How a battle for the soul of Man United set the tone for the 1999 Treble season
The Old Trafford club's historic campaign was preceded by a hugely divisive - and ultimately unsuccessful - attempt by Sky to gain control
Twenty-five years on from Manchester United’s glorious 1999 Treble, Sir Alex Ferguson’s talent-packed side is still remembered as one of the greatest teams in the history of British sport. But, as author Ryan Baldi details in his book They Always Score: The Unforgettable, Improbable, Iconic Story of Manchester United’s Treble Winners (Polaris, 2023), a proposed takeover could have had an even more profound and long-lasting impact on the club than anything that happened on the pitch that year, had the collective activism of a group of supporters - and a ruling by the Monopolies Commission - not intervened
July 1, 1998 – Isleworth, Middlesex
As Martin Edwards and Maurice Watkins spread napkins across their laps and prepared for a run-of-the-mill business lunch, neither anticipated the earth-shaking reverberations the meeting would unleash.
Manchester United’s chairman and the club solicitor had been called to BSkyB’s headquarters near Heathrow Airport to discuss the prospect of introducing pay-per-view matches as part of Sky Sports’ Premier League broadcast offering. Or so they thought.
Once Edwards and Watkins were through the door, settled and with pleasantries exchanged, Mark Booth, Sky’s chief executive, confessed to a ruse. Pay-per-view was not on the agenda. That money-grab would be discussed another time. Instead, Booth had an altogether more seismic matter to raise.
‘What I really wanted to talk about is Sky buying Manchester United,’ he said.
Regional broadcaster Granada bought a 9.9% stake in Liverpool in 1998 and purchased around a 5% interest in Arsenal the following year. Cable broadcaster NTL bought into Newcastle, Aston Villa and Leicester, plus Scottish giants Celtic and Rangers, as the Millennium neared, too.
And if outright media ownership of football clubs was as inevitable as some were beginning to believe, there were no more obvious bedfellows than Manchester United and BSkyB.
When English football’s top clubs broke away from the Football League to collectively negotiate their own television-rights deal and form the Premier League in the early 1990s, it was a £304 million five-year contract brokered with Sky that fostered football’s subsequent financial boom. When that deal was renegotiated for a further four years, taking it up until 2001, the figure had shot up to £670 million.
Sky’s eye-watering investment reflected the popularity of the Premier League on their subscription-driven sports channels. And no team drew viewers like United. Through their success on the pitch as champions in four of the first five Premier League seasons and by exploiting marketing opportunities like no club ever had before – from United-themed wallpaper, cola and, believe it or not, life insurance to a relentless cycle of replica-kit releases – the club were adored by their ever-swelling fanbase; to everyone else, they were hated bitterly. Whichever side of the line you were on, United were box-office, must-watch TV.
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp owned 40% of BSkyB at the time, and the Australian media mogul’s standing interests in sporting franchises in the United States hinted at a similar move into football. In March 1998, through News Corp, whose Fox network held several sporting broadcast rights contracts in the US, Murdoch bought the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team. The following month, News Corp acquired a minority stake in the LA Lakers. Having banked on TV coverage of the Premier League to revitalise Sky in the early 90s, club ownership would give Murdoch and Sky yet greater control of their primary UK product.
Plus, by the time of Booth, Edwards and Watkins’ surreptitious sit-down, United and Sky were already partners in the club’s latest attempt to squeeze cash from their supporters: MUTV. Pipped to the distinction of being the first football club to have an in-house television channel by Middlesbrough’s launch of Boro TV in 1997, MUTV was to take to the air in September 1998, offering magazine-style shows, exclusive player interviews and delayed match replays – at a cost of £4.99 per month.
‘You’d seen the growth of Sky and TV,’ says Edwards. ‘All these other channels were coming on board. We also had our own radio station. Granada were very keen to get involved. I can’t remember whether it was Sky or Granada who approached us first. In the end, we did a deal [for MUTV] between the three of us – a third, a third, a third; Granada being the local station, Sky doing the Premier League, and ourselves. We set it up as a three-way partnership, but they paid the costs. That was how it was set up.’
On 6 September 1998, the proposed takeover was no longer a whispered secret confined to the boardrooms of Old Trafford and Sky headquarters.
‘MURDOCH TO BUY MANCHESTER UNITED,’ screamed the Sunday Telegraph’s front-page exclusive. ‘Rupert Murdoch’s satellite television group, BSkyB, is to buy Manchester United for up to £575 million,’ said the explosive article’s opening paragraph.
‘I don’t think we ever found out how they got the exclusive,’ Edwards says. ‘But they got it out before we formally were ready to announce it.’
The day after the Sunday Telegraph splash, the Manchester United-supporting journalist Michael Crick, who was a reporter for the BBC’s Newsnight at the time, was asked to write a reactive piece for the Evening Standard. In his article, Crick railed against what he perceived to be a deal damaging not only to his club but the entire game.
The previous week, Crick had attended a concert at the Royal Albert Hall to mark the one-year anniversary of Princess Diana’s death. There, he had bumped into Richard Hytner, a former boyhood acquaintance from their time together at Manchester Grammar School. Hytner ran the influential advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi. He was also an avid Manchester United fan and shareholder. After reading Crick’s commentary in the Evening Standard, Hytner suggested the two old friends pool their collective expertise and contacts books to form an alliance in opposition to the BSkyB takeover.
