Manchester United’s prospective buyers are due to hold face-to-face talks with Raine, the bank handling the sale for the Glazer family, and club officials at Old Trafford in the next fortnight.
These discussions are being billed as “stage two” of the
process: a deep dive into the club’s finances, when all of United’s commercial
secrets are revealed, to select eyes, under a cloak of secrecy.
Neither of the two publicly-declared bids are anywhere near
Raine’s minimum enterprise value of £6billion, with Sheikh Jassim believed to
be in the region of £4.5billion ($5.3bn) and Ratcliffe at around £4.3billion
($5.1bn).
However, while their valuations of United are similar, the two
bids are very different — Sheikh Jassim wants to buy the entire club in cash,
including the 31 per cent of the company not owned by the Glazers; Ratcliffe is
only proposing to buy the Glazers’ shares, and doing so with a mix of cash and
new borrowing.
If anything, indicative bids tend to come down after due
diligence is carried out, in the same way that house-buyers often try to knock
something off their offers after seeing a surveyor’s report on the property
concerned.
Sheikh Jassim — and Ratcliffe, for that matter — can rightly
point out that their valuations already reflect a huge premium on the average
share price over the last year, and the recent surge in the club’s market
capitalisation has been created by their interest in the club. If they were to
pull out, where do you think the share price will go?
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