Can Sir Jim Ratcliffe Save Manchester United?
Runner number 46136 of the 2024 London Marathon moved steadily, if ever so slightly gingerly, his feet staying in close communication with the ground.
This was perhaps understandable, considering the runner — the billionaire Sir Jim Ratcliffe— was 71 years old, and that, due to a hamstring injury, he had only trained for six weeks. But also, perhaps, something else. Not so long ago, he found his bones had started breaking.
Before he turned 60, nothing: not a single snap, which was impressive given how many eminently snappable situations he had placed them in.
In 1995, aged 43, he climbed Mont Blanc. He got lost and almost died, but no snap. In 2009, aged 57, he trekked 10 days across the North Pole in -40 degrees°C ; a couple of years later, he decided to trek 100 miles across the South Pole, too. He got frostbite and went half-mad, but still, nothing broke.
When he decided to take a motorcycle trip across Africa for his 60th birthday, however —his friends dubbed him “bus pass”; Ratcliffe told them huffily he didn’t use buses — the snap-ping began.
Mid-way through the 100-day, 10,000km journey, he came off his bike and broke three bones in his foot. A local doctor bandaged it so tightly he feared it might require amputation, and so Ratcliffe cut off the cast with a chainsaw, before getting a ski boot flown in so he could finish the trip. He likes to say he’s the only man ever to have gone skiing in Namibia.
Since then, he has taken part in ultramarathons in the Sahara and South Africa, plus the odd Ironman triathlon, because you need to keep yourself active. But on bikes and motorbikes and skis, he has broken nine bones. He’s still Steve McQueen in his head, he says, but the doctors, increasingly, tell him off. General anaesthetic, they point out, isn’t ideal in your seventies.
Ratcliffe made his money with Ineos, the petrochemicals company he founded in 1998. It now operates 194 sites across 29 countries and generates around £52.6bn in annual revenues. With a net worth of £23.5bn, according to the latest Sunday Times Rich List, he’s currently the fourth-richest person in the UK.
By his mid-sixties, when age started tapping him on the shoulder, Ratcliffe and his longtime Ineos co-owners Andy Currie and John Reece decided to diversify.
“When we got into our sixties, we’d spent a lot of lives working quite hard and we’ve made quite a lot of money,” Ratcliffe said recently. “And we all enjoy sport. And we felt that, you know, getting involved in sport, in a way would be sort of quite good for the Ineos brand but quite enjoyable for us because, you know, we’re three northern blokes who enjoy sport.”
The result, depending on your point of view, was either a mid-life crisis, billionaire-style, or simply someone realising they could Brewster’s Millions through the rest of their life without ever noticing a difference in their bank balance.
Ratcliffe is an ardent football fan, so, first, he bought the Swiss football team FC Lausanne-Sport in 2017, a month after his 65th birthday. He liked it so much he bought a French team, Nice, a couple of years later.
He looked at the British sailing team and wondered why it was they had not won the America’s Cup in almost two centuries, and so formed Ineos Britannia in 2018 to end 173 years of hurt (it has, sadly, not yet come home).
In 2019, he sponsored Team Sky — the cycling squad that had won the Tour de France with Bradley Wiggins, Chris Froome and Geraint Thomas — after the broadcaster’s deal ended, deciding that winning the Tour de France might be fun, too. (He renamed them the Ineos Grenadiers, though they’ve only recorded one victory since.)
Marathons? Sure. That same year, Ineos picked up the baton from Nike after it fell short in its attempt to help Eliud Kipchoge run the world’s first sub-two-hour marathon. In Ineos’ attempt, Kipchoge did it with 20 seconds to spare. (It didn’t break the official record, though, as it wasn’t under regular race conditions.)
Formula One? Why not? In 2020, Ineos became the principal partner of the Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 Team. Rugby? Might as well. In 2022, Ineos became the performance partner to the All Blacks, New Zealand’s all-conquering international team.
Cynics, noting that Ineos is a petrochemicals company that has previously been on the wrong side of environmental laws, claimed sports washing; if that were the case, it was more like a sports tsunami.
Yet when it was announced in November 2022 that Manchester United — one of the biggest football clubs in the world — was up for sale, it was personal. Ratcliffe was a lifelong fan.
Since 2005, the club had been owned by the Glazers, an American family deeply loathed by the fanbase. Their leveraged buyout had saddled the club with enormous amounts of debt — over half a billion pounds — the interest for which was paid by the club itself.
