Owning a football club, Tottenham Hotspur chairman Alan Sugar once complained, is “like drinking prune juice while eating figs.” Sugar’s digestive metaphor was actually about money. It came in, from ticket sales, TV rights, and sponsorships, and went right back out, in the form of payments to players, transfer fees, and payments to agents. Sugar, one of Britain’s richest people and owner of the club from 1991 to 2001, was bemoaning the fact that, no matter how much his revenues increased, his profits, instead of keeping pace, remained relatively stable.



Malcolm Glazer saw that it didn’t have to be this way. Instead of relatively staid civic institutions that existed for the benefit of the local community, football clubs in his view could become global businesses capable of throwing off consistent and ever-increasing returns for their owners. Here, at least, Glazer was a visionary. In 2005, he bought Manchester United by leveraging nearly $1...