Sir Martin Broughton has questioned the valuations being put on Liverpool and Manchester United at the moment, as they’re not based in London.
The British businessman has spoken to the Telegraph about the situation at these two Premier League giants, who could soon be changing owners, or at least having new minority investors involved.
Broughton was previously chairman at Liverpool for a brief period, but it seems he isn’t convinced these clubs will get their £4bn valuations met, because investors in football clubs tend to be more keen on clubs in London, nearer where they tend to be based.
“I would question whether they’ll [United and Liverpool] get the kind of prices they floated,” he said.
“With Chelsea – and I think Arsenal and Tottenham would fall into the same category – the people we spoke to tended to be overseas billionaires who had a pad in London and the pad in London was in Knightsbridge or Kensington, Chelsea or something.
“So when they came to London, they went to Chelsea. They were football fans, and they were Chelsea fans… they’re not going to be bidders for Liverpool or Manchester United because they’ve got a pad in London and they’re not planning to move their pad to Manchester or Liverpool. So it’s a different type of buyer to the ones that we were looking for with our consortium.”
There certainly seems to be an advantage to being a London club, but it would be a shame if that started to harm these two great institutions of English football, with so much history and success associated with Liverpool and Man Utd.
It also seems a slightly questionable claim anyway given that we’ve also seen big overseas investment in the likes of Manchester City and Newcastle United in recent history.