Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business
A dark hour imprisoned in a gridlocked multi-storey car park close to Old Trafford on a home-match evening gave me an opportunity to ponder what was once called ‘the beautiful game’. I was a Chelsea fan in my youth — the heroic era of Cooke, Wilkins and Droy — but I’m irritated by the modern fashion for corporate chiefs to declare their club allegiances in the interest of looking blokeish. I’m prepared to accept that the governor of the Bank of England has a lifelong passion for Aston Villa, on the basis that no one would make that claim to impress, but — to take two examples I stumbled across this week — who really cares that the chief executives of Standard Chartered, Peter Sands, and the advertising agency M&C Saatchi, David Kershaw, are devotees of what Kershaw refers to in his official bio as ‘the mighty Arsenal’?
So I’m not a natural supporter of the Red Knights, the consortium led by Jim O’Neill of Goldman Sachs, financier Keith Harris and hedge-fund player Paul Marshall, who are trying to wrest control of Manchester United from the Glazer family.
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