It was the deal that was going to show the business upside-down, sports activities’ reply to a type of Marvel/DC crossovers. One enterprise analyst quoted broadly at the time mentioned it was like “bringing together Coca-Cola and Pepsi — it’s that big.”
On February 7, 2001, sports activities followers on each side of the Atlantic woke to information of an alliance between two of the largest names in the enterprise: Manchester United and the New York Yankees, the Red Devils and the Bronx Bombers, the team of Sir Bobby Charlton, George Best, Eric Cantona and David Beckham and the team of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio and Derek Jeter.
The partnership was launched at a information convention in a resort simply off Times Square.
“It is an alliance,” United’s chief government Peter Kenyon informed the assembled media, “that links the greatest franchises in the world.”
For a time, the sports activities pages have been stuffed with tales about how a lot this deal would possibly in the end be value for each — billions of dollars, NCS reckoned — and the way it would possibly evolve.
Initially, the two groups deliberate to promote one another’s merchandise. Beyond that, they hoped to open doorways. The dot-com bubble of the late Nineties had burst, however there was a complete new world on the market to overcome.
With Beckham and Jeter as their respective poster boys, the advertising alternatives have been enormous. Both United and the Yankees have been already serial champions. Together, it was felt, they’d rule the world.
But the partnership, launched amid nice fanfare, by no means bought previous first base. It was barely heard of once more. As Peter Draper, United’s advertising director at the time, tells The Athletic, “it withered on the vine”.
In the unusual early years of the web age, when watching Premier League football was still largely an underground activity in the United States, the easy reality is that no person, whether or not in Manchester or New York, actually knew what to do with the partnership.
“On the surface, nothing really happened,” says Charlie Stillitano, the Italian-American sports executive who helped to broker the deal. “But looking at it more clearly now, it opened people’s eyes in America to the business potential of soccer — and laid the foundations for everything that has happened over the 25 years since.”
It was late 1999, individuals have been panicking about the millennium bug, and the Yankees have been on high of the world. They had simply received their third World Series title in 4 seasons and, with Mariano Rivera pitching and Jeter at shortstop, have been already planning to make it 4 out of 5. They have been the most precious franchise in world sport and have been searching for methods to remain forward of the sport. Even the concept of making a Yankees soccer workforce had been floated.
The New York Yankees had simply received the 1999 World Series (Matthew Stockman/ALLSPORT through Getty Images)
“We were looking to do whatever we could do to expand the Yankees brand, particularly into Britain,” says Harvey Schiller, who had not too long ago been employed by George Steinbrenner, the principal proprietor, to turn into chief government of YankeeNets, which additionally owned the New Jersey Nets and the New Jersey Devils.
Manchester United have been at the superb peak of their powers. They had simply received the treble — the Premier League, the FA Cup and, for the first time in 31 years, the European Cup, which had been rebranded as the Champions League. They have been intent on world domination off the pitch and on it. With the digital age dawning and with superstars resembling Beckham of their ranks, there have been industrial alternatives of a kind that had not existed earlier than.
At a time when the majority of blouse sponsorship offers in the Premier League have been for beer, crisps, automobiles, vans, electronics and desktop computer systems, United, whose long-running partnership with Japanese electronics firm Sharp was nearing an finish, needed one thing completely different.
“We started searching the market for a major partner, a modern tech company, that could help us expand the brand globally,” Draper says. “We were going back and forth to the States a lot. We spoke to Jerry Yang at Yahoo!, which was one of the really big fish at that time.”
They discovered that associate nearer to residence, securing a cope with telecommunications large Vodafone, which at £7.5million a yr (then $10.8m) was by far the largest in the Premier League.
But their varied Stateside conversations had opened doorways. “Charlie Stillitano had introduced us to a variety of people, mainly in the tech space and the media space,” Draper says. “MUTV (United’s television station) was still in its relative infancy and the YES (Yankees Entertainment and Sports) Network was really coming on the radar. That’s how Charlie introduced us to the Yankees and to Harvey Schiller.”
