Show us the money: United find plenty of ways to score
By JACOB SAULWICK, smh.com.au
The name Manchester United means David Beckham, Ryan Giggs, and 20 English league championships. It means George Best, three European Cups, the Theatre of Dreams football stadium and 659 million fans worldwide.
And it means an awful lot of wealth flowing through the Cayman Islands.
When Sydney’s United fans, as well as other football tragics and enthusiasts, chip in $15 each to attend a training session at the SCG on Friday night they will be contributing, in a small way, to an economic and sporting entity that in size and scope dwarfs all those in Australia.
By and large, Australian sporting teams, for a nation whose major codes tend to gravitate close to home, measure up pretty well with the big teams around the world. On some numbers, AFL clubs such as Collingwood would rank in the top 20 global clubs by value if they played the round-ball game.
But United are in a different league altogether.
In Forbes’ recent ranking of most valuable football clubs, United actually fell down the list, losing top spot for the first time since 2004 to Spanish side Real Madrid. But Forbes still put a valuation of $3.44 billion on United, and that valuation has more than doubled in the past eight years. (One could, pretty much, fund one year of the ACT government if that value was cashed in.)
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