Close-Up: Newsmaker - How will losing its star player affect Saatchis?(Manchester United appointed Saatchi & Saatchi's Lee Daley)

The agency must prepare for another change in management after Manchester United signs Lee Daley.

Lee Daley's advice to anyone thinking of starting a business is to look at religion or football because 'you have a customer base who will believe in your proposition until the day they die'.

It doesn't appear that the former Saatchi & Saatchi chief executive and chairman will be donning a dog collar any time soon. But with his new role as the global commercial director at Manchester United, Daley will be fully indoctrinated into the church of football.

As a United fan who, like most of his contemporaries, grew up at least 100 miles from Old Trafford (Grimsby, to be precise), he says he thinks the game has changed so much that the global commercial opportunities available make the offer 'too good to turn down'.

A couple of decades ago, the world of professional football - a working-class sport with an unsavoury reputation for terrace violence - was a million miles away from that bastion of Thatcherite capitalism, the advertising industry. But all that has changed, and the game is arguably now more about big business than sport.

'This is true, but it's still the fans who are important,' Daley says 'It's about reaching the people who have this all-engulfing passion and letting them feel the power and the buzz that supporting Manchester United provides.

'Advertising has given me a unique understanding of emotional attachment, and I now have lots of ideas for pushing the club forward, from original content to online communities and mobile content.'