With Sir Jim Ratcliffe now part-owner of Manchester United, ratifying his 25 per cent purchase for £1.3billion, fans will now dare to dream of the start of a new era.
The Glazers are, unfortunately for supporters, still in situ for the time being, but in Ratcliffe, who will take control of football operations along with his INEOS team, they now have a fiercely competitive boyhood fan who thrives when the odds are against him.
Ratcliffe has rarely had things easy, spending the first 10 years of his life in a council house on Dunkerley Avenue in Failsworth, a small town between Manchester and Oldham.
His dad was a joiner while his mother was an accounts office worker. The family were far from flush with the cash and the riches he enjoys today as Britain’s wealthiest man.
From there Ratcliffe and his family moved to Yorkshire and he attended Beverley Grammar School, where he honed his passion for industry; it was said that a young Ratcliffe would count factory smokestacks from the window of his house.
Sir Jim Ratcliffe has completed his £1.3billion purchase to own 25 per cent of Man United
The billionaire has come from humble beginnings but is now a force to be reckoned with
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A degree at the University of Birmingham followed, but even then he was routinely dismissed on his first day when he was embarrassed to see he was nearly at the bottom of a list of 99 undergraduates ranked by their A-level results. He went on to defy expectations and achieve a 2:1 in chemical engineering.
Upon graduating in 1973 – which was no mean feat given his simplistic beginnings in Failsworth – Ratcliffe spent time honing his knowledge working for BP and Esso.
Three days in at BP and he was fired after because his boss had seen his medical report and wasn’t keen on him working there with mild eczema.
So, he returned to education to gain an MBA at the London Business School. Ratcliffe was preparing to forge himself a lucrative path to prosperity through industry.
Ratcliffe walks into Manchester United now flush with cash – he has already said he is planning to put £245m in to fix ailing infrastructure.
But his rise to the top has been something of a slow burn.
Ratclfife, following his MBA, went on to work as a trainee accountant at a pharmaceuticals company before moving to Esso then Courtaulds, a Coventry-based fabric and chemicals producer.
Fast forward to 1989 and Ratcliffe would find himself on the ladder after joining US private equity group Advent International.
Ratcliffe was now in the big leagues and three years after taking a job with AI, at the age of 40, he mortgaged his own home to buy BP’s chemicals division for about £40m, setting up his first business, INSPEC, in the process.
His INEOS team have a large sporting portfolio but Man United is their biggest challenge yet
What was perhaps the first major financial risk of Ratcliffe’s career proved ingenious. Across the next 20-plus years he completely transformed INSPEC into the world’s fourth largest chemicals company, with annual revenues of £45bn.
The next step in furthering his brand and his fortune came five years later when he founded INEOS.
Ratcliffe was now at high-risk, high-reward. He put in everything he owned – as well as loans and venture capital equity, for INEOS to purchase the former BP site from INSPEC.
Buying operations from major companies was a key target for Ratcliffe to quickly and effectively escalate the value of INEOS.
His game-changing deal, that remains historic in INEOS’ history, was the £5bn takeover of BP’s petrochemical business ‘Innovene’ back in 2005.
Business experts said at the time that INEOS’ sales quadrupled overnight following that deal to the tune of £18bn. Staff numbers doubled to 15,000, too.
Ratcliffe was comfortably a multi-billionaire.
‘We’d look at businesses that were unfashionable or unsexy, facilities owned by large corporations where you’d know they would be sloppy with the fixed costs,’ Ratcliffe once told the Times.
‘We’d run them a bit better, reduce the costs, make them busy, and over the cycle they are very profitable.’
Don’t be fooled into thinking Ratcliffe in any way lucked his way into great fortune. In fact, his tough demeanour and stance earned him the nickname, Dr No.
JR, the oil tycoon in TV show Dallas, was another popularised nickname for the new Manchester United chief.
For most Manchester United fans it will be the performance of Ratcliffe and INEOS’ sporting portfolio that will be of the most interest, and it is a portfolio that is wide-reaching.
In 2017, INEOS snapped up Swiss football team FC Lausanne-Sport.
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‘This is not a profit-making activity,’ David Thompson, a senior executive at INEOS, said at the time.
Two years later the billionaire acquired French top-flight side Nice for £91m.
There has been significant investment in Nice since their purchase, with the club spending €253m (£220m) in the transfer market, now into their fifth season in charge.
But that injection of capital is yet to yield the level of on-field success many had anticipated, even allowing for the challenges of competing in Ligue 1 with mega-rich Qatari-owned PSG.
