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Revision as of 17:21, 8 May 2006 by 88.111.126.88 (talk)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)Charles Martin Edwards (b. 24 July, 1945) was the chairman of Manchester United from 1980 until approximately 2000.
Edwards was born in Adlington, Cheshire, England. At thirteen, he failed the entrance exam for Stowe School, his parents' first choice, and went to Cokethorpe instead. He left at 18 with six O levels and no A levels.
He was elected to the Manchester United board in March 1970 and became chairman in March 1980 when his father Louis died. When the Football Association voted to allow football clubs to have one paid director, he became Chief Executive and paid himself an annual salary of £30,000.
He had never shown much interest in football before inheriting the club, preferring to play rugby on Saturday afternoons until giving up through injury. He tried to sell United to Robert Maxwell in 1984 and to the property developer Michael Knighton in 1988. The sale to Knighton collapsed when he was unable to raise the funds to pay for the club, after being given access to the club's books. Knighton was still given a seat on the board, and sources at the time suggested that this was in exchange for keeping quiet about what he had seen in the books.
The club's other directors were furious at the way the attempted sale was handled and persuaded Edwards to float the club on the stock market. This raised significant funds at the time, but this had all been paid back as dividends by 1999 and has since cost the club millions of pounds every season. It hasn't had the stabilising effect that was hoped for, with the threatened takeovers by Rupert Murdoch and the Irish duo J.P. McManus and John Magnier and the leveraged buyout by Malcolm Glazer having had exactly the opposite effect, leading to large-scale protests and the creation of a breakaway club.
He has been subject to several newspaper allegations about his private life, one of which alleged that that "he enjoyed spying on women using the toilets at Old Trafford". Whether true or not, he resiged from his post at Manchester United soon after, though his nickname "toilet sniffer" is still widely used.
Reference
Crick, Michael & Smith, David (1989). Manchester United - The Betrayal of a Legend. Pan Books Ltd. ISBN 0-330-31440-8.
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