Remembering the 1989 Manchester United takeover bid that opened eyes to a future paved in gold

It made Edwards a very wealthy man too – perhaps as much as £100 million - when finally he relinquished the last major part of his family’s shares to the Scottish businessman Harry Dobson in the preface to the 2005 Glazer takeover. Back in 1989 he was mortgaged to the hilt on United, partly a consequence of a share issue ten years earlier which had allowed his family to take control. Then Edwards says he owed £900,000 to the banks, his house was on the line and the team was struggling.

The book that tells the story of Edwards’ first decade of chairman as forensically as any other is the 1989 investigative work “The Betrayal of a Legend” by the political journalist Michael Crick, a lifelong United supporter, and co-author David Smith. Crick recalls how the plan to sell United was agreed so quickly that when Edwards appeared alongside Knighton at a press conference he got his name mixed up with the Old Trafford catering manager and accidentally introduced him as “Michael Whetton”.

Crick’s book, updated in 1990 and now long out of print, is a forensic examination of the Edwards legacy up to Ferguson’s first trophy, the 1990 FA Cup, when modern United finally took off, and it does not spare the family. Edwards’s father, former United chairman Louis, died in 1980, weeks after a Granada Television World In Action documentary had alleged that his meat company had paid bribes to win contracts, as well as raise questions over the United share issue.

By 1989, Martin had been chairman for almost a decade. He had sacked Ron Atkinson and spent around £8.5 million net supporting Ferguson in the transfer market - not always with the expected returns, it should be said. He knew by then that the Taylor Report would require a £10 million rebuild of the Stretford End. Knighton offered £10 million for Edwards’ 50 per cent stake, £10 million for the rest of the stock if shareholders were prepared to sell, and another £10 million for the new stand.

It was Knighton’s ball-juggling on the pitch before a home game against Arsenal that went down in folklore but really what makes the deal stand-out now was how little United, in the “doldrums”, as Edwards saw it, could see of the future. When United came to float on the Stock Exchange in 1991 they would be worth more than double, £43 million. When the Glazers took control in 2005, United were worth £790 million. Their latest capitalisation puts them at around £2 billion.

When Knighton’s original backers withdrew, he was in a race against time to secure the investment that he, as a former teacher, whose biggest asset was the ownership of a private school in Yorkshire, had to raise. What he did have was the option to buy Edwards’s United shares for £10 million and when he failed to raise the investment he tried to flip the deal, offering the option to the businessman Eddie Shah for £16 million.

Knighton sent a report into United’s finances by his accountants to potential backers. “This report, which Knighton was essentially hawking around contained confidential information about the club and there was a real risk of it falling into the hands of our competitors,” Edwards writes. “All this from a man who did not yet own the club.” Crick goes further and suggests that the report, complete with player contracts and sponsorship deals, even reached Manchester City.

Edwards says that after the club successfully got an interim ruling against Knighton stopping him leaking information, they met at a Novotel on the M63 where Knighton was offered a directorship in return for giving up his option. He agreed and was later reprimanded by the Takeover Panel for his conduct. Edwards remembers the episode as “a low point … hugely disruptive, courted a lot of bad publicity and gave my critics plenty of ammunition.”

But he now knew that his United stake was worth more than £10 million. As for Knighton, he has since claimed that many of his 1989 ideas for United’s future expansion were secretly adopted. He had envisaged a future in which the club’s name would endorse, Crick writes, “clothes, cosmetics and holidays”, which sounds like a prototype for United’s current army of so-called “global partners”.

Edwards never fell out with Knighton despite the humiliation heaped on the club, and over time the United chairman would realise the value of his shares. It is Crick, however, writing in 1989, who draws the most perceptive conclusion from the Knighton episode when considering the future: “The more the new owner has to pay for his club,” he says, “the more Manchester United may have to pay him back”.

La Liga chief dreaming of a 'Le Pen for Spain'

Javier Tebas, the president of La Liga, and the man who held court at the Soccerex conference in Manchester last week, certainly has what might be described as an interesting CV. 

As a young man, he worked as a delegate in the province of Huesca for what was then Fuerza Nueva, a party with a fascist pro-Franco ideology who might be regarded as the equivalent of the British National Party.

These political beliefs have not been a barrier to a career in Spanish football for Tebas, and he recently told Spanish newspaper AS he he had not changed his mind, advocating a “Le Pen for Spain” to defend the “identity” of the nation. 

Although born in Costa Rica, Tebas seems strangely attracted to the notion of Spanish identity. He proposes to kick Barcelona out of La Liga if there is a referendum for Catalan independence. 

What a reassuring figure he must be for those overseas players, including a certain Argentine, who have helped make La Liga great.