Wintry conditions spared Manchester United the test of playing crosstown rivals Manchester City in a League Cup semi-final on Wednesday, as Britain dug itself out from its heaviest snowfalls in three decades. Next up for United (weather permitting) is a tough Premier League trip to overachievers Birmingham tomorrow, where Sir Alex Ferguson’s side will attempt to rebound from a painful start to the year.
But even snow can’t hide the fact that United are a troubled team, both on the field and off. The fast-approaching business end of Europe’s soccer season, when league titles will be won and lost, will show whether United’s recent shakiness is nothing more than an uncharacteristic dip in form or, as some are starting to suspect, the beginning of a longer-term and potentially corrosive decline that the club may be ill-equipped to arrest.
The biggest cause for alarm is the state of United’s finances.
Newspaper reports last weekend that the club’s American owners, the Glazer family, are considering raising funds with a £600 (US$963 million) bond issue were a stark reminder of the giant and growing debt that United are laboring under.
United insist, and outside experts agree, that the club makes enough money to keep its creditors at bay, at least for the moment.
But it hasn’t escaped anyone’s attention that Ferguson is still sitting on the bulk of the £80 million United received from Cristiano Ronaldo to Real Madrid this summer. The question is why? Ferguson clearly needs more talent. Dimitar Berbatov has not fulfilled the promise he showed when United paid £30 million for him in 2008. Nani is another disappointment and Michael Owen is no longer a sure goal scorer. That veterans Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes and Gary Neville are still getting so many games is due not just to their amazing longevity but also because not enough talented youngsters have risen through United’s ranks — as those players once did — to permanently unseat them.
While still just two points behind leaders Chelsea, United have lost five of their 20 league games. That’s not a crisis but it is one loss more than in all of last season. After the humiliation of losing to Leeds in the FA Cup on Sunday, the first time that a Ferguson side has fallen to such lowly opposition in that competition, some United fans called for an end to his 24-year reign.
Ferguson says the Glazers are not stopping him from spending.
They don’t have to — Ferguson is doing that himself, being thrifty in a market which he says is over-inflated.
“Maybe it is the Scotsman in me but I believe in value, even when I am spending someone else’s money, and the asking price for players we were looking at just wasn’t realistic,” the Manchester Evening News quoted him as saying at the start of this season. “We don’t suddenly have to splash out to try and compete at the top.”
Coming months will prove whether Ferguson is right or being priced out of renewed success. Either way, United’s tightly held wallet is raising questions. Compared to big-spenders Real Madrid and Manchester City, United are starting to look like poor cousins.
Thanks largely to their 76,000-seat Old Trafford stadium, United are a moneymaking machine, with annual turnover of £257 million, according to the most recent accounts available. But interest repayments from the debts the Glazers took to buy United in 2005 more than swallow any profits. Those debts swelled to £699 million in the last accounts. With repayments, a pretax profit of £24 million in the year to June 2008 became a pretax loss of £44 million.
Interest payable on United’s debt — £69 million in 2008 — would buy a marquee player each season.
The concern is that the debts could eventually undermine United’s ability to continue financing winning soccer. Losing, in turn, could hit revenue, potentially starting a downward spiral. The retirement of 68-year-old Ferguson, when it comes, could also be a delicate financial time for United if his replacement proves unable to quickly match his success, especially in the lucrative Champions League.
“They can comfortably service the debt at the moment,” says sports industry financing adviser Harry Philp. “But there is a ticking time bomb ahead for them.”
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier