The sale of shares - through the New York Stock Exchange favoured of the club's American owners rather than the more obvious choice of London - will therefore effectively guarantee United $100 million in fresh money. This will be used to reduce the club's debts.
Against those £423.28 million ($662.8 million) debts, mostly related to the Glazer family's 2005 takeover of the club, the amount United are seeking to raise is modest. Perhaps this reflects how the banks might have got cold feet the last time a share issue was considered. A proposed $1 billion float in Singapore was pulled amid "market turmoil".
In return for the cash, the Glazers will be handing over a proportion of their ownership stake, but they will not cede control. Under the resulting share structure the "B" shares the Glazers will hold will carry 10 times the voting rights over the "A" shares that are being sold to the market, and will never have less than 67 per cent control over shareholder meetings.
Indeed, although United will become a leaner business, paying off up to 15 per cent of their outstanding debt, the new ownership format will not make a transformative difference to the club in anything but its ability to pay down debt.
Currently, United are paying about £46.5 million a year in net interest; my rough calculations suggest the share issue will reduce that bill by up to £7 million a year in the future, although it may not even be that much.
United have already conducted what they call an "aggressive deleveraging" programme which, between July 2010 and July 2011, brought down their debts by almost £225 million. Freeing up more cash to repay debts will reduce how much interest has to be paid in future as well, providing a compound benefit that will be familiar to anyone who has overpaid their mortgage.
But, in the same way as it is unlikely to improve United’s transfer-market muscle, it is difficult to see what benefit there is to the investors in the shorter term. As United note, the debts they already hold place certain obligations on the club: "The indenture governing our senior secured [loan] notes and our revolving credit facility limit our ability, among other things, to: pay dividends or make other distributions or repurchase or redeem our shares."
If anyone had any doubt about what that means, United’s prospectus spells it out later: "We do not currently intend to pay cash dividends on our Class A ordinary shares in the foreseeable future."
There is lot of fluffy stuff in the prospectus about how United have 659 million "followers", a figure extrapolated from an internet survey of 53,287 respondents that was paid for by United. The club's Facebook popularity is also stressed, comparing their 26 million "connections" with New York Yankees' 5.8 million.
Certainly there is no disputing their introductory claim: "We are one of the most popular and successful sports teams in the world, playing one of the most popular spectator sports on Earth."
United should be applauded for using that brand to try and reduce their biggest business risk - the debt that hampers their ability to function as a normal dividend-paying business. But when they have been told so often how sustainable that debt is, perhaps fans should also consider why the Glazers have chosen to do so now.
