You're moving the goal posts all over the place. You mentioned leverage and then it wasn't important when you saw that other clubs are much more heavily leveraged than us. You then mentioned not borrowing against/relying on future ticket sales and when you realised that's exactly what we're doing, you're moving from that position again.
We have £200m of cash or cash equivalents sitting on our balance sheet. We've a tonne of money. Levy always structures deals in such a way that we don't pay everything up front and the players have some sort of recovery value. I'm not suggesting that we abandon that model. But, in my view, he needs to be a little more adventurous to capitalise on what we have by signing a couple of quality players - Jack Grealish is not the type of player we need right now. I'm not suggesting for a second that we borrow hundreds of millions and buy a couple of 30 year olds but we can take a sensible risk and bring in someone like Kovacic, Zaha, Martial, de Ligt and not put much strain on our finances.
I'm perfectly happy for us to match our debt against the items that debt is used to finance - that's what all sensible businesses do. Utd are heavily leveraged but my belief is that the debt was used to purchase the club itself with the club being the security - as with a mortgage. We've essentially done the same with the stadium - we've taken what is, for all intents and purposes, a mortgage on a new stadium.
When you go to a lender for this type of finance they're looking for three things;
1) Can you afford to repay the loan (as with all loans). That's pretty simple and the terms we've agreed make that clear.
2) What security is there?
3) Does the "business case" stack up - essentially, can the applicant demonstrate increased profit will return from buying the asset?
Let's ignore 1 - as you've already stated, it's not really an issue.
2) It's illegal for a lender to have a charge (shared ownership) over a player, so borrowing to buy players means that the lender will want some other security. It's absolutely fine to borrow against a stadium to buy that stadium, it's not OK to borrow against any of our tangible assets in order to buy a player.
3) There's no business case for showing that a player (especially not one at the Grealish end of the spectrum) will increase profits. When we borrow £30M to buy a Sissoko, or £40M to buy a Grealish, or £70M to buy a Zaha, what do we do when that player flops and needs replacing? We can't realise their value at market because we've discovered that they're actually a bit brick. So we need to borrow to replace them - what happens if that player flops? Due to the nature of the asset, we need to be prepared that all players purchased could suddenly be worth next to nothing - that's why debt for players is a really bad idea.
Now if gap insurance existed for players, you might be on to something. But I'm fairly sure it doesn't and that it would probably require a lender holding a charge over that player and would violate the shared ownership rules.
