Six heirs, one football club, a team that has forgotten how to win and a co-chairman who reportedly told a room of bankers that the brand carries on regardless.
Avram Glazer is right about Manchester United, and he has chosen a dreadful autumn to be right in public. In September the club’s co-chairman spoke at Deutsche Bank’s first Sports Investment Conference in London. He reportedly told an audience of financiers that a club of United’s standing does not depend on success on the pitch for its commercial power. The remark stayed in the room until 5 November, when Laurie Whitwell reported it for The Athletic. By then United had just beaten Roma 3-2 for their first win in ten matches and still sat 17th in both the Premier League and the Champions League.
He reportedly compared United with the New York Yankees and the Dallas Cowboys, franchises that stay global brands through good seasons and bad. In a lecture hall full of people who value sports assets for a living, that is an unremarkable thing to say. In Manchester, during a run like this one, it was received as a provocation.
The answers came quickly and from the expected quarters. Alex Crook, talkSPORT’s United reporter, judged the comments badly out of tune with a club enduring its worst start to a season in more than 40 years. Martin Edwards, the former chairman, said he expected supporters to be furious and accused the owners of getting their priorities wrong. The idea is not even new at Old Trafford. Ed Woodward, then executive vice-chairman, offered much the same philosophy in 2018.
So this was less a slip of the tongue than a house view, said aloud to the wrong week. Football will forgive an owner almost anything except describing the business accurately.
Six heirs, one microphone
The Glazers are not much given to public speaking, which makes their filings the more rewarding read. Manchester United’s 2013 annual report to the SEC named Red Football LLC as the controlling shareholder and set out the arrangement beneath it. There were trusts for six lineal descendants of Malcolm Glazer, Avram, Joel, Bryan, Edward, Kevin and Darcie Glazer Kassewitz, each owning an equal share. It was the estate planner’s idea of fairness, and a reasonable one.
A dozen years on, the equal shares are no longer quite equal. As at 1 September 2025, Avram held 9.85% of the total voting power, a smaller slice than he had two years earlier, and the filings do not say why. Joel, Darcie and Bryan each carried more. The brother who turns up at bank conferences to speak for the family therefore commands the fourth-largest vote among six siblings. Kevin and Edward, for completeness, hold less still. Joel holds the largest stake of the six and was listed as president of the family’s general partner in the 2013 filing. Taken together, the siblings hold roughly two-thirds of the votes, which is another way of saying that nothing happens without them.
The family’s last formal look at its options began in November 2022, when it announced a strategic review. That review ended on 20 February 2024, when Sir Jim Ratcliffe completed a minority investment and took control of football operations. The family also owns the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers, so Ratcliffe is managing one of two sporting properties in the portfolio.
The agreement with Ratcliffe is reported to contain two clauses that matter more than any speech. A drag-along provision, active since August 2025, allows the Glazers to compel Ratcliffe to sell his stake alongside theirs if they sell to a third party. Until February 2027, Ratcliffe is also guaranteed a minimum price per share in any such sale, after which the floor falls away and a sale could go at any price.
Families with this much money tend to have their options drafted long before anyone admits to wanting them.
Who the remark was meant for
The audience matters more than the sentence. Deutsche Bank’s conference was full of people who lend against, invest in and price sports assets, and sources told The Athletic that Glazer’s presence suggested he was keeping an open mind about investment opportunities. That is their interpretation. His own last on-record word on the subject came in Miami in February 2025, when he was asked whether he would sell and answered no.
The speculation has grown louder since then, but no buyer has appeared. Late October reports, resting on a single unnamed source, said the family was waiting for the right time to cash in. Ben Jacobs, the journalist, has said the Glazers would sell once a new Old Trafford is built. He has also reported inquiries over twelve months from Saudi Arabia and from a Bahraini and Emirati group, none of which became a bid. No sale has been announced.
Read in that setting, the remark looks like ordinary, competent positioning. A club whose value moved with every defeat would be worth least in exactly the seasons when its owners most need to look calm. Anyone across a table, whether lender, partner or prospective buyer, would point that out. Placing Manchester United alongside the Yankees and the Cowboys, brands whose value survives a losing year, is the case an owner makes to protect the price, whatever he means to do with it. A family that also owns an NFL franchise knows that argument from the inside. American sport has been making it for a long time, and the people in that London room have heard it before and generally accept it.
The best argument against him belongs to Crook and Edwards, and it deserves a fair hearing. Supporters are not shareholders. A season this poor is felt in the stands long before it appears in any valuation. When an owner tells bankers that results are incidental to the commercial machine, he is also telling fans where they stand in the arrangement, and they are entitled to dislike the answer.
All of that is true, and none of it makes him wrong about the money. The critics are objecting to a sentence that was addressed to someone else. A supporter hears that losing does not matter, while a banker hears that the asset holds its value while the team is rebuilt. Both have understood him correctly, which is why there was never a version of this remark that would have pleased both audiences. The only real choice was who heard it first, and he chose the financiers, in September, in London, two months before anyone in Manchester found out.
The co-chairman has now set out, to the people who finance such things, why a bad run of results should not lower the price of the badge. The floor under Ratcliffe’s price expires in February. Old Trafford took the remark personally, and the bankers, presumably, took notes.
Read Next: How Crichton’s ER Contract Reached The Pitt in 32 Years