Stillitano’s eyes gentle up when he describes the potential he noticed. “Manchester United was one of the few teams in the world at that time that actually thought about marketing,” he says. “They had a full merchandising crew and were doing things that were cutting edge to try to develop their brand. And the Yankees were collecting clubs — the Nets, the Devils — and they had formed the YES Network. That brought about the idea that the Yankees and Manchester United could do something really cool together.”
The talks have been saved below wraps, with an announcement deliberate in New York on the afternoon of February 7, however the information seeped out the night time earlier than and was plastered over the again pages of the morning papers: “Yankee Doodle United”, “United hit Yankee jackpot”.
Shares in Manchester United opened on the London Stock Exchange at 211p and briefly soared as excessive as 240p earlier than the information convention started in New York.
Charlton, the most venerable of English footballers, was stunned by a curveball when a reporter requested him if he may title the Yankees’ shortstop. The reply was Jeter, MVP of their current World Series win, who was about to signal a $189million, 10-year deal that may dwarf even Beckham’s earnings at the time.
“I’m not proud to say I don’t know,” Charlton informed the assembled media. “But our club is an institution and (…) because of that, we are very careful of who we join forces with. This alliance with the New York Yankees is an alliance with the organisation that is probably as similar to Manchester United as it’s possible to be.”
“It was presented in the media as a merchandising deal: ‘We’ll sell their caps and they’ll sell our shirts’,” Draper says. “But it wasn’t really that.
“The intent was an intellectual exchange around the understanding of sports from different places and the different relationship those sports had with their fanbase and the media — because the media landscape in America was and still is very different from the UK. There was learning to be done intellectually and then we would see where we might take it commercially.”
“It was a marketing relationship,” Schiller says. “After we did the deal, we started questioning some people on the street in Britain, asking them, ‘What do you know about the New York Yankees?’, and they didn’t even know it was a baseball team. They thought ‘Yankee’ just meant an American person. ‘You’re in New York, you’re a Yankee’.
“I said, ‘When I put on this NY baseball cap, what does that mean?’. This guy said, ‘It means you’re a New Yorker’. So that was what we wanted to change through this relationship.”
Stillitano remembers a cargo of Yankees caps to Manchester that offered out inside days. “But because of how marketing revenue was distributed in the MLB, the Yankees only ever received a tiny, tiny portion of whatever was sold internationally,” he says.
Schiller concurs. “It was a nice announcement for everyone,” he says. “But on our side, because merchandise revenue is controlled by the league and distributed equally among every team, it didn’t matter if the Yankees sold 60 per cent more than everyone else; we would still only get one share. There wasn’t really any advantage from doing that and sharing the revenue.
“But it was a fun thing to do. And it was good publicity. For both parties, I think.”
There was excited media chatter about cross-promotion: the chance of getting Beckham and Jeter collectively on the similar billboard.
But that threw up one other drawback. The Yankees have been Adidas’ industrial companions, however United, who had a cope with Umbro, had not too long ago agreed a brand new 10-year sportswear and advertising partnership with Nike, which was to start out in 2002. “And it was hard for them to do anything on that side of things when one was Nike and the other was Adidas,” Stillitano says.
David Beckham was massively marketable at the time (Gary M Prior/Allsport/Getty Images)
There have been advantages for United, although. For a time, highlights of their matches — and certainly traditional video games from years passed by — have been screened on the YES Network, which earned them weekly tv publicity in the Greater New York space when Premier League protection was scarce.
“Don’t forget, this is the early 2000s, and there was so little international soccer on TV in the U.S. at that time,” Stillitano says. “It’s very early days of the internet. You had to look very hard even to find the box scores.
“They weren’t allowed to show the games live. I don’t know whether the rule was 12 hours later or 24 hours later, but we had what was called ‘Manchester Mondays’, where Manchester United’s games were shown on the YES Network on a Monday night. Suddenly, you had a bunch of soccer fans who could see these games, which was great for awareness of Manchester United in the States.”
