“Football is a very complicated sport, especially at the top, so I’m sure they [Ineos] will contribute,” Erik Ten Hag said on Friday. “They will help us to achieve our high ambitions.”
In throwing bouquets at Jim Ratcliffe’s following his 25 per cent purchase of Manchester United that gave the Ineos owner control of football operations, the manager captured a key fact of the deal.
Football is, indeed, a “very complicated sport”, so as one club executive commented to this writer this week: who knows if Ratcliffe’s arrival will be the proverbial stroke of genius or a disaster that ends in tears?
Zoom out from the hope supporters rightly feel at the six Glazer siblings’ collective ownership being diluted to 49 per cent and Ratcliffe becoming the largest individual shareholder and it is simple to see why doubts persist. Suddenly there are seven chiefs and two power bases at the club. They may or may not jostle for supremacy.
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On one hand there is Ratcliffe and his lieutenants, Dave Brailsford (Ineos director of sport) and Jean-Claude Blanc (Ineos Sport chief executive), both of whom will take seats on the football board if and when the deal is, as expected, ratified by the Premier League in at least six weeks time.
On the other is the American family led by Joel Glazer, who is the de facto head of its collective ownership and runs United on a day-to-day basis from his Florida headquarters.
Ratcliffe may control football operations but how clear is the demarcation between where these end and the commercial operations begin? If the manager wants funds for a new star central midfielder, what material use would approval from Ratcliffe’s team be if the Glazers then said no?
The winter window opens next week but the terms of the deal state that, even though Ratcliffe is not yet officially in place, no transfers can be done unless Ineos are consulted. Ten Hag needs reinforcements for his see-sawing side and, as it is notoriously hard to pull off major deals in January at the best of times, the last thing required is another complication.
Further complexity lies in the executive positions. Ratcliffe seeks to replace John Murtough as United’s football director with Newcastle’s Dan Ashworth: can he do so unilaterally or do the Glazers have to sign this off too? And what about the chief executive position? This is vacant and Blanc is Ratcliffe’s favoured candidate but the appointment is a company board decision and while Ratcliffe will again have two of his people on this – the Ineos co-founder, John Reece, and Rob Nevin, the chairman of Ineos Sport – will the Glazers really countenance having a Ratcliffe man as the club’s most powerful executive?
In the “drag-along” clause there could be a further conundrum. This allows the Glazers, 18 months after Ratcliffe’s purchase, to compel Ratcliffe to join any outright sale of their share. In this scenario Ratcliffe would have a 12-month window in which to strike an agreement to be the purchaser but if the Americans were to refuse his offer, they could sell elsewhere and he would be out of the club. Here, then, Ratcliffe is still in thrall to the Glazers’ realpolitik regarding real control of United, which could, in time, make his apparent grip on football operations irrelevant.
Alongside all of this is the fundamental challenge for Ratcliffe and company: can they truly oversee the radical upturn in on-field fortunes that United and their mammoth fan-base crave?
That was the question to Ten Hag that drew his “complications” line. The full answer was: “In other clubs, they have experience, in other sports, they have a lot of experience, a lot about performance, a lot of knowledge. So I’m really looking forward to [seeing] how they can contribute and I’m sure they can. Football is a very complicated sport, especially at the top, so I’m sure they will contribute, they will help us to achieve our high ambitions.”
Except Ineos Sports’ track record is patchy. Its first foray into football was the purchase of Lausanne Sport (LS) in November 2017. Since then, the Swiss club has yo-yoed between their country’s first and second tiers. They are currently third-bottom of the top flight with a goal difference of minus 5. In the summer of 2019 Ratcliffe took over Nice. Since then the French club, whose last league title was in 1959, has finished fifth, ninth, fifth and ninth, and they now sit second in Ligue 1, a perch on which they have not finished since 1976.
[ Jim Ratcliffe could cut 300 jobs at Manchester United in streamliningOpens in new window ]
Beyond football, Ineos Sport became a third equal-partner in the Mercedes F1 team in December 2020. The following season the championship was claimed but after eight straight triumphs, the past two seasons have ended in second and third-place finishes. And its purchase in 2019 of the Team Sky cycling team, which became Ineos Grenadiers, led to the end of a run of eight Tour de France victories.
So then, the Ratcliffe United era: a new hope or another misstep for a seriously troubled club whose side is the definition of topsy-turvy?
At Old Trafford on Tuesday Ten Hag’s men were 2-0 down to Aston Villa and the businessman’s buy-in appeared a why-have-you-done-this-Jim? move. But United put on a second half show that featured two Alejandro Garnacho goals plus Rasmus Højlund’s memorable 82nd-minute volleyed winner and all felt far rosier.
This is how football’s instant gratification culture works. But in the coming months we will discover whether there are to be any real, long-term gains for United.
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