Rochester man became a hero in one sports town, a pariah in another

Posted by author March 2, 2025 Sports

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Malcolm Glazer is one of kind in Rochester sports history.

There have been more than a few Rochester natives who’ve won Super Bowls, a World Series, a PGA major and even a Stanley Cup. But there’s only one Rochester kid who grew up to become a billionaire owner of two of the most valuable sports franchises in the world.

In February 2024, Forbes Magazine ranked the Glazers ($10B) at No. 44 among America’s richest families.

The Rochester native and 1946 Monroe High School graduate inherited his father’s business while just 15. He began pouring his early earnings into buying rented homes in the Rochester area, later expanding his real estate interests around the country.

In 1962, he partnered with a Brighton man to buy a Wayne County bank, becoming — at 34 and 25, respectively — what was believed to be the youngest persons in New York to own controlling interest in a bank.

From there, according to a February 2021 story by Bills reporter Sal Maiorana, Malcom Glazer bought into companies such as Harley Davidson, Formica, Tonka, Omega Protein, and Rochester-based First Allied and Zapata Corporation. He also had stakes in fast food restaurants, television stations, nursing homes, trailer parks and shopping malls, and made a killing in the 1990s in junk bonds, reportedly doubling an original $80 million investment.

He eventually left Rochester and moved to Florida in 1991, where he became a household name in the sports world after purchasing the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 1995 for a then-record $192 million. After seven years of his ownership, the hard-luck Buccaneers won their first-ever Super Bowl in 2002.

Between 2003 and 2005, Glazer took aim at Manchester United, one of the most popular soccer entities in the world. He gradually bought out United shareholders in what ESPN described as a “hostile takeover” in a leveraged buyout. Maiorana said fans of the Premier League team loathed how Glazer made the purchase and the thought of an American family owning an English soccer club.

In 1999, Malcolm founded the Glazer Family Foundation to support programs designed to serve disadvantaged youths and families. The foundation donated $5 million to the construction of the Glazer Children’s Museum in Tampa in 2011.

Glazer died in 2014 at 85 and is buried in Rochester’s Mt. Hope Cemetery.

A Champions League win and multiple Premier League titles later, United fans still hold a grudge. Protest flags mocking Glazer were photographed at a match as recently as 2022.

Mark Ogden, writing for ESPN that year, wrote that “The hostility is as fierce as ever, and even when beating Liverpool and Arsenal at Old Trafford this season, the stadium reverberated to chants of ‘We want Glazers out.'”

In 2024, Forbes ranked United as the 14th most valuable ($6.55B) sports franchise in the world. The Bucs were ranked 26th ($5.4B). That same year, British billionaire and lifelong United fan Sir Jim Ratcliffe bought an ownership stake in Man United, according to Amie Wilson of the Manchester Evening News.

— Bill Wolcott is a producer who helps cover the Buffalo Bills, high school and Rochester sports in general. The lifelong New Yorker has been a journalist for 30 years.