Exposure and model recognition have been a giant a part of it for United, gearing up for a pioneering pre-season tour of America in the summer season of 2003. Just as Ferguson had got down to conquer Europe, the United hierarchy had made it their mission to “crack America” in the 2000s. The affiliation with the Yankees may solely assist in that regard.
But the partnership by no means developed. “Commercially, we never really got to a level of, ‘Wouldn’t it be good to do this?’,” Draper says. “If I was to be critical of us, on both sides of the water, I don’t think we put our shoulder to the wheel on it and really explored what it could be. Today, you look at it and think, ‘Why didn’t we?’. In retrospect, I’m not sure why, other than the day-to-day getting in the way. We didn’t have the vast commercial team that United had a few years later.
“It was a new thing. People were a bit tentative about it. We didn’t want to tread on their toes and they didn’t want to tread on ours. There wasn’t really a business plan behind it. The intention was for it to evolve, the way some of our other projects did, but that didn’t really happen. Sometimes you get out of things what you put in. I don’t think we put enough in. It became a bit of a hollow arrangement.”
When was it disbanded? “It wasn’t, really,” he says. “It wasn’t like there was a contract over hundreds of pages saying, ‘We’ll do this and you’ll do that’. At most, it was a memorandum of understanding. And it just sort of… gently disappeared.
“It was nice in a ‘hands across the sea’ way, but it never really came to anything. If we had been a bit more aggressive, on both sides, we could have got a bit more out of it.”
Schiller makes a shocking revelation: that United may feasibly have gotten much more out of it.
“I tried to talk Mr Steinbrenner into buying Manchester United,” he says. “We had an opportunity to purchase it — not for the Yankees, but for the Steinbrenner family. George’s son Hank, who was a big soccer person, was very keen. He’s one of the ones who pushed his father to get the Yankees involved with Manchester United in the first place.
“There was an opportunity to buy it, and I don’t remember how much it would have cost, but it certainly wasn’t anything near what it would be today. If I remember correctly, it was some way below $1billion.”
That suggests it was in the early 2000s, when BSkyB, owned by Australian media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, was United’s largest shareholder. In 2003, BSkyB offered its 9.9 per cent stake to the Cubic Expression firm, owned by Irish horseracing tycoons John Magnier and J.P. McManus, who have been in dispute with Sir Alex Ferguson over the breeding rights to racehorse Rock of Gibraltar. That triggered the sequence of occasions that ended with one other American household, the Glazers, shopping for the membership in 2005 for £790million ($1.4billion at the time) and loading it with debt.
“I was pushing and hoping we would do it,” Schiller says. “But a lot of other things were happening at the same time, and there were several complications. I’m not sure the reasons (that Steinbrenner didn’t proceed), but probably because people didn’t understand the value of the Premier League and what a great investment it would have been. The door was open, but we didn’t follow through.”
Stillitano remembers that the Steinbrenner household felt shopping for United would have introduced too many dangers, on condition that financial performance was so closely tied to securing Champions League qualification each season. “And I said, ‘Look, this is Manchester United with Sir Alex Ferguson. It’s always going to be in the Champions League’,” Stillitano says — and that was the case till Ferguson retired in 2013 and the membership started to really feel the results of mismanagement below the Glazer household’s possession.
What type of proprietor would Steinbrenner have been for United? “If the family had been involved, I believe it would have been very popular,” Schiller says. “It certainly would have had very strong management, which was the nature of the Yankees. If that had happened, then the marketing relationship between the Yankees and Manchester United would have become very significant.”
Twenty-five years on, the sports activities business is a really completely different place: way more commercialised, way more open to abroad affect and enlargement.
Stillitano suggests the Americanisation of European sport — of the Premier League particularly — could be traced again to United’s expansionist plans in the early 2000s: not simply the alliance with the Yankees, which introduced a flurry of media publicity, however their pre-season tour of 2003, which he remembers turning heads in American sports activities funding circles.
