After buying his stake in Manchester United in February, Sir Jim Ratcliffe admitted he and his INEOS team had “made a lot of cock-ups” in his other footballing ventures, Lausanne and Nice, presumably in a bid to convince the Red Devils fans that they had learned lessons from those mistakes that would not be repeated at Old Trafford.
He will no doubt claim they’ve made great strides off the pitch in his eight months at the helm, but the club is yet to reap the rewards of that supposed improved structure on the pitch, with United 13th in the Premier League and hoping Ruben Amorim can be their saviour aafter Erik ten Hag was given the boot having put them on a steady downward trajectory since the British billionaire bought the club.
Ratcliffe’s also made some questionable strategic calls and ill-advised comments in interviews that are among the mistakes we’ve listed here, including some that the Ratcliffe advocates will claim weren’t his decisions, but – despite his clear ethos of passing it wherever possible – the buck stops with him.
Anyway, here we go: Ratcliffe’s mistakes ranked from minor to major.
8) The whole staff email
We suspect the Manchester United fans were delighted to hear about Ratcliffe and Ineos’ plan to conduct a ‘thorough strategic review’ of the football club when the British billionaire took charge of all football operations. After years of Glazer family negligence, on and off the pitch, it was necessary.
But while we imagined people in hard hats pointing to leaks in the Old Trafford roof and football coaching svengali Jason Wilcox shaking his head on the side-lines of an Erik ten Hag training session, we didn’t foresee Big Sir Jim himself picking up dirty socks from the academy dressing room.
It’s a level of scrutiny that in some ways reflects well on the fourth-richest man in Britain – he has a hands-on approach – but upon describing the cleanliness of the youth team changing rooms as a ‘disgrace’, along with many of the other facilities on his tour of the club in a leaked whole staff email, Ratcliffe immediately managed to ‘create a toxic feeling inside Carrington’.
He labelled the Manchester United museum – quite possibly the pride and joy of several members of staff – a load of ‘crap’, and in a bid to end the work-from-home culture, told employees to head back to the offices, despite there not being enough desks for them all to work. ‘If you don’t like it, please seek alternative employment,’ he told them.
Your Simon Jordans claimed it was a necessary shake-up, a method of sorting the wheat from the chaff, but there’s also little doubt that some very capable employees – not necessarily all Gen Z woke snowflakes – won’t have enjoyed Ratcliffe’s authoritarian day-one approach, will have taken it as a bleak sign of what was to come and taken a job in a more forward-thinking environment.
7) ‘Wembley of the North’
Ratcliffe’s claim that a “conversation” with the government was required after proposing that Old Trafford is redeveloped into the ‘Wembley of the North’ was galling, to put it mildly.
The suggestion was that the burden of financing United’s next chapter should be shared between him, a man worth around £12bn, and the taxpayers. A brazen proposal even before you consider that Ratcliffe himself is a tax exile having officially changed his residence in 2020 from Hampshire to Monaco in a move estimated to have saved him £4bn, which is enough to build two Wembleys of wherever.
6) FA Cup travel
In order to give Manchester United the best chance of on-field success, no saving is off-limits in the Ratcliffe regime, as those travelling to the FA Cup final discovered.
As joyous as that day became, any staff attending did so without recourse to former privileges. They each paid £20 towards travel costs that previously came as a perk of the job, while packed lunches were also seen as a luxury they could do without by the penny-pinchers at a club that had generated record revenues of £650m in its last accounts.
5) Cutting the disability budget
Not nearer the top because they’re only ‘considering it’ but even thinking about cutting the disabled supporters’ association budget in half is deplorable.
As David Ornsein say, it’s “terrible optics” for a football club that has routinely spunked tens of millions of pounds on average footballers to believe that a viable and reasonable method of cutting costs is to make the lives of their disabled supporters harder. The audacity would almost be impressive if it wasn’t so shameful.
4) Job cuts
The optics aren’t great when only a few months after staff members were all told they were crucial in helping contribute to on-field success, 250 of them were made redundant as part of Ratcliffe’s determination to slash costs by scrapping ‘non-essential’ activities.