Their stewardship had overseen a spectacular fall from grace for the club. For a side that had dominated English football for over two decades, the last 10 years had seen it become a perennial punchline, rebounding from one humiliation to the next.
The negotiations took over a year; at several points, Ratcliffe almost walked away. He remembers popping an expensive bottle of champagne in May 2023 at the Monaco Grand Prix, thinking the deal was done. It would take another nine months.
In the end, it was only a partial takeover, with Ratcliffe buying a 27.7 per cent stake in December 2023 for £1.25bn to take control of “football operations”. In reality, though, as a Manchester United source told me, he’s the chairman in all but name.
At the 30km mark at the London Marathon, Ratcliffe started feeling the fatigue, but finished in four hours and 32 minutes. It was, in fairness, still a personal best. After all, he didn’t just have a time to beat, but also a game to get to.
Manchester United were about to kick off against Coventry in an FA Cup semi-final at Wembley. It was a game they were expected to win — Coventry sat mid-table in the league below them — which almost guaranteed they would lose.
Still, by the time Ratcliffe arrived at just after half-time, Manchester United had taken a comfortable 2-0 lead. Everything was looking up. If they could win the FA Cup, it would surely signal to everyone they were back.
Ratcliffe was only a few months into his reign, but his arrival had caused genuine optimism for the first time in a generation. There was talk of a new stadium. Reports of a new management team. Everything from the training ground to the IT department was being looked at and then frowned at. Was a sleeping giant about to wake?
In the second half, United stormed into a 3-0 lead courtesy of Portuguese playmaker Bruno Fernandes. They were winning with ease, the United of old, the final as good as booked. It was around then that the wheels came off the wagon.
If you weren’t a football fan in the Nineties and the Noughties, it’s perhaps hard to fully grasp what an all-pervasive, all-conquering force Manchester United were. They weren’t a football team; they were the football team.
Take Man City’s success of today and literally double it — Manchester United won 13 Premier League titles in 20 years under Sir Alex Ferguson, compared to City’s six in the 13 since. Ferguson won five FA cups, four League Cups and the Champions League twice, a decade apart, with two entirely separate sides.
Ferguson was so successful for so long he didn’t just give first-team debuts to the “class of‘92” — the fabled generation that saw the likes of David Beckham, Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes and Gary Neville emerge from the youth team— he was still the manager when they had their testimonials for retirement.
Cristiano Ronaldo won the Ballon d’Or with them. Wayne Rooney became their all-time top scorer. Nicky Butt was just sort of there, but still: he was there a lot.
They won matches so late, and so often, new terms entered the footballing lexicon. Squeaky bum time. Fergie time. “Football... bloody hell.” I remember watching my side, the perennial also-rans Tottenham Hotspur, go 3-0 up against them at home and feeling nothing but dread: we’ve angered them now. They won 5-3.
As the Premier League became not just the top league in England but the world, so Manchester United drew the first truly global fanbase.
According to the market research firm Kantar, they have over 1.1bn “fans and followers” worldwide, which is over three times the population of the United States. If they ever decide to rise up, we’re in trouble.
Since Sir Alex Ferguson retired in 2013, however, they’ve had reason to. His replacement, the dour Scot David Moyes, was manager fodder, lasting less than a year. The rest haven’t fared much better. In the decade since Ferguson’s retirement, Manchester United have had eight different managers, the same number as in over 40 years before him.
They haven’t come close to winning the league since. Last season, they finished eighth, after making their worst start to a season since 1930. The malaise, to Manchester United fans of a certain age, can be rather disorientating.
“There’s a generation now who just can’t conceive that we were the pre-eminent force in English football,” says Chris Rumfitt of the Manchester United Supporters Trust. “My daughter plays in a football team and wears the United kit to training. They just laugh at her and say, ‘You support a shit football team’.”
The subsequent fallout has, by turns, been distressing and depressing (to Man U fans), but also the gift that keeps on giving (to everyone else).
Former players who only knew glory were forced to watch on in a kind of horrified punditry purgatory as their club went 4-0 down against Brentford. Whole supercuts exist on YouTube of Gary Neville endlessly saying things such as: “This is Manchester United we’re talking about.”
They’re the Titanic, essentially, if the Titanic had sunk slowly over a decade, and past crew members were endlessly asked to appear on TV to comment on where the water was up to.
