Football finance

Even you non sports fans have heard of Manchester United. Supposedly the most valuable franchise in professional sports anwhere. At least it was, word is out now that the team has more than 700 million pounds of debt. ( no pound symbol on this keyboard). For fiscal 2009 they paid 41M in interest on that debt. Good thing they sold Christiano Renaldo for 80M otherwise they would have had a big loss.

You see football works a little differently than sports you may be used to. The teams own the players and can buy and sell or loan them out as they see fit. It's like slavery, at least that's the term that was used by the FIFA boss, Sepp Blatter. Don't worry though, Mr. Renaldo gets some cash too.

ManU did just what all those repossessed homeowners in Riverside did, took out a huge loan to buy the house not worrying about payments because everything goes up all the time anyway, right? But ManU's got better bankers that the poor sod in the "Inland Empire". They've got a plan to sell bonds to get everything straightened out. Pardon my ignorance but if you are in dept up to your eyeballs and then take on more dept in terms of bonds then you're better off how? Hopefully you're better off because the bond interest rates will be lower than the exhorbitant rates that the mob, ah, hedge funds are changing now.

How the heck did some Americans end up owning the pride of England anyway? It's OK that a Russian owns Chelsea, cause you know Russians are the mob, and some Arabs own some other team I can't remember because they never get to go out on Saturday so if they own a team then it'll be OK to have what little fun they are allowed. Malcolm Glazer, the American owner of ManU also owns the Tampa Bay NFL team. They are just horrible but the town built them a stadium so they can now pay with taxes and tickets to see this disaster on the field. Manchester has got a good stadium for now so that's covered, I have to wonder if the town would put up some cash to buy another good player or two and regain their glory. Probably not, but then the Brits are often happy supporting a lame team with a lot of past glory so they can just get along like that.