Apple is set to buy one of the biggest football teams in Europe: Manchester United. Is Big Tech running away from their own sector?
The Premier League is up for grabs: more and more big football teams are being sold to foreign entities for billions of dollars. The latest news is that Apple, the tech giant manufacturer of the iPhone, might be interested in buying Manchester United.
Apple’s bid approaches $7 billion (6.6 to be precise), a potential football history record. It would also be the first football team owned by a tech company. A strange couple that is hard to imagine but that might become reality.
In recent years, many Premier League teams have been sold to foreign buyers, coming primarily from Gulf Countries. Oil is not an attractive business anymore for them, and so they wish to diversify entering the most profitable entertainment sector in the world.
In 2008, Manchester City was purchased by Sheikh Mansour, an Emirati billionaire and politician. In 2021, Newcastle United (a relatively minor team in the Premier League) was bought by a Saudi Arabia consortium.
And the trend is not limited to Great Britain. Paris Saint Germain (PSG), one of Europe’s biggest teams based in France, is owned by a Qatari sports organization closely linked to Qatar’s government. In fact, Qatar’s ownership of PSG is part of the wide series of scandals related to the 2022 World Cup.
But why would Apple follow the example of Gulf oil countries and buy a British sports team?
What is Apple doing
Apple is one of the biggest companies in history, being worth over 2 trillion dollars. It has always been a leading actor in the tech sector and a safe haven for investors. The tech sector, however, has had a very rough year, and Apple was hardly spared from it.
Some tech giants like Meta (Facebook’s parent company) and Netflix had it worse. Netflix, on its part, lost subscribers for the first time in 12 years, forcing them to introduce ad-based subscriptions.
Meta, on the other hand, lost 70% in value in just one year. A staggering loss, surely fueled by Mark Zuckerberg’s obsession with the Metaverse, but staggering nonetheless. Indeed, it is a sign that the tech sector has stopped growing, at least for the moment.
Even Apple, with their net-worth still above the clouds, has suffered some setbacks. Apple stocks have fallen almost 20% in one year, and their revenues have been disappointing too.
Just like the Gulf countries are looking for new places to invest, so is Apple. Football is a valuable and generally safe investment. Indeed, it might even be safer than tech, considering that Apple is willing to put their money into it.
Will Big Tech recover from this year? Will the Premier League become a cluster of multi-billionaires losing touch with their fans? It all seems likely right now, but first let’s see how the market reacts.
