“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 Sir Jim Ratcliffe following his 25% purchase of Manchester United that gains the Ineos owner control of football operations, the manager employed an apt phrase that shone a light on the crux of the deal.
Football is, indeed, a “very complicated sport” so as one club executive commented privately this week: who knows if Ratcliffe’s arrival will be a stroke of genius or a disaster that ends in tears?
Zoom out from the hope supporters feel at the six Glazer siblings’ collective ownership being diluted to 49%, with Ratcliffe now the largest individual shareholder, and it is simple to see why the future remains uncertain. Suddenly there are seven chiefs and two power bases at the club which may or may not jostle for supremacy.
On one side is Ratcliffe and his key lieutenants, Sir Dave Brailsford (Ineos director of sport) and Jean Claude Blanc (Ineos Sport CEO), both of whom will take seats on the football board when the deal is ratified, as expected, by the Premier League in a minimum of six weeks’ time.
On the other is the American family led by Joel Glazer, the de facto head of its collective ownership, who runs United on a day-to-day basis from his Florida headquarters.
Ratcliffe may control football operations but how clear are the demarcations of where these end and the commercial operations begin? If the manager wants, say, £100m for a new central midfielder, what use is Ratcliffe’s team sanctioning this if the Glazers then say 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 then 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, the last thing required is another – to use his word again – complication.
One more is found in the area of key executive positions. Ratcliffe seeks to replace John Murtough as United’s football director with Newcastle’s Dan Ashworth: can he do this unilaterally or do the Glazers have to sign this off too? And the CEO position: this is vacant and Blanc is Ratcliffe’s favoured candidate but who is appointed is a plc 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 is further complication and conundrum. This allows the Glazers, 18 months into Ratcliffe’s purchase, to compel the 71-year-old to join any outright vend of their share. In this scenario Ratcliffe has a 12-month window to strike an agreement to be the purchaser but if the Americans refuse his offer they can sell elsewhere and he is out of the club. Ratcliffe is still reliant on the Glazers in terms of the realpolitik of who controls United which could, in time, make his grip on football operations irrelevant.
Alongside all of this is the fundamental challenge for Ratcliffe and company: can they truly administer the seismic upturn of on-field fortunes at United that the mammoth fan-base craves?
This was the question to Ten Hag that led to his comment about “complications”. 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,” he said. “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 Sport’s track record is patchy. Its first foray into football was the purchase of Lausanne-Sport in November 2017. Since then, the Swiss club has yo-yoed. After relegation at the end of that season, promotion was achieved in 2019-20. Another relegation and promotion followed with LS currently third bottom of the Swiss Super League. In the summer of 2019 Ratcliffe then took over Nice and the French club, whose last league title was in 1959 and have not finished as runners-up since 1976, placed fifth, ninth, fifth and ninth, though they are currently second.
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 acquisition of the Team Sky cycling team – rebranded Ineos Grenadiers – in 2019 has delivered only Egan Bernal’s triumph shortly after the takeover following a run of six Tour de France wins in the preceding seven years.
So, the Ratcliffe-United era: a new hope or the next misstep in a seriously troubled club whose side is the definition of topsy-turvy?
At Old Trafford on Boxing Day Ten Hag’s men were 2-0 down to Aston Villa and the businessman must have been asking himself: ‘Why have you done this, Jim?’ 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 if there are to be any actual long-term gains for United.
