Manchester United Faces Doubter in the Market The British soccer team Manchester United has made a poor showing on the field this season. Now the British hedge fund manager Crispin Odey is making a multimillion-dollar bet that the club's New York-listed shares are destined for a similar trajectory. Odey Asset Management, Mr. Odey's fund, has taken a $22 million short position against Manchester United shares. Investors take short positions by borrowing a company's stock and selling it in anticipation of pocketing a profit when they buy the stock back at a lower price. Mr. Odey's bet pits him against several investors who remain strong supporters of the team. George Soros has a 5.3 percent stake, and GLG, a division of the world's biggest hedge fund, Man Group, has a 2.2 percent stake. But Manchester United's journey since its initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange in August 2012 has been a tale of two teams. On the field, the 135-year-old club has fallen from the top of the English Premier League standings last season to ninth place this year. The team has endured a series of changes, including the retirement of the club's longtime manager, Alex Ferguson, and its chief executive, David Gill. During Mr. Ferguson's 27-year tenure, Manchester United transformed itself from an underdog to a champion, winning 38 trophies along the way. David Moyes, its current manager, is under pressure to push the team back to the top of the league. In the stock market, the club has experienced steady growth since its debut at $14 a share. The stock closed at $16.98 on Wednesday. With a strong brand and hundreds of millions of fans around the world, the club reported record revenue in 2013. In its latest quarterly results, Manchester United said its sponsorship revenue had risen 63 percent, compared with the period a year earlier. Mr. Odey is well known in London for his brief marriage to Rupert Murdoch's eldest daughter, Prudence, and for having a sausage named after him in Ross-on-Wye. Last year, he became a symbol for excess after he received permission to build a Palladian-style chicken coop at his country home near London. Featuring a staircase for the chickens, the coop prompted tabloids to call it Cluckingham Palace. Mr. Odey is not the only investor to turn bearish on the company. Five percent of Manchester United's stock is out on loan, a proxy indicator for how much is being shorted, according to data collected by Markit. Fears that the team's relatively poor performance this year in the Premier League will seep into its balance sheet are not unfounded, according to some analysts. Among the risk factors listed in the team's prospectus filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Manchester United said it was "highly dependent on members of our management, coaching staff and our players." The company also has 389.2 million pounds in debt, and investors have virtually no voting rights. This reality was underscored in September when the Glazer family, which owns Manchester United, filed documentation that would allow the company to undertake a $400 million sale of shares - a move that would dilute the value of current holdings. With the company's fate closely aligned with Manchester United's performance on the field, investors may not take much comfort from recent comments made by the team's manager. "I think there's a bit of everything that we could be doing better," Mr. Moyes told the British news media this week.