THE SUNDAY TIMES
New Manchester United owner Malcolm Glazer is considering the sale of the "presenting rights" to the club’s Old Trafford stadium. This form of sponsorship would see the stadium be called "Old Trafford in association with ...", and would be more palatable to United fans who fear the owners are looking to sell the naming rights to the stadium.
Selling stadium presenting rights would, however, be less lucrative than selling the naming rights to Old Trafford, which could exceed the £3m a year that Arsenal are thought to be earning from their deal with Emirates for their new stadium.
Other English club stadiums to sell naming rights are Bolton Wanderers (Reebok), Wigan (JJB), Coventry City (Ricoh), Leicester (Walkers), Stoke City (Britannia). None of these are thought to be worth more than £1m a year.
The largest stadium naming rights deal in Europe is the Allianz Arena in Munich, which is worth £60m over 15 years. The most valuable naming rights deal in the US is the Reliant Stadium in Houston, which is worth $300m (£165m) over 32 years.
Usually stadium presenting rights are only sold as a supplement to a sponsorship deal, as they are much less effective than naming rights deals, since the sponsor’s name will get little media coverage. The same is true for selling the naming rights to stands, which is what the Glazer bid vehicle, Red Football, is also reported to be considering. Manchester United’s main sponsors are Vodafone, paying £9m a year until 2008, while Nike’s kit deal with the club is worth a minimum £303m until 2015. The club currently has eight secondary, or "Platinum", partners — Pepsi, Budweiser, Dimension Data, FujiFilm, Wilkinson Sword, Audi, Ladbrokes and Century Radio — who contributed £5.5m to the club’s coffers last year.
Glazer will this week publish an open letter to investors and fans which will commit him to a four-year £100m transfer budget. The letter will be written by the tycoon’s son Joel, who, unlike his father, claims to be a long-time United fan. It will be contained in the Glazers’ offer document, which will also reveal that the interest bill to service £550m of debts will be less than initially expected
THE INDEPENDENT
It was a simple enough invitation. Now that their dad owned the controlling stake in Manchester United, perhaps Joel and Bryan Glazer would like to come and watch the game?
The Independent on Sunday had nothing special in mind. A few hours at a sports bar a few miles from their waterfront homes, a couple of mid-morning pitchers of ice-cold beer as they watched the FA Cup Final, and a chance to chat about United's mixed fortunes.
Alas, it was not to be. A security guard at Tampa's Harbour Island gated community where the Glazers' neighbours reportedly include Generals "Stormin' Norman" Schwarzkopf and Tommy "We don't do body counts" Franks, said no one was answering the phone.
If the Glazer brothers appeared less than overwhelmed by the fact that their father's £790m acquisition were playing in the FA Cup Final yesterday, they were in good company here in Tampa, the Florida city in which Malcolm Glazer bought the local American football team, the Buccaneers, 10 years ago.
Indeed, local sports fans appeared about as interested in "soccer" as they were in bull-fighting. Daniel Ruth, a columnist with the Tampa Tribune, went as far as to suggest that Man Utd was "the world's foremost collection of men in their underwear playing the most boring sport on the face of the planet".
Such balanced reporting aside, football is of course as Mr Glazer's purchase has shown a truly international sport, unlike the stop-start, testosterone-pumped pastime in which players wear helmets and shoulder pads. So why are the fans in Tampa not more excited at the prospect of embracing the beautiful game?
"I have never seen a game of soccer shown in here," said 26-year-old Michael Booth, sitting at the bar at Walter's Press Box, a well-known Tampa sports bar, on Friday. "I think there is too much competition there's football, baseball, basketball, hockey."
The Press Box bar is a monument to all things sporting. The walls are full of signed jerseys from local stars, there's a pair of boxing gloves belonging to a lightweight champion sitting in a case and a bank of televisions were showing four or five different sports simultaneously.
But of Man Utd and of the FA Cup final, there was not a trace. Apparently only one bar in the entire city showed the match. "This is the first that I even heard he had bought the team," said Tommy Rex, a locksmith and a dedicated "Bucs" fan.
The dichotomy of soccer in the US played by millions of schoolboys and girls but ignored as a professional sport is well known. But if the game were to have a chance anywhere it ought to be in newly booming Tampa. Indeed between 1975 and 1984 the city was famous as home of the Tampa Bay Rowdies, a club that attracted the likes of the mercurial Rodney Marsh.
Whether Malcolm Glazer has the charisma, ability or even the desire to turn US sports fans on to British football is far from clear. Indeed at a press conference on Friday afternoon, Bryan Glazer declined to discuss Man Utd other than to say it should not interfere with their effort to host the Super Bowl in 2009.
And while the Buccaneers won the Super Bowl a couple of years ago, few fans here express any warmth for him. Countless people said his interest in teams was purely financial. And that remained the case yesterday. The message from the Glazer family, who now control the team which yesterday happened to be playing in the equivalent of the Super Bowl, was that it was business as usual.