James Lawton: United should fear Yankees' example

As Manchester United fight for their financial lifeblood in European football tonight they should be aware of a blood-chilling photograph that appeared in the New York Times over the weekend.

It showed baseball fans of Pittsburgh holding up a placard in reaction to the likelihood of their sport plunging into another strike in a few days' time. What it said would not so long ago have amounted to the rankest heresy among followers of America's supreme sporting pastime. It declared that the closing of every baseball park would be preferable to the continued "strangulation" of the game by the sheer financial power of New York Yankees.

United should not wonder for a second about the relevance of this placard to their own situation as they seek to top up their defensive unit with the signing of a couple of young thoroughbreds in the wake of the £30m purchase of Rio Ferdinand, Unless there is some miraculous transformation in the financial affairs of the English game, the crisis message in America will be reproduced here any month now with the name of United simply replacing that of the Yankees.

Not so long ago United were trumpeting a commercial deal they had made with their baseball counterparts. Yankees gear would be sold by United, and vice versa. Commercially speaking, it didn't seem to be quite the business coup it was being made out to be, and certainly it is true that David Beckham shirts are still something of a rarity in the Bronx. But it did say a lot about how United had come to see themselves. It was as occupants of a separate sporting planet with horizons of profit way beyond any of their rivals. The Yankees had for some time been inhabiting such a sense, but euphoric wellbeing is not their prevailing mood right now.

It is believed that as many as eight Major League Baseball clubs are prepared to shut their gates and keep them closed until there is (a) a settlement with the players that begins to make some sense of the future and (b) an agreement that the Yankees sharply increase their current contribution to a revenue-sharing pool, which is already more than £20m more than any other club.

Current proposals would have the Yankees paying at three times that level. John Moores, the owner of the San Diego Padres, says: "If the players strike I'll be prepared to sit out a season, I won't like it but I'm prepared to do it. I'm not going to be part of a crazy system in which we have to keep raising ticket prices."

Or, he might have added, one in which one of the weakest teams in baseball, the Texas Rangers, paid the slugger Alex Rodrigues $262m (£175m) over 10 years after his agent had failed to persuade the New York Mets that his client should receive, on top of a similar salary, a private jet and his own corporate box.

United may say that they are insulated against salary capping and revenue sharing by European fair trading regulations, and they have the lawyers to resist any fancy ideas advanced on behalf of the common good when the Football Association and the Premiership and the Professional Footballers' Association get down to the brass tacks of survival.

But they should still take a look at that picture in the New York Times. It might just remind them that there's not much fun in being the fattest cat on the block if you have nobody left to play with.