Gambling on sports can happen in a variety of different ways. You have the sports bets you can place on different teams whether it is football or tennis. You also have gambles on the actual team by buying them when they are in a risky situation. Malcolm Glazer falls under this second category. He is a US businessman, yet he decided to take a risk on Manchester United.
Why take such a risk? What made it a risk to take on Manchester United? First, the football team was up for sale and it would take 800 million pounds in order to get the control. It also meant that if he could not get the team to win and win big for the next season he would lose more than just his investment. He would lose his ability to continue making big buys. If this is not a gamble then what is, right? Malcolm Glazer had to bet that his new team would actually make the wins he needed to make the purchase worthwhile. It was not a simple game he was betting on, but an entire season that needed to make him money. This makes it more than sports betting in the traditional sense.
Perhaps it was his success with a US team that made him feel he could pull off what he needed with Manchester United. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers became Glazer’s and actually managed to get a Super Bowl victory that same year. It means that something in Glazer’s life was providing him with luck in getting a stake in the football team and victory. For the amount Glazer invested in the club he managed to purchase the whole of it over the course of a couple of years. At first he was only given a small amount.
The shareholders didn’t want Glazer to have the entire club, especially since he was US based. Still, Glazer tried for several more months to get his bid for the entire amount of the club stake and managed to pull it through.
By taking on the entire club it has meant taking on any debts and making the team unpopular. It is not the players that are unpopular. Rather, it is Glazer himself due to the increased ticket costs. Fans have become highly angry that he is the owner of the team. It has meant destroying a lot of things that have helped the team in the past, like the TV rights. Despite all of this Glazer did not stop his purchase or the changes he has had to make in a bid to get the team a success.
It certainly shows that he is willing to make some expensive mistakes in the hope that it will pay off. It also makes the situation more of a gamble considering that he has bet on a whole team for winning seasons yet again when he is against all the odds. It is unknown, at least to us, why he might have fought so hard for something that clearly upsets the fans.