Man Utd maybe get 70,000 at home games. But the worldwide market for their mwerchandise is much greater.

Did you post that here by accident?

I'm in office today, but I will listen tomorrow as it's sounds interesting. I think the value of the future sales could be a red herring, as nobody involved in this believes the value of the derivatives is actually what is required in the real world, they are for the most part just bets, albeit in some cases the end product is actually needed e.g. my employer is a huge consumer of energy and hedges on energy prices to cap exposure to price rises. This kind of thing reminds me of sizing debt, in that adding up all the debts in an economy can give a misleading impression of how much money is actually needed to facilitate it, e.g. A lends B £500 who lends C £500 who lends D £500, we end up with £1500 of debt, but what really matters is that A can meet obligation to B and B to C and so on. The people speculating on derivatives need to meet their obligations to each other in cash, it doesn't really matter how many barrels of oil that equates to in the real world.

Speculation has been blamed for high energy prices/oil prices before, but I think it's a bit hollow, speculation is just whether people think prices are going to go up or down in future and the resulting changes in behaviour now that causes prices to go up or down. What I think matters is the expectation about supply and demand including all relevant factors like production and taxation and competition for resources.

My favourite one is "Enoch Powell was right" which usually comes up every now and again.

If only Powell had left out the rivers of blood and predicted instead that multiculturalism would have seen the internet full of obsessed racists he would have been on the money...

Speculation or not, there's certainly something fishy going on. In January the pre-pump price of fuel (as delivered to the forecourt), increased by about 10p per litre. The Petrol Retailers Association thought it strange given the relatively low wholesale price of fuel on the world's various markets, coupled with a lack of demand due to adverse weather and the fact that UK refineries were cutting down on activity because no one was buying fuel. They employed analysts to see just where the price increase came from and these analysts could only account for 3p of the increase. They did of course factor in currency fluctuations and all the other identifiable variables but they still came up well short fo the 10p rise.

The main suspicion is that markets are being rigged in a similar manner to LIBOR

That analogy doesn't work as the merchandise exists and actually gets sold directly as shirts and memorabilia, not in futures.
Try again.

Second thoughts ... don't.

I wasn't trying to say shirt sales = "futures" or derivatives. What I was pointing out that there are other markets were the secondary market is far larger than the market which they derive from and no one bats an eyelid.

So what?
That's completely irrelevant to the point now being discussed, which is about paper trading, futures, derivatives i.e. trade in intangibles which allegedly may be rigging the price of the tangible item.

Give it up lad, you're fooling no-one.