👉 Background: Manchester United is one of the most famous and most successful soccer teams in the world. They have won 20 EPL titles and 12 FA Cups and are estimated to have 1.1 billion fans and followers around the world.

👉 What happened: Manchester United is publicly listed on the New York Stock Exchange. And one family, the Glazers, own 69% of the shares. But in the last week, a Qatari banker lobbed a lazy $6.1 billion USD offer for the club, which is more than double what the club was trading for on the NYSE.

But the Glazers rejected the offer and accepted an offer from a British investor for just 25% of the company... which values Man United at around $6.3 billion USD.

👉 What else: Given Manchester United is having its worst start to a season for 30 years, both Man United investors and fans are keen to move on from their majority owners. But with different classes of shares... this makes it very challenging.

What's the key learning?

💡Different classes of shares can carry different voting rights, different dividend policies and different privileges too.

💡When Manchester United listed on the NYSE in 2012, Class A shares were sold to the public. And, Class B shares were retained by the Glazer family. But here's the challenge for Man Utd investors:

• Class B shares are entitled to a regular dividend... but Class A wasn't.
• Class B shares also had 10 times the voting power of Class A shares

Essentially meaning that no investor could gain a controlling interest in Manchester United without the Glazers agreeing.

💡While this seems quite strange for a football club, many big tech companies in the US have multi-class share structures which give the founders preferential rights.Think: Meta, Google, Airbnb, and Slack .

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