Manchester United co-owner tells Martin Samuel what he really thinks of the Glazer family — and where it has all gone wrong at Old Trafford.
Sir Jim Ratcliffe used to start his day with a coffee, a croissant and the newspapers. He still has the coffee and the croissant. “Now I invite someone in to have it with me,” he says. “I don’t read the paper. I used to have a nice life. Now it’s like getting a school report, every day.”
The world’s smallest violin, for the country’s richest man, please. No one is going to feel sorry for Ratcliffe, and he knows that. He wasn’t seeking pity. The question was about fun, and whether there was any to be had running Manchester United. There are all sorts of reasons why very rich men buy football clubs but one of the most overlooked is pure pleasure-seeking.
Mike Ashley thought he would have fun at Newcastle United. He imagined heading north with his mates, drinks before the game, watching his team, off to Bigg Market with the fans later. What he didn’t envisage was: fat Cockney bastard, get out of our club; and years of antagonised exile.
Ratcliffe isn’t in those shoes just yet, but he’s hovering outside the closet. There is a song, heard during a match at Fulham in January, that no longer differentiates between his stewardship and that of the Glazers and uses the same four-letter word for both. You’ll find it in Chaucer. Then there are the realities that are not just matters of opinion. The league position, the finances, a difficult start for new manager Ruben Amorim, the regulatory limitations that will continue impacting hopes of swift recovery.
The fans thought they were getting a benevolent custodian looking down and laughing indulgently like the Teletubbies Sun Baby. What they have instead is a billionaire who ups ticket prices, lays off staff and makes judgments that are random at best, with key personnel hired and fired at enormous cost. And the Glazers. Still, the Glazers. Still the majority owners of Manchester United, the club continuing to service their debt. Ratcliffe’s advisers don’t like him talking about his partners. If he speaks positively, and he does, it distances him further from the fans.
Ratcliffe was being driven from Craven Cottage — chauffeur, not angry mob — when supporters surrounded his vehicle. United had won that day, but ticket-price rises had been announced with no concessions for children or pensioners.
One of Ratcliffe’s critics said tickets at Old Trafford should be a third of those at Fulham. Ratcliffe disagreed. He believes it should be more expensive to watch the biggest club in the world and in their new stadium, with its planned 100,000 capacity, there will be room for more affordable seating. But that’s a long way off, five years at least, and a lot of rough sea to cross, particularly getting the government to uphold its end of the deal. If this friction continues, or heaven forbid gets worse, can he stick it out?
“It can be unpleasant,” he says. “And I’ve probably failed on the having fun front. I mean, I can put up with it for a while. I don’t mind being unpopular because I get that nobody likes seeing Manchester United down where they are, and nobody likes the decisions we’re having to make at the moment. If I draw a bit of the ire, I can put up with that. But I’m no different to the average person. It’s not nice, particularly for friends and family.
“So, eventually, if it reached the extent that the Glazer family have been abused, then I’d have to say, look, enough’s enough guys, let somebody else do this. They can’t really come to a match, the Glazers. They’ve retreated into the shadows a bit now, so I’m getting all the bloody stick.
“We bought in and I haven’t seen them since. It’s, ‘Thank you, Jim, you’re doing a really good job.’ At the moment, I don’t have security, I don’t have to walk around like that. But it would defeat the object, wouldn’t it? You couldn’t tolerate it at that level, it just wouldn’t be fun.
“I haven’t had it so far, not really. I had that guy through the car window at the Fulham match that got arsey with me, but I haven’t had what I would call threatening behaviour — although my brother Bob sends me f***ing critical notes. It’s a bit like me and Ruben, he gives me advice.”
That, by the sounds of it, is not always taken. On holiday in the south of France four years ago, I bumped into Bob Ratcliffe. He told me that Sir Jim’s company Ineos, where he ran football operations, would never buy a Premier League club. Too expensive, no money in it. The only way football in England worked as an investment, he said, was to start in the Championship, build up and win promotion. And then, December 2023, his big brother bought into the biggest Premier League club of them all.
And here’s the strange thing. Ask Jim his motivation and it is one of the rare occasions he is stumped for an answer. He could play the proud Mancunian card but does not. And it isn’t the money, he insists. “That is 100 per cent not where I’ve come from at all. I’m making enough money in chemicals and oil and gas and all that stuff.” So? “I can’t honestly answer why we did it. It’s quite a difficult question. With Nice, in the French league, you can buy a club for £100million. It’s much cheaper access. But I don’t particularly enjoy going to watch Nice because there are some good players but the level of football is not high enough for me to get excited.”
So here’s my theory. Ratcliffe part owns Manchester United for the same reason as their former chairman Louis Edwards, or any number of rich men have owned football clubs since the dawn of professional competition: ego, prestige, because they can. He’s not in it for the same reason as his partners, or the hedge-funders and venture capitalists. He’s in it, I think, because it is something to be the owner of the biggest club in English football.
If you like sport — and Ratcliffe’s portfolio from cycling to sailing and Formula 1 confirms that he does — owning Manchester United is cool. Except when it’s not. Like right now, when Ratcliffe is the lightning rod for a regime that has been consistently failing for more than a decade now.