The £15m that Manchester United are to pay the six Glazer siblings every year in solemnly announced dividends marks the beginning of the maxing-out end that the family have planned ever since they bought the great football club with all their borrowed money 10 years ago. United, the club that became a legend for the epic rebuilding after the Munich air disaster, have been manipulated in modern times as a prototype for relentless financial exploitation of a football “brand” and its supporters.

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During Thursday’s conference call with merchant bank investors keen on making money from the famous club, Ed Woodward, the vice-chairman and the Glazers’ long-term loyal fixer, enthused as always about global millions of fans, Twitter followers and hashtags, while news of that $0.045 dividend was briefly mentioned in passing. As United’s corporate finance director, Hemen Tseayo, noted, it is the first dividend the plc will pay since the Glazers relocated United’s ultimate company registration from Sir Matt Busby Way to the Cayman Islands, and floated the shares on the New York stock exchange three years ago.

The £15m annual dividend, wearily predictable but still unpalatable to United’s many informed supporters, sets the process seriously under way for the US family to fill their own bank accounts with fortunes from United. That always looked like the intention when, practically unknown in Britain and with no background or connection to United, in 2005 the family pulled off their £790m takeover, of which £525m was borrowed, £275m of it from “payments in kind” or piks – very high interest finance owed to hedge funds. Woodward, then at the bank JP Morgan, was an architect for the Glazers of that leveraged takeover, including the high-interest piks, then the saddling of United with paying it all off.

The club, including supporters whose season-ticket prices were immediately increased and subjected to compulsory purchase of cup tickets, have poured money out to bankers since: that monumental £700m, to cover interest and a series of other heart-sinking fees. Even last year, with United through the knife-edge period of indebtedness and making almost £400m in income despite the post-Sir Alex Ferguson season out of the Champions League, the club paid another £35m in finance costs, mostly due to paying bankers a premium for yet another refinancing. The debt still, remarkably, stands at £411m gross.

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A previous refinancing in 2010 revealed that the six children of the late Malcolm Glazer – the brothers Avram, Bryan, Edward, Kevin and Joel and their sister, Darcie Glazer Kassewitz – had borrowed a total of £10m from the club and been paid £10m in “management and administration fees”.

When they moved the registration of the football club, formed in 1878 by workers on the Lancashire and Yorkshire railway, to the tax haven of the Cayman Islands, they cashed in £75m by selling a slice of their shares. Last August, with United floundering after the Glazers and Woodward bungled the succession to Ferguson, the Glazers nevertheless decided the time was right to make another $200m (£129m) selling some more shares. Then in December, Edward Glazer made approximately £29m by selling a small portion, 3m, of his shares.

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The new dividend, $0.045 every three months on each of the 131m shares the Glazers have accrued to themselves after all the corporate reorganisations, promises to bank transfer them £15m, £2.5m each annually; and they are surely looking ahead to a grand final sale. A document registered with the New York stock exchange on Thursday enables them to sell up to 24m shares over the next three years, which would make them $432m (£276m) at current prices. United plc also has the possibility of selling new shares to raise the same amount; the document dutifully makes clear that none of the money the Glazers are paid for their shares will go to the club. Indeed, not one penny of the millions they have made, or the £250m they spent initially as part of their leveraged buyout of the club has gone in for the use of United itself.

There are people, mostly not versed in British football’s folk roots and administrative history, who admire the Glazers for being clever, for seeing in 2005 how much more worldwide commercial capital would be colonised by the Premier League and its biggest “brand”, and say good luck. Those people need reminding of the history: that unlike in the US where sports teams have always been franchises, commercial investments for “owners”, Britain had clubs, formed by members, such as those Newton Heath railway workers, for the foundational love of the game.

When football became professional in the late 1880s and clubs formed limited companies to protect their members from personal liability for the expenses, the Football Association imposed rules to prevent these clubs becoming mere commercial vehicles. One of the important limits was to the value of dividends, precisely so that shareholders, “owners”, did not use their club shares to cash in, as the Glazers are doing now.

Those rules lasted into the 1990s but were bypassed from the 1980s by club owners, including United’s, forming holding companies to float as plcs on the Stock Exchange, which would pay dividends and transform their shares into more saleable assets. The FA, in the now well-told but still heartbreaking history, sat and watched, befuddled; abandoning the club ethos and rules in the hyper-commercial, TV rights-bonanza modern era, just when carefully crafted regulation was needed most.

The Glazers, reviled by many United fans including those who formed the breakaway FC United of Manchester on supporter-ownership principles, nevertheless blazed a trail for more US investors buying great English clubs – Arsenal, Liverpool, Aston Villa, Sunderland – looking for capital gain, in the financially booming league they call the EPL.

As ever with the Glazers, there was no criticism of the dividend from within football. The FA, now chaired, in a trick of history, by Greg Dyke, a backer of the 1992 Premier League breakaway and one-time director of the pre-Glazers Manchester United plc, has been a compliant governing body throughout.

The Premier League chief executive, Richard Scudamore, is the well-paid servant of the club owners, there to enrich them with huge TV deals, and the Glazer takeover was all approved on his watch. Ferguson, backed in the transfer market, as he saw it, and handsomely paid, praised the Glazers as “fantastic owners”. David Gill, the chief executive who first opposed the takeover then said the Glazers had revised their borrowings to make them acceptable, is now reinvented as the FA’s and English football’s good governance representative at Uefa and, he hopes, ultimately Fifa.

Gary and Phil Neville, Paul Scholes and Nicky Butt, who have garnered a huge media presence and trade on their “class of ’92” credentials as hometown United lads at heart, have not been noted over the past 10 years for speaking out about the actual ownership structure and financial pounding of their club.

The Glazers’ methods incorporate many criticised elements of divisive modern capitalism: debt-laden acquisition of a healthy company to leech money to banks; use of a tax haven; rising costs to the public; massive directors’ salaries – all aiming for exponential personal gains for the owners. And still, nobody in football authority dares to utter a word about whether any of this brings the people’s game into disrepute.