‘After the piece comes out,’ Crick remembers, ‘Richard then rings me and says, “Why don’t we set up a shareholders group to oppose the bid?” I immediately said, “Yes, what a great idea.” We put out a press release and that immediately drew in other people. Then I started reaching out to people I knew who supported United; people like Jonathan Michie, the economist, the journalist Jim White and the actor Roger Brierley. I got a friend of mine who works at Companies House to print off a list of all the shareholders. There were about 28,000 addresses. And how do you get through all of that? Well, it was easy. We had lots of people phoning us up saying, “How can we help?” So we sorted these addresses into blocks of 1,000, sent them out to these individuals with a pack of address labels and said, “Type out all of these names on to address labels over the next week.” Then we sent out a mailing to all the shareholders asking them to join us, asking them to contribute money. The drummer from Queen, Roger Taylor, gave us £10,000. We got loads of contributions.’
Crick and Hytner formed Shareholders United Against Murdoch (SUAM), bringing together as many fans and minor shareholders as possible in order to, in theory, gather enough of a collective stake in the club to influence the outcome of the BSkyB bid. They also teamed up with Andy Walsh and the Independent Manchester United Supporters Association (IMUSA) he ran.
‘I didn’t realise it at the time but Andy had once been a member of the [left-wing activist] group the Militant Tendency,’ Crick says. ‘Andy was a bit weary of me because I had once written a book about the Militant Tendency exposing their activities within the Labour Party. But we actually got on remarkably well. One of the things about being a part of a Trotskyist group such as that is that you learn the art of campaigning, so Andy was very good at getting things done.
‘We divided the fans up between us. We were dealing with the more middle-class people who were more likely to have shares; Andy was dealing with the more local, Manchester-based, working-class audience who were less likely to have shares. We tried to get as many people to buy shares as possible, even if they only bought one.’
On 9 September, before Charlton visited for the third round of the new season’s Premier League fixtures, United and BSkyB held a press conference at Old Trafford. Caught off guard by the Sunday Telegraph’s outing of the deal, they wanted to publicly wrest control of the developing narrative, confirming the agreement – albeit at the higher-than-reported figure of £623 million – and attempting to assuage the backlash.
‘Our interests are 100 per cent aligned with the Manchester United fans,’ Booth said. ‘They want to win the league, so do we. They want to win the cup, so do we. They want to have the best manager and players and so do we. They don’t want us to do anything that will change their club in a negative way, and we won’t.’
Those opposed to the deal weren’t buying Booth’s line. In December, reports would emerge of United’s interest in Japanese midfielder Hidetoshi Nakata. It was claimed Sky were the ones pushing for a £10 million bid for the Perugia player in order to further tap into the Far East market. And the pervading feeling was that Sky wanted to be able to negotiate from both sides of the table when it came time to hammer out future TV-rights deals.
An insight into just how deeply Booth’s affection for United ran came when, at the press conference, a reporter from The Mirror – under instruction from managing editor Piers Morgan – embarrassed the American executive with what, for any half-interested football follower, was a simple question: ‘Mr, Booth, can you tell me who plays left-back for Manchester United, please?’ Booth was clueless. Denis Irwin, that ever-reliable fan favourite, had unwittingly struck an early blow against the proposed takeover.
The resistance campaigners organised a mass meeting at Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall a week after news of the BSkyB deal had broken. Around 1,000 supporters attended to hear Crick, White and Walsh speak. Fans were urged to stage a sit-in at Old Trafford when United hosted Barcelona in the Champions League a few days later and to altogether boycott the upcoming game against Liverpool.
While opposition to the BSkyB bid was visceral and significant, the United supporters who mobilised against the takeover represented a vocal minority. The number of fans who gathered at Bridgewater Hall paled in comparison to the 55,147 who’d packed Old Trafford the previous Wednesday to watch Dwight Yorke score twice on his home debut as United smashed Charlton 4-1. There was no sit-in at the Barcelona game, no significant boycotting of the Liverpool match.
‘In those early days we still faced a lot of opposition,’ Crick says. ‘As a club we’d reigned supreme from ’93 to ’97, and it looked like we were going to reign supreme for a very long time. Suddenly, Arsene Wenger and Arsenal come along and we lose our crown. Football fans are naturally pessimistic types. There were a lot of people who thought that was it, the glory days were over – “Ferguson needs to go. The board need to go and buy Ronaldo.” A lot of people felt that if Sky took over they’d pump in lots of money, Christmas would arrive and we would be able to buy who we wanted.’
Even if fan sentiment had been unanimously anti-takeover, it’s unlikely that alone would have been enough to scupper Sky’s ambition – ‘No, not really,’ is Edwards’s blunt response to the question of whether supporters’ opposition to the Murdoch merger had a material effect on the board’s pursuit of a deal. If the bid were to be blocked, it would not be because of activism around Old Trafford alone. It would require an intervention from Downing Street.
‘The important stuff was behind the scenes,’ Crick says. ‘It seemed the only way you were going to thwart this bid was through the competitive offices. So, first of all, getting the Office of Fair Trading to deem that it should go to the Monopolies Commission. We got people to write to their local Members of Parliament and get them to sign a Commons motion against it. That helped flush out where the support was among MPs. We were lucky enough to get some lawyers involved who gave their help for free. That then enabled us to put forward documentation to the OFS. Once the Monopolies Commission inquiry got underway, we then gathered evidence for them.’
SUAM and IMUSA had to prove that the Sky takeover was not only immoral but anti-competitive. And in April of 1999, between crucial fixtures against Juventus and Arsenal in the Champions League and FA Cup, respectively, the Mergers & Monopolies Commission delivered its verdict: the proposed takeover was blocked, a victory many fans would consider a fourth triumph for the club in its Treble year.