Since 2019 Nice have had six managers walk through the doors at Allianz Riviera. Patrick Vieira was dismissed in 2020, while Adrian Ursea, Christophe Galtier, Lucien Favre, and Didier Digard – on an interim basis – have been and gone with Francesco Farioli currently in the job.
Although, it now seems that years of churn have finally made way for a promising league campaign – Nice are second through the opening 12 games, a point adrift of leaders PSG – Ratcliffe looked to have unsettled some Nice supporters in the summer when he announced a change in recruitment strategy that would see the club pivot from high-profile additions in the mold of Kasper Schmeichel, Ross Barkley and Aaron Ramsey, to up-and-coming young players.
It is a sensible business model but not an easy sell to fans that hold a win-now mindset.
In May, club captain Dante was vocal in his criticism of the ownership.
‘To maintain a project, maybe you need to speak less about objectives and work in silence to create an environment of competitors,’ said the Brazilian defender. ‘Because the expectation is even bigger, and then after, people are frustrated.
‘The best thing to do is to prepare as quickly as possible for next season in order to start it well.’
He has experience across various sports, including Formula One with the Mercedes team
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‘Do you remember how many players came in at the end of the transfer window last summer?’ Dante continued. ‘Six left, six arrived. It’s difficult in these conditions. Simply, we mustn’t make the same errors.
‘If someone wants my opinion, the earlier we organise ourselves, the better it will be. If we want to aim higher, we have to anticipate things and put the values of the organisation in place.
‘When the coach [Lucien Favre] arrived, we said in two years that we would always be in the Champions League. It doesn’t work like that. Ligue 1 is very difficult.’
Outside football INEOS’ record is one of glory and success.
Sponsoring the Mercedes Formula One team, taking on professional cycling outfit Team Sky and winning the Tour de France seven times with the team now known as the INEOS Grenadiers, Ratcliffe’s record speaks for itself.
INEOS also has ties to British sailing legend Ben Ainslie and they are a performance partner to the New Zealand rugby team.
But football appears an itch he is still desperate to scratch, a mountain he still needs to climb with his insatiable appetite to be the best.
Jean-Claude Blanc, who heads up INEOS’ sports portfolio, is a contender to be United CEO
Ratcliffe’s stride into English football has been four years in the making.
In 2019, Ratcliffe’s brother Bob revealed INEOS had aspirations of acquiring a team in England’s top-flight, only to find the eye-watering prices to be prohibitive.
‘We spent quite a lot of time looking at Premier League clubs,’ he told the BBC.
‘[It’s] pretty difficult to rationalise purchases in the Premier League at this time for us and then, if you look below the top six, they’re all £150m and above and you’re going to write a cheque for £50m and get in the ‘Everton Cup’.
‘There was some early exchange [with Chelsea] but we were a significant way apart on valuations. The issue was its stadium. We are all getting older and it is a decade of your life to resolve that.’
Clearly unperturbed by his brother’s reticence in 2019, three years later Ratcliffe and INEOS tabled a late bid to purchase the Blues but were beaten by the Todd Boehly-Clearlake consortium that shelled out over £4bn for the side.
Not only did the Chelsea offer indicate their willingness to enter the high-stakes game of Premier League ownership, but – mindful of his brother’s comment on Stamford Bridge – it pointed to a readiness to commit to spending off the pitch as well as on it, which is welcome news to United given the quite obvious need to patch up Old Trafford.
Now with control of United’s football operations Ratcliffe is embarking on a daunting task of transforming the fortunes of one of the biggest clubs in world football without ultimate authority.
Ratcliffe (right) also owns Nice in France, and they are battling PSG for the title this season
In the short-term there will be a shake-up of the club’s existing hierarchy. Chief executive Richard Arnold is stepping down from his position at the end of December and will make way for Patrick Stewart, United’s general counsel, in the interim.
Other changes are expected to follow, with reports of football director John Murtough and director of football operations David Harrison expected to follow Arnold out the door.
Then there is the reported interest in Crystal Palace sporting director Dougie Freedman, who has been in charge of the Eagles’ recruitment since 2017.
He is among a shortlist of candidates that includes former Monaco sporting director Paul Mitchell as well as Jean-Claude Blanc.
Joined-up thinking across departments, long-term plans, investment in infrastructure and a commitment to actually improving on the pitch. It sounds pretty simple, but it doesn’t mean it’s easy.