Bid for United that opened eyes to future paved in gold
A new autobiography revives startling memories of Michael Knighton and his failed 1989 takeover
There are just seven pages of Martin Edwards’s newlypublished autobiography dedicated to it, one of the great football stories of our time that came at the cusp of change in the modern game, a tale that 28 years on feels unreal when you contemplate the transformation wrought since.
Michael Knighton’s failed takeover of Manchester United in 1989 has never been given the cinematic treatment but it might just be due consideration, a story so remarkable that even now it bears retelling. Over the past couple of weeks, it has been the club’s former chairman Edwards touring radio studios and in the pages of newspapers to promote his book Red Glory, recounting his 23 years in effective charge of United, although too little is dedicated to those crazy weeks at the end of 1989.
At 72, Edwards is asserting his part in building the global giant that now resides at Old Trafford, and there is much of his story that is hard to argue with. Eternally unpopular with fans, he can still point to his appointment of Sir Alex Ferguson, the retention of him through the difficult early days and then United’s boldness in striking out as a corporate entity under Peter Kenyon and then David Gill.
It made Edwards a very wealthy man, too – perhaps as much as £100million – when finally he relinquished the last major part of his family’s shares to the Scottish businessman Harry Dobson in the preface to the 2005 Glazer takeover. Back in 1989 he was mortgaged to the hilt on United, partly a consequence of a share issue 10 years earlier that had allowed his family to take control. Then, Edwards says, he owed £900,000 to the banks, his house was on the line and the team were struggling.
The book that tells the story of Edwards’s first decade as chairman as forensically as any other is the 1989 investigative work The Betrayal of a Legend by the political journalist Michael Crick, a lifelong United supporter, and co-author David Smith. Crick recalls how the plan to sell United was agreed so quickly that when Edwards appeared alongside Knighton at a press conference, he got his name mixed up with the Old Trafford catering manager and introduced him as “Michael Whetton”.
Crick’s book, updated in 1990 and now long out of print, is a forensic examination of the Edwards legacy up to Ferguson’s first trophy, the 1990 FA Cup, when modern United finally took off, and it does not spare the family. Edwards’s father, former United chairman Louis, died in 1980, weeks after a Granada Television World In Action documentary had alleged that his meat company had paid bribes to win contracts, as well as raise questions the United share issue. By 1989, Martin had been chairman for almost a decade. He had sacked manager Ron Atkinson and spent around £8.5million net supporting Ferguson in the transfer market – not always with the expected returns, it should be said.
He knew by then that the Taylor report would require a £10million rebuild of the Stretford End. Knighton offered £10million for Edwards’s 50 per cent stake, £10million for the rest of the stock if shareholders were prepared to sell and another £10million for the new stand.
It was Knighton’s ball-juggling on the pitch before a home game against Arsenal that went down in folklore but, really, what makes the deal stand out now was how little United, in the “doldrums”, as Edwards saw it, could see of the future. When United came to float on the Stock Exchange in 1991 they would be worth more than double, £43million. When the Glazers took control in 2005, United were worth £790million. Their latest capitalisation puts them at around £2 billion.
When Knighton’s original backers withdrew, he was in a race against time to secure the investment that he, as a former teacher whose biggest asset was the ownership of a private school in Yorkshire, had to raise.
What he did have was the option to buy Edwards’s United shares for £10million and when he failed to raise the investment he tried to flip the deal, offering the option to the businessman Eddie Shah for £16 million.
Knighton sent a report into the club’s finances by his accountants to potential backers. “This report, which Knighton was essentially hawking around, contained confidential information about the club and there was a real risk of it falling into the hands of our competitors,” Edwards writes. “All this from a man who did not yet own the club.”
Crick goes further and suggests that the report, complete with player contracts and sponsorship deals, reached Manchester City.
Edwards says that after the club obtained an interim ruling against Knighton stopping him leaking information, they met at a Novotel on the M63 where Knighton was offered a directorship in return for giving up his option. He agreed and was later reprimanded by the Takeover Panel for his conduct. Edwards remembers the episode as “a low point … hugely disruptive, courted a lot of bad publicity and gave my critics plenty of ammunition”.
But he now knew that his United stake was worth more than £10 million. As for Knighton, he has since claimed that many of his 1989 ideas for United’s future expansion were secretly adopted. He had envisaged a future in which the club’s name would endorse, Crick writes, “clothes, cosmetics and holidays”, which sounds like a prototype for United’s current army of so-called “global partners”.
Edwards never fell out with Knighton despite the humiliation heaped on the club, and over time the United chairman would realise the value of his shares. It is Crick, however, writing in 1989, who draws the most perceptive conclusion from the Knighton episode when considering the future: “The more the new owner has to pay for his club,” he says, “the more Manchester United may have to pay him back”.
What makes it stand out was how little United, in the doldrums, could see of what would lie ahead