“Member associations shall ensure that neither a natural nor a legal person (including holding companies and subsidiaries) exercises control or influence over more than one of their clubs whenever the integrity of any match or competition organised at member association level could be jeopardised. Member associations shall include such an obligation in their statutes and lay down the necessary implementing provisions.”
Article 7 of the UEFA rulebook is unequivocal. Should Qatari interest in buying Manchester United from the Glazer family materialise into a potential takeover, it may also prove the biggest hurdle to a transaction being completed.
On Tuesday night the Daily Mail reported that a “number of wealthy individuals” from Qatar were merging to make an offer to buy the Old Trafford club in a potential record sale of a sports team.
But the identities of those individuals have not been made clear, while subsequent reports elsewhere have indicated that the country’s emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, is interested.
To satisfy the UEFA rules should a takeover be completed, they will need to provide sufficient evidence that there is no overlap with or links to Qatar Sports Investment, which owns Paris Saint-Germain.
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Otherwise, a deal is unlikely to be completed because it would lead to a situation where one of the two clubs would be blocked from competing in the Champions League.
The Mail report said that the group looking at United is not linked to QSI and its advisors are confident that it can be proven no conflict of interest exists.
But QSI is affiliated with the Qatar Investment Authority, the state’s sovereign wealth fund. QSI's chairman Nasser Al-Khelaifi also sits on the QIA board.
The Glazers confirmed that they would listen to offers in November and Raine Group, the US merchant bank which also oversaw last year’s sale of Chelsea, have been put in charge of overseeing the process.
A soft deadline of mid-February has been set for bids to be submitted and one of Britain’s richest men, Sir Jim Ratcliffe, has already confirmed his interest.
Paris Saint-Germain's Qatari president Nasser Al-Khelaifi (AFP/Getty Images)Yet the reported asking price of the Glazers is about £6bn, an unprecedented sum for a sports team and more than double what Chelsea ended up being sold for last spring.
That deal, which saw Clearlake Capital and US businessman Todd Boehly take over from the sanctioned Russian Roman Abramovich, was worth about £2.5bn with an additional £1.5bn of investment in infrastructure promised.
Experts think United’s true value is somewhere between £2bn and £2.5bn but the club’s history and name could see it sold for more than that figure.
On 22 November last year a United statement said that the club was "commencing a process to explore strategic alternatives… as part of this process, the board will consider all strategic alternatives, including new investment into the club, a sale, or other transactions involving the company."
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