This Should Help The Debt Payments

Manchester United will announce the largest sponsorship deal in football when they unveil a 4-year £80M deal with Chicago-based Aon Corp.

Aon engages in risk management, insurance brokerage services and consulting services worldwide (sound familiar?). But really, who the fuck cares? Outside of Carlsberg I can't think of a single shirt sponsor whose products I've consumed.

From the Guardian: "United have been scouring the globe for a new sponsorship deal since their current sponsors, AIG, the American insurance company, announced it would not be renewing its £14m-a-year deal when it expires at the end of the 2009-10 season."

So, US taxpayers are on the hook for another season, then the Glazers really get to cash in.

But here's a fun story that we hope is somehow symbolically prophetic.

The Aon Center in downtown Chicago was originally the Standard Oil Building. When it was completed in 1973 it was the world's tallest marble-clad building, with a facade of 43,000 slabs of Italian Carrara marble.

Too bad the marble used proved to be too thin. A year after the building's completion a slab detached and went through the roof of the nearby Prudential Center Annex. Eventually the entire building had to be refaced and from 1990-1992 every single marble slab was replaced with white granite at a total cost of $80M (over half the original cost of the building).

There's a little bit of fudging here as Aon didn't take over the name of the building until 1999 (and wasn't even the primary tenant for a couple of years after that).

But hey, Sir Alex is already showing an Achilles loyalty to aging players like Scholes and PFA Player of the Year Ryan Giggs, and if Ronaldo leaves, or if he dooesn't but the Portuguese split in the locker room festers... We're just saying, there might be cracks in the facade.

It's wishful thinking. But sometimes there is an ironic elegance to life.