In 2026, more than half the clubs in the Premier League are American-owned — in lots of circumstances by buyers who additionally personal or have stakes in American sports activities franchises, resembling the Glazers (Manchester United and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers), Kroenke Sports & Entertainment (Arsenal, the Los Angeles Rams, the Denver Nuggets, the Colorado Avalanche, the Colorado Rapids), Shahid Khan (Fulham and the Jacksonville Jaguars) and Fenway Sports Group (Liverpool, the Boston Red Sox, the Pittsburgh Penguins and RFK Racing).
But even now, there may be little or no sense of crossover. FSG oversees Liverpool and the Red Sox at an government degree, and the two franchises share a industrial associate (Boston-based cloud storage service supplier Wasabi Technologies), however the kind of all-conquering sporting empire briefly envisioned in the early 2000s has not come to move.
Hank Steinbrenner (left) was eager for the household to purchase Manchester United (Al Messerschmidt/Getty Images)
The closest factor to it’s the Red Bull Sports empire, whose pursuits embody soccer (most notably RB Leipzig, Red Bull Salzburg, New York Red Bulls and a minority stake in Leeds United), ice hockey, motor sport, rugby union and crusing. It is an offshoot of the Austria-based Red Bull drinks firm.
But it’s nonetheless a way off what Stillitano had in thoughts when as he places it, in the rush of pleasure over the United-Yankees partnership, he “naively thought, ‘What if we could get the biggest brands in world sport — Ferrari (the Formula 1 team), the All Blacks (the New Zealand rugby union team) and so on — and do something really big?’. How cool would that be?”
“It sounds terrifying. But the idea of building an all-conquering sports empire — building on a unified strategic vision both on and away from the field — seems far more realistic 25 years on. “There’s so much more potential for cross-promotion now,” Schiller says. “What happened back then was that both sides didn’t really know what to do with it.”
Schiller, Draper and Stillitano agree that the concept was years forward of its time. And whereas each United and the Yankees are nonetheless amongst the largest and strongest manufacturers in world sport, it’s doable to take a look at their dominant positions at the startof the century and wonder if, in the digital age, an opportunity was missed.
As recently as 2010, the first year of the Forbes list of most valuable sports franchises, United have been first, and the Yankees have been third behind the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys. In the 2024 rankings, led by the Cowboys for the ninth consecutive yr, the Yankees were fifth (still the leading baseball team by far) and United were down in 14th. Both have remained commercially sturdy regardless of a downturn in fortunes on the fields, however baseball faces its personal challenges and United, after years of mismanagement, face theirs.
There is a postscript. Since May 2013, the similar month that Ferguson stepped down at United, the Yankees have been in partnership with Manchester City, as a 20 per cent investor in the newly fashioned Major League Soccer franchise New York City FC. For now, NYCFC nonetheless play the majority of their residence video games at Yankee Stadium, which has additionally hosted Manchester City on varied pre-season excursions.
When the Yankees agreed a deal to repurchase the YES Network in 2019, MLB.com reported that one of their fellow investors was the Mubadala Development Company, the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund led by City’s proprietor Sheikh Mansour and chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak.
“I don’t know the ins and outs of it,” Draper says. “I remember at the time we were asked, ‘Do you ever see New York having a Manchester United team?’, and my response was, ‘There’s only one United’. But City have gone and grasped that concept and done it brilliantly with their multi-club around the world. That is the kind of thing you could have done.
“But that wasn’t the intention in 2001. It was about an exchange of intellect. The intention was that it would evolve from there, but it never did.”
It didn’t get past first base, however it was nonetheless a turning level. As Stillitano places it, there was barely a ripple on the floor past the preliminary headlines. “But if you look at it clearly 25 years on, a lot of stuff happened,” he says. “And this deal was a big part of what really opened people’s eyes, in America, to what soccer was and how you could market it.”