The potentially most interesting news of recent weeks is of course the rumour that Qatar Holdings plan a massive takeover bid of United. The Glazers keep insisting that the club is not for sale,but of course it would be if someone was prepared to pay over the odds. And the Qatar group is exactly the kind of buyer our esteemed owners are likely to be looking for.
Even so I don’t get too excited by a rumour that has all the hallmarks of having been invented at a Fleet Street desk (or the Middle East equivalent). It’s not too difficult to imagine that someone has tried to put two and two together. A: You need an awful lot of money to convince the Glazers to sell. B: Some guys from Abu Dhabi are pouring an awful lot of money into City. C: Their wealthy neighbors from Qatar show a lot of interest in football, e.g. Barcelona and the World Cup. D: A bid for United is imminent. Even a humble blogger could have come up with something like that. And the stories circulating don’t contain any quotes or other facts to make them more credible.
But there is one little piece in this jigsaw that keeps nagging me. Why has Sir Alex offered such a lot of support for Qatar’s World Cup bid? When he did so in January 2010 it could be interpreted as nothing more than normal courtesy when visiting the country, but he praised the bid again in November and I don’t see a lot of (if any) footballing reasons for doing so. Might there just possibly be a hidden agenda?
Between the Lines 