Paul Rouse: The brutal reality of Man United's decline is apparently unstoppable
Jim Ratcliffe, Ineos CEO and minority shareholder at Manchester United, alongside his wife Catherine Polli.
Jim Ratcliffe has been a disaster as co-owner of Manchester United Football Club.
If his leadership had simply been useless, it would be bad enough. But the ineptitude of his decision-making has been compounded by the embarrassment he causes when he speaks in public.
Ratcliffe was in Madrid this week to oversee the latest debacle. It is eloquent testimony to the rotten state of his club when a middling centre-half, Lisandro Martínez, feels emboldened to speak publicly in criticism of the men in charge of recruitment at Old Trafford.
Martínez was talking after United had lost 2-0 to Atletico Madrid and he said in essence that Manchester United had not bought enough good players in the summer.
It can be argued that Martínez – in timing and in standing, given how poorly he is currently playing – was wrong to speak as he did; but it cannot be argued that he was wrong.
For example, it is a simple fact that one of the biggest clubs in the world entered the season with only one left-back and only one centre-forward.
This was a gamble heightened by the injury profiles of the two players who do hold the positions.
As it turned out, neither has been able to play for the past two games and the timeline on their return is unclear.
The men effectively criticized by Martínez – Jason Wilcox and Omar Berrada – were appointed to run “the football operation” after Ratcliffe bought around 27% of Manchester United for €1.5bn or so in February 2024.
As part of this process, Ratcliffe had also appointed an expert in cycling – Dave Brailsford – to help run the club. This did not last long.
Although it did last longer than the appointment of Dan Ashworth as sporting director. Ashworth started in July 2024 and was gone by that Christmas. The full story of that debacle remains untold.
So it is Wilcox and Berrada who run day-to-day decision making.
Over the past two years, their record is stunning. And not in a good way.
In terms of managers, they decided to keep Erik ten Hag, and then fired him. They hired Ruben Amorim and then fired him too. They then hired Michael Carrick as a caretaker, before giving him the job on a full-time basis in the summer. It is a dismal truth that Carrick is currently the favourite with the bookmakers in England to be the first Premier League manager to be fired this year.
Recruitment is – as we all know – fundamental to the success of every single enterprise. And so it is that the players who have been bought for Manchester United have repeatedly found new ways to confound those who thought they had seen it all.
It is not just that there are not enough players for each position, it is also that there appears to be no obvious logic to the assembly of the squad. And, to begin with its most fundamental fault, it lacks any meaningful aggression.
All bets are now off as to what happens next. Jason Wilcox may also soon lose his job. If he goes – and if Omar Berrada goes with him – it would not be a surprise. When a team gets into a groove of losing like Manchester United are currently in, no boundary can be set on the damage to people’s careers.
There can, however, be no confidence that any appointment to the United hierarchy would bring anything more than light or temporary relief. Similarly, appointing a great manager or recruiting exceptional players would most likely fail.
The reason for this is clear.
The ownership of Manchester United is so dreadful that the brutal reality of the club’s decline is now apparently unstoppable.
The majority owners – the American Glazer family who bought the club, loaded it with debt, and almost never now come to Old Trafford – are utterly reviled by fans. Their true ambition appears to be to continue to keep this unique cash machine tipping away for their own benefit. They will sell at some point, but only after they have squeezed the lemon of as much juice as possible.
The Glazers must have been unable to believe their luck when Ratcliffe stepped in to pay so much money to be their mudguard, not least because he had previously failed in his effort to buy Chelsea.
When he walked into United, Ratcliffe had a very particular type of self-confidence: that of the man who has earned extreme wealth and believes that there is more or less nothing he could not do. We know them well here in Ireland.
In respect of Ratcliffe, it was as if running a sporting club would be a thing of nothing for a man who had made monstrous amounts of money since founding petrochemicals firm INEOS in the 1990s. Surely soccer couldn’t be that hard?
Turns out it is. He has found himself out of his depth. He has presided over a club that has botched not just the “football operation”, but also the development of a new ground, the reduction of its workforce, the treatment of season ticket holders and the setting of ticket prices.
Which brings us to the embarrassment he causes. Ratcliffe seems to believe that his success in business also allows him to profess on the world, that he has been gifted special insight, a certain genius.
An admirer of Nigel Farage, he said earlier this year: “The UK is being colonised by immigrants, really, isn’t it? I mean, the population of the UK was 58 million in 2020, now it’s 70 million. That’s 12 million people.” Ratcliffe is a tax exile who lives in Monaco and the numbers he quoted were completely wrong – by more or less that 10 million people.
More worryingly, the language he used is saturated in the online talking points of the far right. Ratcliffe may have become wealthy beyond reason, but his money has provided no insulation from ignorance; instead he has been caught in the warp of disinformation and ideological nastiness that has consumed so many around the world.
In the same interview, he also used inaccurate figures to slight people in Britain who live “on benefits” in Britain and that one of the major issues in the country was “with people opting to take benefits rather than working for a living”.
That he is a man of a particular stripe was confirmed in a recent interview when he lamented the loss of the British Empire: “We had the greatest empire in the world. We were a great people. We won two world wars. But unfortunately, at the moment, I think the UK is on the slide.” Again, according to Ratcliffe, the fault lay with immigrants and those on benefits, and the failure of politicians to take them on.
This would be hard enough to listen to if it was some blowhard on a high stool. The fact that it is a man who owns a significant part of Manchester United is entirely bleak.
While Jim Ratcliffe and the Glazers own Manchester United, it will remain stuck in a tailspin from which there will be no escape.
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