The blame, the fanbase feels, can be laid squarely at the feet of the owners, the Glazers. Money has continued to be splurged in the transfer market — some £1.5bn — but with heroically little to show for it. Signings have been panicked and haphazard, each new manager casting off previous mistakes only to make room for his own.
Current coach Erik ten Hag spent £85m on a winger (Antony) that club scouts decided was worth no more than £25m. José Mourinho spent a club-record £89.3m on a midfielder (Paul Pogba) who had previously left them on a free transfer, and who then left on another free transfer. Ole Gunnar Solskjær green-lit the signing of an 18-year-old (Amad Diallo) for the youth academy, only to discover the club paid £37m for him. They’ve spent a quarter of a billion on centre-backs alone.
But, crucially, almost no money has been spent on the club itself. Cristiano Ronaldo told Piers Morgan — in a bombshell 2022 interview that would see Ronaldo leave for a second time —that upon re-signing after a decade away, the training facilities had not changed one bit: “They stopped in time.”
In October last year, Charlie Savage, a former youth-team player, said the facilities were on a par with those at his new club, Reading, who play in League One.
Worse was their stadium, Old Trafford. With a capacity of 74,310, it is still the largest club stadium in the country, but is decades out of date. Even the roof leaks. In a home game against Arsenal in May, so did the away dressing room.
As Gary Neville put it, of the Glazers stewardship: “They’re having a toxic impact on the club from the inside out.”
Yet amazingly, despite this decade of decline, Manchester United remain, according to Forbes, one of the most valuable football clubs in the world: at an estimated £5.2bn, they’re second only to Real Madrid. Their previous success, it seems, has a half-life.
“It comes from Africa, it comes from Scandinavia, it comes from Ireland, it comes from Asia,” says football-finance expert Kieran Maguire of the valuation. “Manchester Unite dare bulletproof. They’re a monopoly supplier of Manchester United. And while we look at them from a competitive point of view, what we see is there is no seepage of support.”
At Ineos, Ratcliffe had made his billions by picking up distressed assets with untapped value in order to streamline and revitalise them. In football, no asset was more distressed, or had such potential.
If the football world is obsessed with the fall of Manchester United, perhaps this is why: they’re not just a club in England, they are England. A once-great institution, respected across Europe, now neglected and diminished, absentee landlords only around for the rent.
Still, fans were split. They wanted the Glazers out, not hanging around in the background.
The partial takeover was confirmed at 4pm on Christmas Eve last year, a timing many saw as the final insult. Popular Manchester United YouTuber Mark Goldbridge, having arrived at his sister’s house for Christmas, took to his nephew’s bedroom for an emergency livestream. “Typical of the Glazers’ ownership,” he tells me.
Or, as Goldbridge put it in another video around that time: “Sir Jim Ratcliffe, you might have a ‘sir’, you might be a billionaire, but you’re an enemy of this football club, mate. Unless you want to come tell us why you’re not? I guarantee you won’t.”
Ratcliffe’s first move to was do exactly that.
Sir Jim Ratcliffe cuts an imposing figure. He’s 6ft 4in, trim, with a wisp of grey beard and a shag of greying hair, which forever seems brushed by the wind. He runs 10km most mornings. He doesn’t suffer fools. He’s not a fan of ties. He isn’t, he says, particularly woke.
At Ineos, nearly all board meetings start with football chat and go from there. When Ratcliffe entered Old Trafford’s Ambassador Lounge on Monday, 15 January, it was to talk only football: three meetings with fans, one with community leaders.
“On day one, he did more engagement with the supporters than the Glazers had done in 19 years,” says Rumfitt of the Manchester United Supporters’ Trust, who attended two of the meetings. He remembers thinking Ratcliffe didn’t look a day over 60.
He was flanked by loyal lieutenants Sir David Brailsford, Ineos’s director of sport, Ineos Sport’s chief executive Jean-Claude Blanc and various Manchester United officials. I’m told it was only to Brailsford, however, that Ratcliffe deferred.
Earlier that month, Ratcliffe and Brailsford had visited Sir Alex Ferguson at his home to solicit advice. It was scheduled to last an hour but went on for four. Brailsford had visited years earlier, when he was the performance director of British Cycling. Discussing the art of having everyone committed to a common cause, Ferguson leant over to issue some sage advice: “Dave, it’s simple — just get rid of the cunts.”
