Reading C
Read the text. Are the statements true or false, according to the text, or is the information not given? Circle T (true), F (false) or NI (no information).
A recent news report tells the story of an anthropologist who discovered a lost tribe in the Amazon. Their way of life had hardly changed since the Stone Age and they had never seen a car or met a foreigner. What shocked the anthropologist most about the natives, however, was not their strange social customs or mysterious religious rituals, but the fact that several of them were wearing Manchester United football shirts!
Whether or not that report is true, what is certain is that Manchester United stopped being just a famous football team several years ago and became a highly successful multinational corporation. The words ‘football’ and ‘club’ were actually dropped from the players’ badges in 2000 in an effort to strengthen the corporate image. With a successful stock market flotation in 1991 and a current market value of over £1.4 bn, Manchester United is as much a triumph of the media as of great soccer.
‘Top clubs have grown on the back of television contracts’, says Richard Baldwin of accountants Deloitte and Touche. With this also comes merchandising. Manchester United’s megastore stocks 1,500 different items, is constantly packed, and merchandising outlets as far away as Singapore, Hong Kong and Sydney attract thousands of fans who couldn’t even tell you where Manchester is on the map. ‘United look and behave very much like a traditional business from a corporate point of view,’ says Nigel Hawkins, a financial analyst. ‘They have a strong brand and have worked to maximize it by bringing in good people.’ They certainly have. One sponsorship deal alone – with Vodaphone – netted Manchester £36 million, and American insurance group AIG just paid £56.5 million for a similar four-year deal.
11) The story about the lost tribe may not be factually correct.