Cheers for this.
We are 7th and main argument why those others are above us is they are a plc why that is a positive don't know? They say that it's because they are more open to scrutinise!? How? No one knows what's happening in the Cayman Islands.
That's a good point. They clearly give a big weighting to PLC clubs on the 'Good Governance' part of the index because, as they put it, they have a legal requirement for 'Good Governance'. But they also say: Good Governance draws on 55 different metrics and covers areas such as board structure, accountability and transparency. They do note United, Spurs and Celtic have a significant fan presence on their boards, so maybe that adds to the supposed 'transparency' but I don't think Spurs or United fans think the way their clubs are run is transparent.
I'm not sure the PLC status is all that indicative of good governance either personally(though I'm no expert). Or how United ended up with such as high Financial Sustainability score given their debt, wages, netspend and so on. United fans themselves have been complaining for many years about how poorly the club has been ran, how wasteful they have been, the board structure and ownership has been refreshed exactly because it wasn't considered good.
United and their fans use the PLC card way to often, more recently they were using it to explain why they got way more exceptions approved for PSR by the PL. "Because we are more honest, open and transparent and clubs like Everton aren't, that's why we got everything we wanted and they didn't". Which sounds like bullshit, how would they know how transparent Everton or Forest were being with the exceptions they asked for? UEFA denied United all the exceptions they asked for their part, but we are supposed to believe the PL were justified and move on, nothing to see because United released a PR statement...
I've read business insider articles suggesting their corporate structure is that the brand is based in the Cayman Islands and
the club itself is a shell corporation.