Adam Williams, Finance & Governance Correspondent

Wed 15 February 2023 18:25, UK

The day the Glazer family leave Man United for good is finally coming into sharper focus – but the identity of their successors remains hazy.

The fog will, however, begin to clear following Friday’s (17 February) soft deadline for bids, after which takeover brokers Raine Group expect all interest parties to have submitted a one-paragraph offer with proof of funds.

As of today, only one group has publically declared its intentions: Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s Ineos, a London-headquartered multinational chemicals company with an annual turnover of roughly £50billion.

But it is now all but certain that Emir of Qatar Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani’s name will also feature on the bid list after Friday’s cut-off, likely as part of a consortium in league with the Qatari Investment Authority (QIA).

QIA have near a near-endless well of petrodollars from which to draw. Their assets – which include Harrods group and multibillion-pound property development projects in Manchester, as well as London and Glasgow – total £375bn.

The Glazers’ asking price of £6bn would be small change to the sovereign wealth fund, as would the £2bn it could cost to demolish and rebuild Old Trafford, a plan which is not finalised but for which the wheels are very much in motion.

But it has been reported that QIA are adamant that they will not overpay to get a deal over the line. It is for that reason that several experts consulted by this site still consider Ratcliffe’s bid the marginal favourite.

While Football Insider has been unable to verify whether that view is shared by Raine Group, it is understood that Ratcliffe has a genuine relationship with Joel and Avram Glazer.

Sentiment alone would not be enough to convince the Glazers, but Ratcliffe is working in tandem with JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs. If anyone can rival the wealth and – crucially – soft power of the Gulf states, it’s US investment banks.

There are expected to be at least four bidders for United in total. Could Twitter and Tesla’s Elon Musk be among them? Not according to industry analysts.

The billionaire provocateur, who once caused the club’s share price to soar after joking about buying them, has named United as his favourite football team. And it has now been reported that he is monitoring the situation closely.

But one financial source told Football Insider that it would be self-destructive for Musk to align his personal brand with United given that the club operates in an industry fuelled by tribalism.

Musk is a disrupter but even he might not fancy the challenges inherent in investing in such a partisan sector. Piling his chips on United would alienate millions of potential investors in Tesla, a publicly traded company.

In any case, sources have told Football Insider that false stories published at the foothills of the United takeover saga linking the likes of Apple and Meta with a deal were amplified by Raine Group to illustrate the club’s global appeal.

Musk certainly falls into the same glamorous but impractical category of groups spuriously linked with a takeover.

While talks between Man United and would-be investors are top of the agenda, the club’s top brass still have a business with thousands of employees and sensitive commercial interests to manage.

Significantly, the Red Devils are looking for a new front-of-shirt sponsor, the most valuable item in its commercial inventory worth well in excess of £100m per year if combined with naming rights for Old Trafford and Carrington.

Ben Peppi, commercial expert and head of sports services in the London office of law firm JMW Solicitors, has told this site that prospective new owners will be briefed by the club about any updates in the hunt for a new sponsor.

Among those who will be kept in the loop besides QIA and Ratcliffe are private groups from the US and Saudi Arabia.

Football Insider understands that any of the state-affiliated groups from the Middle East would almost certainly take United, who have traded on the New York Stock Exchange since 2012, private.

Uefa meanwhile would reportedly not consider a QIA-financed takeover to be a violation of its conflict-of-interest rules despite the ownership of Paris Saint-Germain by Qatar Sports Investment (QSI), a direct subsidiary of QIA.

Notably, PSG president Nasser Al-Khelaiffi, the chairman of QSI, sits on Uefa’s executive committee.

But the notion that there would be no state involvement in QIA’s potential ownership of Man United has been dismissed as laughable by geopolitical experts like Professor Simon Chadwick.

“They’re very hard-nosed and strategic about this,” he told Football Insider.

“What they are trying to do is create industrial networks to drive economic benefit, achieve geopolitical returns and project soft power.

“They are incredibly well advised and essentially what they are trying to do is to join the dots in a much wider economic and political network.“

State involvement from an authoritarian theocracy or not, QIA’s bid appears the favoured option for droves of United fans desperate to compete at the top of a Premier League increasingly tangled in the tentacles of Gulf-state ownership.

In other news, Man United and Chelsea in Lautaro Martinez race amid £70m reveal.