The normally excellent David Conn comes perilously close to echoing the classic English anti-American line today in his post on the American Glazer family taking £500 million out of Manchester United since purchasing the club with leveraged funds in May 2005. While his arguments, in part taken from the work of the excellent Andersred blog, on how United have been ravaged by irresponsible borrowing, are sound, his conclusion leaves a bad taste:

The US owners of two of England’s other biggest clubs, Arsenal and Liverpool, both motivated financially by the Premier League’s global TV and commercial income, fly in this week. Stan Kroenke will contemplate the crumbling of quality at Arsenal and departure of several top players during his ownership, while ticket prices for fans were increased. John Henry will arrive for a Wembley final after a deeply ignominious episode in the club’s history, the Luis Suárez affair, the leadership at Liverpool furiously criticised by a coalition of anti-racism groups.

Henry has always expressed puzzlement with United fans’ objections to the Glazers’ debt-loading, given United’s success. Kroenke, who paid Arsenal’s selling English shareholders millions personally but has committed to not putting a cent into the club itself, in his only public address to date, memorably went out of his way to express admiration for what the Glazers have done. MU Finance plc is where those deeds are recorded, and even after so long, the running total should always be observed.

Implied here is the idea that American investors qua American investors are reckless when it comes to purchasing storied, top flight English clubs. No mention of the countless small-time English business interests that have left various clubs in a state of total financial disarray over the last few decades (Ken Bates anyone?).

Conn taps into to the classic European fear of American globalization, in which ancient English institutions like football clubs will be irresponsibly transformed into ‘brands,’ or worse—’franchises.’ Yet the fact remains that many English business investors in English football, or Russian, or whatever, would also approve of the Glazer strategy, particularly as leveraged buyouts are part-and-parcel with modern corporate practice. Conn echoes the tacit understanding in English circles that all economic irresponsibility can be traced to the United States, despite the wide-ranging evidence that the EU markets were just as poorly-regulated ahead of the 2008 downturn.

Rather than burning an old Yankee straw man, Conn should have used the opportunity to question why ‘modern corporate practices’ are used on an institution in which profits are rare and excessive losses the industry norm. The very fact United’s revenue, as with all European football clubs, is intrinsically tied to European and domestic success is the problem. That football is continuously treated like a typical profit-motivated ‘business’ when it demonstrates over-and-over again it is not, is the problem. The model itself is the problem, not those who continue to abuse it.

The financial disarray in modern football is not a matter of better use of the fit-and-proper test, nor is it a question of money-minded Americans ruining a traditional, British way-of-life. It is the insistence that football is a business like any other that continues to bring even the most successful clubs like Manchester United perilously close to significant decline.