United Road Take Me Home

Now my grasp of economics is rudimentary at best. For proof of this you need look no further than my bank accounts monthly slide towards the red. Going back a bit further I can cite my C in Economics A-Level, the final product of two years spent alternating between bafflement and boredom. So my grasp of fiscal good sense is shaky in the extreme.

That said, I’m versed in the fact that money is ultimately an entirely notional, abstract concept. Goods and services have no innate value in themselves, we merely attach arbitrary values that float free of reality. Who decides that The Most Talked About Footballer of his Generation should earn more than the nurse tending the elderly and infirm this Christmas Eve? With both of these things said I’m finding it impossible to get my head around the mind-boggling levels of debt that continue to accumulate on the back of the Glazer takeover as revealed in the Times the other day.

All money may well be notional, but the notion of £656 million is just a little too abstract for me to wrap my head around. Try as I might, I simply can’t fathom how the Glazers plan to turn United into a profit-making organisation. The phrase voodoo economics seems particularly apt, but what little information trickles out of the Glazer camp provides little indication of how they plan to pull off the ultimate conjuring trick and make the debt disappear.

In the circumstances it’s virtually impossible not to find the pledges made about stadium naming rights and collective TV bargaining disingenuous. At least they’re upfront about exhibition matches straddling the globe, but the acres of empty seats on the most recent jaunt abroad should prove salutary here. Ticket prices will of course rise, the elasticity of our loyalty no doubt being tested to its utmost. According to the Times the Glazer’s feel that tickets at Old Trafford are undervalued when compared with other Premiership clubs, essentially those clustered around the capital. Of course they neglect to point out the fact that many workers in the Northwest are equally under-valued in comparison to their Southern counterparts.

The only glimmer of positivity to emerge from the Times report was the dismissal of Chelsea’s prospects of ever competing with United in the domain of, and a chill passes over the soul as I even contemplate using these words, brand recognition. Unless Kenyon will be able to manufacture a history for his adopted first-love by 2014, his chances of making good on his claim that Chelsea will be a bigger name than United look utterly hopeless.

Meanwhile the level of debt continues to soar, and the Glazers believe that we’ll be happy to be fobbed off with the purchase of a Galactico every couple of seasons. I’d like to think that they’re wrong, but deep inside, I worry that they could be right.