Malcolm Glazer: Obnoxious US billionaire owner of Man United
1928-2014
MALCOLM Glazer, who has died at the age of 86, was a controversial Floridabased billionaire who emerged in 2005 as the unlikely new owner of Manchester United.
When Glazer first expressed interest in the famous football club in September 2003, fans were mystified. Among the few facts known about him were that he had never set foot in Manchester and did not like sport.
What he did like was to be known as “a true American success story” and in some respects he was: he had made his fortune first from owning trailer parks, then by investing in shopping malls, nursing homes and a variety of other businesses in the food, banking, broadcasting and energy sectors. In 1995, he ventured into the sports arena by buying the Tampa Bay Buccaneers American football team.
Having done so, he promptly told the city of Tampa to build him a new stadium, or he would move the team to Baltimore. The city did as he asked, largely at taxpayers’ expense. The team ended a long losing run by winning the 2003 Super Bowl and the value of Glazer’s investment quadrupled.
A judge who presided over one of his courtroom wrangles called him ‘a snake in sheep’s clothing’
If that success won him some admirers, they were heavily outnumbered by his detractors. His reputation was, at best, that of an intensely private man whose life was dominated by business, religious faith and devotion to his wife and children. But according to those he had crossed — including his own siblings, with whom he fought a long court battle about their mother’s will — it was the profit motive that predominated.
“He’s centred on one thing,” his elder sister, Jeannette, told an interviewer at the time of the bid for Manchester United. “He’s like a machine — money, money, money. There’s no other dimension. He’s always striving for more, which, I suppose, is why he wants your soccer team.”
The chief obstacle to that ambition was a 29% stake in the club held by two Irish horse-racing tycoons, JP MacManus and John Magnier. Glazer gradually built up a stake to match theirs before finally prevailing with a £3-a-share deal in May 2005. That valued the club at about £800-million, but Glazer put up only £272-million of his own money and saddled the club with a huge bank loan to make the sums add up.
The impact on the club’s profitability (and thereby its ability to buy the best players), coupled with Glazer’s strangely rebarbative demeanour, provoked a wave of hostility from suspicious fans. With his ginger beard, beady eyes, high-waisted trousers and habitual refusal to speak in public, he resembled nothing so much as an ill-tempered garden gnome.
Buccaneers fans had already nicknamed him “the leprechaun”; less endearingly, a US judge who presided over one of his courtroom wrangles called him “a snake in sheep’s clothing”.
But Glazer swiftly disappeared from British public view, debilitated by strokes, and his sons, Joel and Avram, took the lead in Manchester United’s business affairs. Many fans remained disgruntled and a group of rich supporters known as “The Red Knights” made an unsuccessful attempt to buy back the club.
Crucially, however, the United manager, Sir Alex Ferguson, not only remained loyal to the Glazers, but also continued to deliver success on the pitch, winning five Premier League titles and the 2007-08 Uefa Champions League before retiring in 2013.
Glazer was born on May 25 1928 in Rochester, New York, the fifth of seven children of a Russian-Jewish watchmaker who had arrived in America in 1915.
He once told an interviewer that he bought his trousers for $19.50 at a discount chain. “You know why? [Because] I remember when I didn’t have $20 to spend on pants.” Nevertheless, Forbes magazine this year ranked him (along with his family) among the world’s richest at number 354 and he lived in splendour in Palm Beach, Florida .
He is survived by his wife, Linda, their five sons and one daughter. — © The Daily Telegraph, London