Making £30m from Investment In Football Club

Read this successful investment story about the man who made £30m from his investment in a football club.

The Telegraph:

Whatever else he does, Harry Dobson will be remembered as the man who made £30m from Manchester United but to the 58-year-old Scot, it doesn't even rank as his best investment. "It was a very, very good deal but it wasn't the best deal I have ever done,'' recalls Dobson of his two-and-a-half-year return on a 6.7pc stake in the Premiership club.

"I bought at 127p-a-share and sold for 300p. It's not an exceptional return. I'm in the mining business. I'm used to trying to do better than that. I once bought a zinc miner for $12m and sold it for $112m over three years. Some property things have been very good too.'' To Dobson, all deals are just investments - a discovery he made at the start of his career some 40 years ago at a mining stockbroker in Australia. "The first day I was there,'' he recalls, "they were trying to tell me what to do and I said: 'let me see if I've got this right. You have these certificates and you sell them for money'. I thought it was absolutely marvellous. I'm a farmer's son from the Scottish borders. I still have the home farm that I was born on. I'm pretty thick so I didn't graduate in anything.

"This concept of these pieces of paper suddenly creating value out of thin air was a concept that was a bit foreign to me but that's how I discovered what I was going to do for the rest of my life.''

It came in useful in 2002, when Dobson was given the opportunity of buying former chairman Martin Edwards' stake in United at a time when Irish horseracing tycoons JP McManus and John Magnier had built a stake in the club. Dobson has known both men for more than 20 years but says his investment was unrelated.

"Martin Edwards wanted to sell his shares and I think, but I don't know, that he didn't want to sell to the two Irishmen. So being Scottish, I must have been okay. Any time you've got somebody selling a large stake in something like that, they tend to be selling it at the bottom and that's indeed what happened.

"Man United was the only proper business in football so if you were ever going to buy anything in football it had to be the only proper business and it also had to be at the bottom of its cycle, which it was. I thought I could make money on it and I did.'' Dobson never went to Man United's Old Trafford ground, either for a match or business meeting. He has also never met Malcolm Glazer, whose heavily leveraged pounds 790m takeover of United last year resulted in Dobson's pay-day.

"I thought that the business was bought for too much money,'' he admits. "I probably couldn't have found it in my heart to pay 300p a share for it. I wish them all the luck in the world.

"It was a trade. There was no emotion involved in it for me at all. I have always been very open about what I was doing. I was there as an investor. I made no bones about that. I said when I bought it that I had bought it to sell it. I think the fans realised that.''

Dobson's Man United experience catapulted him into the media spotlight. He was ranked 115th on the Sunday Times Rich List this year, with a cited fortune of pounds 550m and is a British tax exile who has lived in Monaco for the past three years after earlier periods in Canada, Ireland and Jersey. "Everybody knows how much they're worth and anybody who says they don't isn't telling you the truth,'' he says. So how much is he worth? "I have absolutely no comment. But I do know how much it is and it's a lot less than the rich list says. Unless, that is, the price of gold keeps going up.''