Manchester United Ltd.

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Manchester United Earnings Conference call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question and answer session. To queue for questions, please press star then 1. If anyone has difficulty hearing the call, please press star 0 for operator assistance at any time. We would like to remind everyone that this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the call over to Corinna Freedman, Head of Investor Relations for Manchester United.

Thank you, Operator. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Manchester United's first quarter 2020 earnings call. A corresponding press release containing our financial results was issued earlier this morning and can be accessed on our IR website. Today's call is being recorded and webcast, and a replay will also be available on our site for 30 days thereafter. Before we begin, and as a matter of formality, we would like to remind everyone that this conference call will include estimates and forward-looking statements which are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially from these statements. Any such estimates or forward-looking statements should be considered in conjunction with the cautionary note included with our earnings release, as well as various other risk factors in our prior filings with the SEC. With us on the call today are Ed Woodward, our Executive Vice Chairman, Richard Arnold, our Group Managing Director, Cliff Beatty, our Chief Financial Officer, and Hemant Saseo, our Head of Corporate Finance. I will now turn the conference call over to Executive Vice Chairman Ed Woodward for his opening remarks.

Thank you, Corinna. Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. It's only been a short time since our Q4 and year-end update, so prepared remarks today will be relatively brief. Before Cliff and Richard talk about our financial and operational performance for the first quarter, I thought it would be useful to provide a statement regarding our goals, how we aim to achieve them and the progress that we've made to date. Our ultimate goal is to win trophies, playing fast, fluid, attacking football with a team that fuses graduates from our academy along with world-class acquisitions. We know this will not be achieved overnight, however we've made investments across the club that we believe have set us on the right path. To recap on these for a moment, Firstly, over the last few years we've significantly invested in our recruitment infrastructure to augment our already strong and experienced team who are working to a clear philosophy. This is demonstrated by the signing of Maguire, James and Wan-Bissaka who have all settled in well. We will continue with our strategy to promote the best players graduating from our academy together with material investment in the coming summers to strengthen our young squad further and challenge for trophies. As a sign of investment in youth for the future, we've fielded the youngest team in the Premier League this season in our game against Brighton at an average age of under 24 years old. Secondly, we've also made investments in our academy across recruitment, facilities, analytics and these investments are now beginning to bear fruit. Last season we led the Premier League in the most first team match minutes played by our graduates. Across the Premier League our graduates are playing 58% more minutes than those from any other club. Our academy graduates have scored or assisted 31 of the 32 goals we've scored so far this season. and finally we are shortly approaching a milestone 4,000th first team consecutive competitive game featuring an academy player in the matchday squad. We know our academy is a strong competitive advantage and is an area that we will continue to invest in as it is the heart of the club. I want to reiterate that our ability to make investments we need to be successful on the pitch is underpinned by a continued strong financial performance. Those seasons to date we've had a mixed start to our Premier League campaign. In Europe we've qualified for the Europa League knockout stages with two games to spare. We've also progressed to the quarter-finals of the League Cup, while our women's team has also started their first season in the Women's Super League season in competitive form. Shifting to broadcast developments, cumulative live audiences for the Premier League was up 10% from two seasons ago to last season. Moreover, combined live audiences season to date in the UK are up 17%. Our home match on October 20th drew Sky's third biggest Premier League audience of all time. We remain very optimistic for continued increases in global football broadcast rights as demonstrated by recent news that CBS has acquired the UEFA Club competitions in the US through to June 2024. According to Bloomberg, this was an estimated 50% increase from the prior US contract and will feature select games free to air. We're also looking forward to Amazon's live Premier League broadcast, which will commence in the upcoming quarter, and we know that the platform will also produce a highlight show. Turning to some industry news, as many of you will be aware, FIFA recently announced that the first iteration of the revamped Summer Club World Cup tournament will take place in China in June 2021. Currently, the annual tournament comprises only seven teams and is played in December, while the revamped tournament will expand to 24 teams and take place every four years replacing the Confederations Cup. Finally, a brief update on FIFA's Transfer Task Force. After a long consultation period, in October the FIFA Council approved a series of key steps to protect the integrity of the system and prevent abuses. In particular, there will be limits on loans of players which won't have a material impact on us and the introduction of major reform around agents, including requiring all agents to be formally licensed and include educational measures. Restrictions around multiple representation to avoid conflicts of interest and a cap on agents' commissions. I'll now hand you over to our Group Managing Director, Richard Arnold, who will update you on the key business activities. Thank you.