded its global fan base represented plenty of unexploited commercial potential. Glazer clearly believes this, otherwise he would not have pursued it so doggedly.