In August 2012, the Manchester United Football Club (MANU) was again listed on the New York Stock Exchange and it made an initial public offering at the same time. Football shares had been notoriously recognized as illiquid because the fans simply buy and hold them for good. How has the market been changed to accept MANU, small though world famous team? Behind this there has occurred a big change in policy, namely due to the “Jobs Act” in the States, involving reopening the capital market to smaller companies to let them produce employment.
    The purpose of this paper is to show that equity financing for football clubs in the open market not only provides a stable budget foundation for them but also encourages good corporate governance in their management. Once they are in the public market, even football clubs are exposed to pressures from the institutional investors if they mismanage their companies, as shown by results in the league table. In Manchester’ s case the tragedy started on May 9, 2013; the day when the legendary Sir Alex Ferguson published his resignation as the manager, followed by the successive poor performance of the club directed by the successor David Moyes. All those stories had been discounted in the market and the price had not performed well, in line with market index S&P 500. And then Moyes was fired.
    This is understandable in the sense that for the investors the manager could not run the club properly, so they suffered opportunity losses in their investments in the club. Corporate governance is defined here as the way in which corporate directors manage the company to adjust the conflicting interests of the stakeholders. Before the United IPO, the football companies had never been exposed to open criticism in terms of the management of their companies because football performances came first. But now sound corporate governance should dominate.