Man United fans urged to turn up heat on Glazers

A Manchester United supporter-based campaign to force the Glazer family to sell their interest in the club can only succeed if fans boycott matches and stop buying merchandise, a soccer finance expert has said.

Lifelong United fan Keith Harris, the former chairman of the Football League and executive chairman of investment bank Seymour Pierce, says raising the money to purchase the club "is the easy part" but convincing the owners to sell was much harder.

As the club's debts have swelled to £716.5 million (Dh4.03 billion), increasing numbers of fans are shunning the side's red and white colours and attending matches in green and gold, worn when the team were known as Newton Heath in its early days. The protest has attracted thousands of followers and Harris says fans must start boycotting matches if they wanted to force the Glazer family to sell.

Harris started to organise a possible takeover after being contacted by members of the Manchester United Supporters Trust, whose membership has risen to 50,000 in recent weeks.

He told the Daily Mail on yesterday: "It is no good fans turning up 10 minutes late for matches, they have to do more than that. "The green and gold protest is fabulous, a symbolic and significant message to the owners. Its like white handkerchiefs in Spain but it won't force the Glazers to sell to us."

Keep up with the latest business news from the region with the Emirates Business 24|7 daily newsletter. To subscribe to the newsletter, please click here.

Follow Emirates 24|7 on Google News.