Why Malcolm Glazer's passing isn't being universally mourned

In many ways Malcolm Glazer could be remembered as a respectable owner of Manchester United. He presided over a period of sustained success on the pitch, he encouraged a huge advance in commercial revenues and – unlike many a Premier League chairman - he made no attempt to interfere with the playing side of things, deferring all that to the presiding genius of the club, Sir Alex Ferguson. There was, however, one significant aspect about Glazer’s ownership that will forever mitigate against him being considered anything other than a disaster for United, its fans and for English football in general: the method he used to buy the club in the first place. [UNITED OWNER GLAZER DIES] Glazer was not interested in using his primary sporting asset for social advancement. He never turned up with a fanfare to watch United play live in the flesh, not even when they played in the three Champions League finals they reached in his time. He was not there proclaiming eternal loyalty, ensuring his face was on television, like Vincent Tan, or haplessly trying to sing along to the club anthem like Tom Hicks at Liverpool. Nor did he exploit it as a vehicle to promote his homeland like Sheikh Mansour. Glazer wasn’t interested in any of that. Politics and personality meant nothing to him. He didn’t even like the sport. All he was interested in was the money United could deliver him. What motivated him was the hosepipe of ready cash it could provide into his ailing Florida property empire. To get his hands on that cash, he engineered a quite shameless takeover employing a leveraged buyout. Effectively that meant taking out a vast mortgage on Manchester United which its customers were then obliged to pay off. An entirely debt-free organisation was thus immediately saddled with the largest deficit ever seen in the game.