Man Utd. The Mother Lode

The five sons and one daughter of the late Malcolm Glazer – Avram, Joel, Kevin, Bryan and Edward Glazer, and their sister, Darcie Glazer Kassewitz – will be paid $3.9m (£2.5m) each annually as the majority shareholders of Manchester United plc, the United holding company registered in the Cayman Islands and floated on the New York stock exchange.

The Glazer siblings together own approximately 131m shares, 80% of the total issued, according to a spokesman for the club. That means every three months, they will be paid $5.9m (£3.8m) in total. Annually, the payment of that dividend four times, each quarter, adds up to $23.6m (£15.2m) altogether to be paid to the Glazer siblings – $3.9m (£2.5m) each.

The decision to pay the dividend was, the company said, made by the board, on which all six of the Glazer siblings sit. The regular £15m the Glazers are set to make from United every year follows a series of occasions on which they have made money since floating the club, which they bought in 2005 using debt that the club itself has been made to repay. The family made £75m selling a portion of their shares when they floated the club in 2012, then last summer sold a further 12m shares for $17 each – making another $200m (£129m). In December, one of the Glazer brothers, Edward, announced the sale of 3m of his shares, for a price that was expected to fetch him $45m (£29m).

The debt imposed by the Glazer family when they bought the club with £525m of borrowed money in 2005, remains £411m, despite about £700m in interests and other finance-related costs having been paid by the club since then.

From here