At the meeting, they spoke about creating an elite performance culture, of trusting in youth; of making important signings, but not superstars with big egos. The attendees were impressed.
Ratcliffe’s first priority was a new management team. Manchester United should have people “best in class”, he later told the BBC. The obvious implication: those currently employed were not.
This was no better displayed than in their lack of clear process and accountability in the transfer market. During an early tour of the training ground, Ratcliffe reportedly questioned the £60m signing of Brazilian midfielder Casemiro, a 30-year-old whose best years were likely behind him, from Real Madrid in 2022. (His first season was a spectacular success, his second an even more spectacular failure. He is currently up for sale. Madrid used the money to fund the purchase of Jude Bellingham, then 20).
At Ineos, Ratcliffe uses a “federal” structure: Ineos is not technically one business, but 36 individual ones, each fully responsible for running themselves, from calling the shots to organising IT. Ratcliffe sits on each board. As Ratcliffe wrote in the introduction to The Alchemists: The Ineos Story, “I like simplicity, accountability; no-place-to-hide, direct, clear organisations.”
Omar Berrada was soon announced as Manchester United’s new CEO, arriving from Manchester City. Dan Ashworth was hired from Newcastle as the new sporting director. Both would have to wait until the summer to start work, following periods of gardening leave. Jason Wilcox, meanwhile, arrived straight away as technical director from Southampton.
At an all-staff meeting later in January, Ratcliffe made clear some of the other changes Ineos planned to make. It intended to eliminate the “job for life” culture and to significantly reduce the 1,000-strong workforce. An official announcement was eventually made in July — 250 staff would be made redundant, saving around £10m a year.
It was straight out of the Ineos streamlining playbook, where being “Ineos’d” had become
a verb (definition: a middle-manager who, following an Ineos takeover, has their company credit card almost instantly taken away).
A senior Manchester United staffer who attended the meeting told me it was, on the whole, “Absolutely electrifying, because the club was really demoralised. The clarity, the new energy... He was communicating a determination to turn things around.”
But there was also trepidation. “If you listen to Jim, you’d think the whole place is a shit-show, whereas in reality there are some really good people and really good players in the squad. It’s about us proving we’re not all rubbish.”
It wasn’t so long ago that fans celebrated takeovers — the ones from oligarchs and oil states— almost like silverware itself. After all, the silverware was almost always on the way.
First Chelsea, under Roman Abramovich, then Manchester City, under the Abu Dhabi royal family, achieved unprecedented success while making record losses.
It’s only in the last year that the Premier League’s Profit and Sustainability Rules — which dictate a club can’t lose more than £105m over a rolling three-year period — have really shown their teeth, with the likes of Everton and Nottingham Forest both deducted Premier League points.
You had to spare a thought for Newcastle, who were taken over by the Saudi Public Investment Fund in 2021 (net worth: around £726bn), but still recently found themselves scrambling to sell players in order to balance their books.
In short: generous benefactors no longer matter like they used to. It’s the money a club can generate that counts.
At £650m, Manchester United’s annual revenue is second only to Manchester City (at £718m). Yet with the income that could be generated from a new stadium, they could dwarf them.
Currently, Manchester United take in around £3.3m every match day. But as football-finance expert Maguire notes, “the experience is pretty horrible”. A new state-of-the-art stadium could see them emulate Tottenham, who built their new £1bn Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in 2019, and went from making £35m a year in match-day income to £117m.
The match-day experience, says Maguire, was crucial. Populated by smart restaurants and bars, the stadium itself became a day out. On average, fans spent almost an hour longer there. Little wonder, then, that Ratcliffe has started speaking of a potential new Old Trafford with a capacity of 100,000, which would still make it the largest club stadium in the country, but now by some distance.
In March, Ratcliffe put together a “joint task force” — which included Gary Neville, Lord Sebastian Coe and Manchester mayor Andy Burnham — to look at options for regenerating Old Trafford and the surrounding area. A club source tells me they’re expected to report their findings by the end of the year.
The cost of a new stadium would be astronomical — some £2bn — but the benefits could be game-changing.
“There’s no reason they can’t be looking at a quarter of a billion pounds from match-day income alone,” says Maguire.
When I spoke to a source at stadium-design company Populous, which was behind Totten-ham’s new stadium and has worked on initial plans for a new Old Trafford, they mentioned something surprising about the new technology that could be involved.