Nearly a quarter of United’s employees lost their jobs and many of them, understandably, may well have pointed out that poor first-team recruitment has wasted far more money than will have been saved by cutting the rank-and-file workforce.
And those redundancies were made before the club spent another £200m in the summer on further under-performing footballers, most of whom can’t currently displace the in-situ under-performing, exorbitantly paid footballers from the first team.
Each of the 250 employees would have to be earning £55,000 per year to make getting rid of them more cost effective than paying Matthijs de Ligt his salary to sit on the bench, and that’s without considering the centre-back’s transfer fee, which would have been enough to keep those staff members in their jobs on that wage for three years.
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3) Women’s team
At the end of June, four months after his purchase of 27% of Manchester United (yes, Manchester United as a whole), Ratcliffe was asked whether he had considered spinning off the women’s team, with Chelsea having recently announced that their side will become a standalone entity.
“We haven’t got into that level of detail with the women’s team yet. We’ve been pretty much focused on how we resolve the first team issues.”
We understand why the men’s team is the priority. It’s the cash cow and what him and his team will ultimately be judged upon. But word to the wise Jim, don’t call them ‘the first team’. The women aren’t reserves just because they’re not men.
A slip of the tongue, maybe, but a telling one which when added to him moving the women out of their training facility and into portable buildings to make room for the men, which hardly paints Ratcliffe as a beacon of equality.
Asked in the same interview about what they are doing with the women’s team, Ratcliffe replied: “Well they’ve just won the FA Cup” as if he a) cared having not even watched the game, and b) had anything whatsoever to do with that success.
And imagine if he had given the same answer about the men when – as he well knows – the FA Cup win deflected from a poor league season and much deeper problems. He did not seem to have the same grasp of the issues with the women’s team, who finished 20 points behind champions Chelsea in the WSL last term.
3) Not sacking Erik ten Hag in the summer
Handing someone who has just overseen the worst season in the club’s history a contract extension is one of the worst decisions made by anyone ever. They played well once, in the FA Cup final, having embarrassed themselves in the semi-final against Coventry, the entire Champions League campaign and the vast majority of their league fixtures. Manchester United were awful.
Their excuse for not replacing Ten Hag being the lack of suitable alternatives has now been exposed as nonsense given the manager they’re now hiring was so available in the summer that he flew to London to meet West Ham on the eve of his side’s crunch clash with Porto in their title run-in.
2) Changing the coaching staff in the summer
Instead of sacking Ten Hag in the summer they got rid of his two assistant coaches, Steve McClaren and Mitchell van der Gaag, replacing them with Rene Hake and Ruud van Nistelrooy, who are arguably the two guys to have been most screwed by Ratcliffe and INEOS’ bungling.
Ruben Amorim has brought his own coaches because it would be mad to leave behind the people who have played a significant role in his success at Sporting, meaning Ruud and Rene et al. are out on their ears after three months at Old Trafford.
A lucky escape some would argue and they’re presumably been well-compensated, as were Sporting for United nicking their manager and coaching staff, which all-in-all reportedly leaves United close to the PSR line
1) Buying players for Erik ten Hag
We were told that Jason Wilcox, brought in as the new technical director, would be the man to ‘determine and drive the move to a clear “game model” – effectively a cohesive playing style and identity United intend to replicate across all age groups.’
And apparently, unbelievably, after ‘providing a detailed assessment of Ten Hag’s strengths and weaknesses’ as the first duty in his new post, Wilcox reported back that not only was Ten Hag the right man for the job, he was also so good at his job that the club should continue to sign players to fit his system rather than individuals with a broader ethos in mind.
Wilcox, Dan Ashworth and the other directors may claim it’s a happy coincidence that the style of their former first-team coach was also the new Manchester United Way, though wouldn’t be at all surprised if the new Manchester United Way is actually more in line with Amorim’s ethos, which will require a host of his players rather than the Ten Hag’s, meaning the perpetual cycle of Red Devils managers being three to four signings away from challenging for the title will continue.
