Sir Jim Ratcliffe has made some tough decisions in his first year as Manchester United co-owner with staff morale currently “on the floor”, according to a report.
We have been blessed with a belting report from The Telegraph, where we have learned more about Man Utd co-owner Ratcliffe’s remarkable cost-cutting measures, hypocrisy and ignorance.
From not knowing who women’s captain Katie Zelem is to creating a ‘culture of fear’ at the club, the British billionaire is not a popular figure among staff and certainly not with supporters, who thought things were looking up when he took control of football operations out of the Glazers’ hands.
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His decisions to make hundreds of staff redundant has unsurprisingly attracted plenty of criticism and the report says staff ‘feel they are paying the price not just for the litany of long-term failures under the Glazers’ and now ‘a series of botched decisions at executive level by Ineos’.
Man Utd are taking loss after loss on the pitch but off it, they might be even more shambolic.
Ratcliffe’s cost-cutting tactics include plenty of redundancies and ridiculously anal and tedious tasks carried out by staff, yet a contract extension for former manager Erik ten Hag months before sacking him, hiring and firing Dan Ashworth and £200million spent on players in the 2024 summer transfer window all happened under his watch.
👉 READ MORE: Every Man Utd signing post-Sir Alex ranked: Alexis, Antony in bottom two, Solskjaer buy top
Ratcliffe has been very critical of the Red Devils’ woeful recruitment before his arrival, yet there are question marks over all of his summer signings a mere seven months later.
The report from James Ducker states:
Morale among staff is widely described as being “on the floor”. Employees feel they are paying the price not just for the litany of long-term failures under the Glazers, but also a series of botched decisions at executive level by Ineos.
Principal among those were awarding Ten Hag a new contract, revamping his coaching staff and allowing another £200 million to be spent on his watch, only to sack the Dutchman 116 days later and bring in a new manager who plays a totally different way. That was an exercise that cost more than £25 million, including money paid to Sporting Lisbon to release Amorim from his deal.
That also includes money spent on hiring and then sacking sporting director Dan Ashworth after only five months, having spent a similar length of time trying to extract him from Newcastle. It was a perplexing episode that cost the club £4.1 million in compensation.
“What good is penny-pinching when savings are obliterated by hare-brained decisions like that?” one staffer told Telegraph Sport.
The report goes on to say that the ‘genuine air of excitement’ upon Ratcliffe’s arrival is nowhere to be seen now, with chief executive Omar Berrada telling staff at the end of 2024 that this year will likely be another “difficult” 12 months.
Indeed, there had been a genuine air of excitement when Ratcliffe and Ineos’s director of sport, Sir Dave Brailsford, held an all-staff meeting at Old Trafford on January 4 last year. The pair drew applause for their straight talking and desire to make football the clear focus again.
One long-serving employee present said he had not felt such a spring in his step since a rousing address to staff by former manager Sir Alex Ferguson shortly before the Champions League final against Chelsea in Moscow in 2008.
By the time Berrada was addressing 650 or so staff in the Manchester suite at Old Trafford at the end of that same year and warning “I can’t promise the next year won’t be difficult too”, the atmosphere could not have been more different.
Senior players Bruno Fernandes, Jonny Evans and Tom Heaton were named as players who have been ‘saddened by developments’ under Ratcliffe, with an unprecedented number of employees losing their jobs.
The likes of Fernandes, Jonny Evans and Heaton, among others in the senior squad, have all been extremely supportive (of sacked staff) and are saddened by developments.
Some staff who have left talk about feeling liberated, but cannot shake their profound sadness at what is unfolding.
👉 MORE: Man Utd news | Sir Jim Ratcliffe archives | Five-year Premier League net spend table