The Tottenham Hotspur Stadium boasts a state-of-the-art pitch that can be retracted underground, making it easier to stage concerts and other non-football events. But the new Old Trafford, the source suggested — who spoke under condition of anonymity to protect relationships — would go a step further. It would contain technology that allows fans from allover the world to have a match-day experience without setting foot in the country.
“Particularly with United, who have this enormous global fanbase: how do we make the virtual experience as good for a fan in Mumbai as a fan in Manchester? And what do we need to build in Manchester to make that happen?”
In essence, built-in camera technology would record the game from every angle; it would then be broadcast live as a holographic experience in purpose-built “satellite” stadiums worldwide.
I mention this to Maguire, who compare sit to a more advanced version of ABBA Voyage, the holographic concert experience that has been running in London since 2022.
“I was in a presentation last year about this. You’d have purpose-built stadiums that hold around 20,000 fans, one in Nairobi, one in Manila and so on, funded by private equity. You could have 10 of these around the world.”
At the moment, Maguire points out, Manchester United’s £600m annual revenue from a global fanbase of 1.1bn works out as roughly 60p per fan per year (“that’s atrocious”). A football club that took match-day income from 10 stadiums rather than one would push that over-all figure into the billions.
“Because instead of 70,000 or even 100,000 people paying to watch a match, you’ve got 300,000 or 400,000.”
You’d just have to hope their internet connections don’t start buffering.
In June, the diggers arrived at Manchester United’s Carrington training complex to start work on modernising the facilities that had, as Ronaldo put it, become set in time. The £50m project is led by Foster & Partners and will first focus on gym, medical, nutrition and recovery areas; work would last for the duration of the2024/25 season. It wouldn’t exactly guarantee success on the pitch, but it did follow the marginal-gains playbook Brailsford had used to such success in the cycling world: that a series of smaller details, when put together, can make all the difference in elite sport.
On the pitch, Ratcliffe renewed the contract of head coach Erik ten Hag after a rather public end-of-season review, in which the Ineos management team interviewed other coaches, only to realise none represented a significant step up.
True to their word, in the transfer market Manchester United wasn’t targeting big-ego Galacticos, but its freshly installed management and recruitment executives were selecting younger players who were hungry, building a team around burgeoning talents such as 19-year-old England midfielder Kobbie Mainoo and 20-year-old Argentina winger Alejandro Garnacho. They beat Real Madrid to the signing of prodigal French centre-half Lenny Yoro, though the 18-year-old managed to pick up an injury in his first game which will see him out for the first three months of the season.
They also followed Ferguson’s advice. Mason Greenwood, who had been sent on loan the previous season following assault allegations (Greenwood was never charged), was soon sold.
Even Mark Goldbridge was coming around: “We’ve become realistic. Maybe five years ago we’d say, ‘Let’s buy Paul Pogba and give him big wages and we’ll win the league.’ We’ve made those mistakes. We are where we deserve to be. But if we are going to come back, we need something sustainable.”
Ratcliffe himself has urged caution, saying it’ll take at least three years to get back to where they were. The stadium, it’s estimated, would take six, even if they broke ground today.
“There’s room for improvement everywhere we look at Manchester United. And we will improve everything. We want to be where Real Madrid is today. But it’ll take time.”
As Rumfitt of the Manchester United Supports Trust put it: “There’s a generation of kids that just won’t believe it when we come back to the top.”
Back in London, back in Wembley, back at that April FA Cup semi-final just after the London Marathon, the game against Coventry was taking a turn for the worse.
Coventry had pulled one back, then scored another via a deflection, then an equaliser from the penalty spot. Bedlam, 3-3. At the end of extra time, with just seconds remaining, Coventry scored a winner.
As the ITV commentator went wild (“One of the most remarkable comebacks in FA Cup history!”), it seemed to sum up the new Man U: from a team that scored “Fergie time” winners, to experts in turning victory into defeat and defeat into calamity. Some United fans left the stadium. You could almost have forgiven Ratcliffe if he’d joined them.
But then something very old-school United happened. Something that was a bit Fergie time. The goal was ruled out. Manchester United won on penalties.
Even more remarkably, in the FA Cup Final the following month, against Manchester City — the four-in-a-row title winners — Manchester United won. They were back in Europe. Football, bloody hell.
It was, Ratcliffe said, with plain-spoken understatement, “a glorious feeling to win”.
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