The man don't give a Buc We asked Tampa Tribune columnist Daniel Ruth what Manchester United supporters can expect now that American tycoon and Tampa Bay Buccaneers owner Malcolm Glazer owns their team. This is what he wrote...
The Guardian Tuesday July 12, 2005 Here's what you poor, poor, sad, slap happy fulminating patrons of the Manchester United soccer team have to understand about the franchise's new proprietor, Palm Beach tycoon Malcolm Glazer and his lads. You can threaten to boycott games. Yawn. You can demonstrate in the streets. Sigh. You can burn all the effigies you want. Oh dear. You can protest, whine, pout, shout and hold your breath. Isn't that precious? You can curl up in the mother of all foetal positions and primal scream yourself blue. How nice for you. And Malcolm Glazer and his rug rats still won't care one whit, not an iota, not so much as a passing moment of concern. Indeed, if the elder Glazer owns ManU for the next 20 years he will probably set foot in the old sod about as often as the Argentine Army Falklands War Veterans Association. That's because - altogether now - HE DOESN'T CARE! There is a story former Tampa Mayor Dick Greco often tells about attending a Tampa Bay Buccaneers football game shortly after Glazer bought the team for $190m in 1995. At one point, as a defensive back intercepted a pass and raced into the end zone for a touchdown, Glazer jumped to his feet to cheer on the player only to be gently reminded by Greco that the new owner of the Tampa Bay Bucs was actually rooting for the wrong team. The Bucs are now worth, according to Forbes Magazine, $779m, so apparently not knowing the difference between a blitz and a blintz hardly seems to have been a particular impediment to Malcolm Glazer. To be sure, many ManU fans are wound more tightly than Princess Anne in trying to fathom what the future may hold during the Glazer years. In a sense, Glazer's confusion over which team to root for is understandable. That's largely because you need to think of the National Football League as a sort of mother of all capitalist communes. The value of the Bucs franchise is grounded in a number of generous sweetheart deals. First, the NFL believes in all for one and one for all, equally distributing the league's profits to all 32 teams regardless of performance. And thus, all 32 franchises including the Bucs receive $100m from the NFL before the first down of the first play of the first game of the season commences. In addition, the Bucs play their games in a $162m stadium, for which the Glazers put up not one thin dime of their own money to build. This is a source of some community discontent, since Malcolm Glazer promised to pay for half of the stadium back in 1995, only to eventually renege on the deal. As well, the Bucs receive about $23m-a-year in luxury suite, concession and parking revenue at the stadium. Then there's the stadium name. Raymond James Financial Corp. inked a 13-year, $35m deal for the naming rights. And that is how a team which sports a 12-20 (won 12, lost 20) record over the past two years is still worth almost a billion dollars. It also might explain why the Glazers can be so indifferent to the team's fans. After all, when you are already turning a profit before the first paying customer sits down in their $59 seat, you can, as the Glazers did five years ago, sue a group of fans for defamation. The disgruntled supporters sued the team when the Bucs moved from the old 73,000-seat Tampa Stadium to the new Raymond James community stadium, with 10,000 fewer general admission seats for the "community" to sit in. Feeling this was somehow unfair, the fans got their lawyers involved and sued. Eventually the suits were settled out of court, but not before attorneys on opposing sides started throwing coffee at one another. If the family's stewardship of an NFL franchise is any remote guide, you should know these folks tend to regard fans with about the same enthusiasm as a widget. Shortly after the Glazers took over, the Bucs discontinued any relationship it had with the many ad hoc fan clubs through the Tampa Bay area, refusing to provide players for speaking engagements and the like. Today the Bucs fan clubs are organised internally by the team. What fun. If you are wondering if the Glazers will shell out money for top-notch players and personnel, the answer is yes. Will they be any good? Who knows? In one of the few instances when sons Joel and Bryan were given their heads to make a management decision pretty much on their own, the boys hired head coach Jon Gruden, who is known to spend long, long hours perfecting losing game plans. As for the future of ManU, don't think for a minute that if the Glazers could figure out a way to sell the naming rights to Old Trafford to... well, France for the right price without causing an international incident, they would do the deal in a heartbeat. After all, these are business people first and foremost. Still, Manchester United fans are going to have to get used to the family owning "their" team. They are not going anywhere and they are not particularly interested in explaining themselves to you. Over the 10 years of Bucs ownership, Malcolm Glazer has had less to say publicly than the Unabomber. Gracious, by comparison the Glazers make the head of MI6 look like a tabloid gossip monger. So let the games begin and watch your wallets. Oh and one more thing: (Memo to Malcolm Glazer and his tots) The nickname for Manchester United is "The Red Devils". There must be a hint in there somewhere to avoid confusing teams - on the off chance you even care. Please use [email protected] for general discussion. To unsubscribe send a blank message (from the email account in question) to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Join as a full member of IMUSA today: http://www.imusa.org/join.htm Yahoo! 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