BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, has revealed it has taken an 8% stake in football club Manchester United.
The holding of 3.3m shares was revealed in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday.
The football club went public on the New York Stock Exchange in August, and its shares have taken off over the past three months, rocketing 35% to stand at its current level of $16.8.
That move may have confounded the short sellers who piled into the stock shortly after its IPO: research from Data Explorers conducted last August found that over 8% of the company's stock was out on loan.
The club's shares subsequently struggled to make gains in Q3 2012, but now stand 20% above the IPO price of $14 a share.
But the club did reportedly find one influential backer in the form of legendary investor George Soros, who was said to have built an 8% stake of his own last summer.
The team is owned by an American family, the Glazers, that took over the club in 2005 and maintains control of the holding through a dual share structure.
This means the family holds Class B shares in the club, which carry ten times the voting power of ordinary, publicly traded stocks.
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