Malcolm Glazer

When Malcolm Glazer purchased Manchester United in September 2003, buying the profitable club for over 700 million pounds, Glazer looked to continue Manchester United's success as an on field power house and a financial success. Glazer has a long history of large acquisitions, including his ownership of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers beginning in 1995, and also his attempts to purchase corporate freight rail, kitchen design and motorcycle manufacturers throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s.

Since arriving in 2003, some of Glazer’s moves have caused uproar among the fan community. After using a leverage buyout to purchase the club, Glazer immediately lost support from the Manchester faithful for his dealings in the negotiations. This immediately put one of the few remaining profitable teams back into debt with annual payments of almost 60 million pounds. This is not the first time Glazer has made a bad first impression, however. After first arriving in Tampa in 1995 following ten over a decade of consecutive losing seasons, Glazer looked to shake things up. He immediately declared the stadium inadequate and filed for relocation to another US city. Glazer’s record of getting on fan’s bad side can clearly be seen in its foundations here, by coming in and immediately trying to rip a team that has been cemented there for years and relocate it somewhere else. It seemed to make a poor impression on the fans, although the success of the Buccaneers immediately rose after Glazer’s arrival, even propelling them to a Super Bowl victory in 2002 under coach Jon Gruden, a fantastic signing in Glazer’s reign.

While his purchases of Manchester United and the Buccaneers seem somewhat similar by the parallel fan reactions, they are more linked than you think. After the 2003 purchase of Manchester United, the Buccaneers suspiciously began spending far less on player salaries than what is allowed under the NFL’s salary cap. In order to compete at the highest level, you think that they would spend as much money as they are allowed to. However, suspicion rose that Glazer was using some of the Buccaneers’ funds in order to account for the debt accumulated in the Manchester United purchase. While these accusations were never proved, it seems clear that Glazer let his overseas purchase affect his beloved Buccaneers back at home, even if it was at the expense of using some of the Buccaneers funds. While Malcolm Glazer on record has been involved with numerous large franchises in sports and in the corporate world, other evidence suggests he is just another corrupt owner looking to make a buck. It seems fun for him to purchase 2 enormous franchises and use the money from one to help out the other, but in reality he has taking away from the integrity of each game and setting his teams, respectively, up for a financial and cultural meltdown. A large number of fans have already protested Glazer’s Manchester United so badly, that a new team has been made to incorporate the true spirit that Manchester United desires, for the love of the game and history, and not about the money. The leverage buyout was a poor enough choice, but trying to use the Buccaneers to bail himself out will come back to not only greatly hurt him, but also tarnish the Buccaneers, Manchester United, the NFL and the FA Premier League.