From Reuters:
Manchester United sold out the 78,000-seat Giants Stadium for an exhibition match on Thursday, a sign that soccer's most marketed club may be cracking North America's lucrative sports apparel market.
Many of those fans, sporting the $70 shirts of the English Premier League champions, even shelled out $50 just to watch United's practice session this week. Add that to the $85 ticket price for prime seats for Thursday's match against Italian champions Juventus.
For United, the richest soccer club in the world, this was an indication that it is getting a foothold in the North American market, which according to the National Sporting Goods Association, was worth almost $10 billion last year for non-shoe sports apparel alone.
Even missing its most marketable player, David Beckham -- traded away to European rivals Real Madrid last month -- United are taking America by storm on a four-match exhibition tour featuring its big stars like Ryan Giggs, Roy Keane, Ruud van Nistelrooy and new U.S. goalkeeper Tim Howard.
Driven by success in last year's World Cup in which the U.S. team reached the quarterfinals, as well as the emergence of home-grown American stars in Major League Soccer, the sport many Americans still love to hate may finally be registering more than a blip on radar screens of sports-mad America, said United spokesman Patrick Harverson.
"This is not just about selling more shirts but long-term plans to win fans over to United."
Kenyon reckons that DB Mark 1's departure has helped the club:
"I am not sure it would have been easier with David Beckham. We saw a lot of coverage of David’s (personal) tour in the US, but I think that when you get here you probably realise it had a lot less impact than we probably thought it was getting back home.
"Secondly, the one thing his transfer has done is it has taken an awful lot of heat away from the rest of the squad. From that point of view it has been more relaxed so the preparation has been great, there has been media interest but it hasn’t been huge, it has allowed the players to have down time to walk the streets without lots of people being around for the wrong reasons. This has been one of the best pre-seasons in terms of facilities and build-up for a long time."