On a recent visit to Old Trafford, Sir Jim Ratcliffe saw visiting fans standing around in the rain with nowhere to go except Gary Neville’s Hotel Football just a corner kick away, built independently under the noses of the club.
Manchester United’s new co-owner stood there and asked, as he has done countless times since examining the club’s accounts, recruitment strategy, stadium, sports science department, chain of command and just about everything down to the sandwiches, is this really the best that a world-renowned institution can do?
The answer hardly needs stating but Ratcliffe, with characteristic northern forthrightness, did so anyway when he called the club’s museum “crap” — less a Gerald Ratner moment than a typically plain-speaking jolt for staff at Old Trafford that everything is up for discussion, challenge, accountability and transformation.
Change is in the air at United from the museum that houses the club’s precious artefacts, the megastore that Ratcliffe dismissed as “too small” and, of course, the stadium, which will be rebuilt one way or another, perhaps as part of a wider regeneration of Trafford Park.
The team too, given that they are on course to finish behind their neighbours, Manchester City, in the Premier League for the 11th year running. Best in the world? United have been third best in the North West for much of the past decade.
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When Ratcliffe met Sir Alex Ferguson in January and a one-hour chat lasted for four, the legendary manager tasked Ratcliffe with ensuring that his 27 years spent elevating the club to the summit of the game were not going to be squandered by more of what has come since.
Even for someone who has built a company, Ineos, from scratch to generate $65 billion in annual revenues, it is the challenge of a lifetime. Less than 24 hours after Ratcliffe’s purchase of a 27.7 per cent stake in United was ratified, he sat in an office in London with one overriding message: the return of ambition.
It is the sort of ambition that probably comes quite naturally if you are worth so many billions that you can sink one of them into your football club with no expectation of a return in your lifetime — not that Ratcliffe expects to lose money on United.
It is the sort of ambition that made him set a three-year plan to overhaul City and Liverpool, which was certainly bullish, though perhaps not outlandish given that Jürgen Klopp will be long gone from Merseyside by then and Pep Guardiola will have probably finished with his work across Manchester.
Those departures will help but only if the new United regime has made much better decisions than the club’s hierarchy of the past decade — and Ratcliffe acknowledged that difficult experiences of Ineos ownership in football at Lausanne and Nice will need to be heeded.
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“We’ve made some really stupid decisions in both those clubs,” he admitted, adding that the Ineos ethos is that everyone is allowed to make a mistake once but twice tests the boss’s patience.
“We have made mistakes in football so I’m really pleased that we made those mistakes before we arrived here,” he said. “If we hadn’t, this would be a much tougher job for us. Because it is huge and it’s very exposed.”
That exposure was underlined listening to Ratcliffe make clear that he is the key influence at the club now. He may be a minority shareholder in an unusual model of co-ownership but he has the steering wheel.
As an illustration, the appointment of a new chief executive would formally come under Glazer powers but it was the Ineos team who were alerted to the potential availability of Omar Berrada, chief operating officer at City. There was a need to move fast and so Ineos made the approach, and Joel and Avram Glazer flew over within 48 hours to interview Berrada to give their approval.
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When it comes to major signings, the plan is to agree jointly a budget in advance of any transfer window to avoid tension about how much to invest. Choice of targets will then be the responsibility of a recruitment department being overhauled by the Ineos head of sport, Sir Dave Brailsford.
Dan Ashworth will lead as technical director whenever he joins from Newcastle United — talks over compensation may resume next week — and it is likely that Jason Wilcox, who worked under Berrada as the head of City’s academy, will join from Southampton.
Change in the manager’s office too? If world-leading is the new aspiration at United, it is reasonable to ask whether Erik ten Hag can deliver given that a promising first season has been followed by a difficult second, with a lack of clear strategy.
There will be no more important decision taken by the new regime than the manager’s position. Ten Hag has another season left on his contract and, while Ratcliffe would not be drawn specifically on the Dutchman, he did say this about wider strategy: “You don’t want to run to the wrong solution rather than walk to the correct solution.”
Not many managers in the world are of a calibre to fulfil the remit of playing the “best football in the world” and winning the biggest prizes within three years, even assuming wretched business in the transfer market is swiftly corrected, so this looms for Ineos as both the key dilemma and the most challenging.
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In the meantime, an entirely new structure of senior leadership will be put in place, and the good news for Ratcliffe is that there is appetite for change among many of the hundreds of United staff he addressed in January. They have seen this grand institution lose its sense of purpose. Ratcliffe was careful not to criticise the Glazers but everyone knows that performance had been steadily eroded and neglected under the Americans and Ed Woodward, the executive vice-chairman from 2012 to 2022.
“United, a bit in the last ten years, [has believed] that if you’re really good in commercial and you make lots of money, then you’ll be successful in football because you’ve got lots of money to spend,” Ratcliffe said. “But I think that’s flawed because you start to degrade the brand if you’re not careful. We’re really clear that football will drive the club. If we’re really successful at football, then commercial will follow.”
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It is remarkable that this needed restating but acceptance of second best, or even third rate, had become normalised at Old Trafford. Ineos’s first mission is to shake up that complacency and, to illustrate the point, Ratcliffe concluded his first media gathering as United co-owner by talking about another of his sporting passions, the America’s Cup, which was first raced in 1851.
“Queen Victoria was present,” Ratcliffe explained. “The US sent a yacht across called America. We had 11 yachts and we had a race around the Isle of Wight. In the end, the American boat won the race. Queen Victoria turned to the commodore and said, ‘Did we come second?’ And the commodore said, ‘There is no second.’ ”
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At a club that has finished seventh, and frequently sixth (its present position), in the past decade, it is not just the stadium that needs a complete overhaul but the culture, the way of thinking.
