How Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s Manchester United dream turned sour
The British billionaire has invested heavily in sport – but with Man Utd fans warning of ‘outright rebellion’ and his sailing alliance with Ben Ainslie in tatters, his quest for triumph has hit choppy waters
Shortly before their acrimonious parting in recent days over their joint pursuit of yacht racing glory, sailing star Sir Ben Ainslie offered some thoughts about industrialist Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s “hands-on” approach to investing in sport.
The Olympian – who last October took Britain to the final of the America’s Cup for the first time in 60 years, on board the futuristic Ineos Britannia vessel funded by Britain’s fourth-richest individual – said: “That’s what Jim is all about. He’s a a very hard businessman – his investments in sport, it’s all about success, results.”
On such a metric, the Manchester-born billionaire, and his increasingly expensive project to wring victory from sporting ventures, ranging from co-ownership of Manchester United to elite cycling and high-speed sailing, have hit perplexingly choppy waters.
Especially for a man who has built, in the shape of his Swiss-based Ineos Group, a global chemicals behemoth with annual revenues of $55bn (£44bn).
In recent days, Ratcliffe has been publicly cussed by Man United supporters and been warned by an official fan group that he faces “outright rebellion” on the terraces if he pursues plans to raise ticket prices at Old Trafford for the rest of the season to a minimum of £66.
He has been told by Sir Ben Ainslie that INEOS faces “significant legal and practical obstacles” after the pair spectacularly parted ways over a further bid for the America’s Cup, the world’s oldest international sporting competition.
And his Ineos Grenadiers cycling team announced it was looking for additional sponsorship after a string of indifferent performances and the surprise departure of GB Olympic star Tom Pidcock, with the team’s chief executive John Allert conceding: “I think the whole Tom topic might be one for a book in 10 years’ time”.

To date, Ratcliffe has spent somewhere in the region of £1.6bn – including some £1.25bn on his 28.94 per cent stake in the Red Devils – to earn such opprobrium. When this week trying to justify his ticket price policy, which comes with no concessions for children or pensioners, he said: “You can’t be popular all the time.”
Even a brief spell of mild approval would probably make a welcome change for a man who sees himself as taking an opportunity to invest some of his estimated £23.5bn fortune in his sporting passions.
Indeed, such has been the turbulence in the fortunes of Ineos Sport – the subsidiary which oversees the company’s investment in nine teams or ventures across six different sports – that the company is conducting an internal review of its assets in the sector.
The company told The i Paper that while the problems at Manchester United had not dimmed the appetite of its founder for sport, it is having a knock-on effect on its ability to invest in other projects. Pointing to its quest for new cofunding for cycling and sailing, a spokesperson said: “It has led us to seek additional investors.”
Industry insiders and experts believe Ineos and its grizzled owner are experiencing what one seasoned sports sponsorship agent described as the perils of “investing in emotion”.
As the agent put it: “It’s pretty clear Jim Ratcliffe’s intentions are honourable and he really cares about what he’s investing in. But what he’s coming up against are the dangers of investing in emotion, in the desire to win. Often that doesn’t come quickly.”
Ratcliffe is no stranger to making plain his desires. Ever since he mortgaged his house and put up his life savings in 1992 to buy a struggling chemicals division of oil giant BP and founded Ineos, he has pointed his staff towards a set of principles encapsulated in what he calls the “Ineos compass” – a diagram detailing likes and dislikes set around his core values of “rigour”, “grit” and “humour”.
Perhaps tellingly, among his preferences are “people who hate losing”, “stamina”, “sport” and “work hard, play hard”. Among his pet hates are “moaners”, “losing money” and “lukewarm cappuccino”.

Certainly, he has made it clear he believes it is time for Manchester United to wake up and smell the coffee.
Almost exactly a year ago, Ratcliffe signed off on a deal with the American Glazer family, the club’s longstanding and little-loved owners since 2005, that gave Ineos control of “football operations”.
The result has been a tumultuous 12 months at Old Trafford during which Ratcliffe and his senior lieutenants, including Sir David Brailsford – the former director of British Cycling renowned for his “marginal gains” theory – have sought to revitalise what Ratcliffe said has become a “mediocre” club.
Part of the approach has involved a dose of the cost-cutting that has characterised Ineos’s turnaround model of its chemical industry acquisitions. In a bid to save up to £45m a year, the club has made 250 non-playing staff – about a quarter of the total – redundant, many of them at the lower end of the pay scale.
Alongside job losses has come a newly impecunious culture, with a £100 Christmas bonus trimmed to a £40 M&S voucher, and a £50 “Steward of the Week” prize discontinued. The belt-tightening has extended even to club luminaries such as legendary former manager Sir Alex Ferguson, who was told his £2.2m a year role as global club ambassador is now surplus to requirements.

Ratcliffe has acknowledged a need for “difficult and unpopular decisions”, telling the United We Stand fanzine last month: “If you shy away from difficult decisions then nothing much is going to change.”
Ineos insists it has rolled up its sleeves on an array of long-term improvements, including a £50m revamp of the club’s Carrington training ground and a proposed £4.2bn redevelopment of Old Trafford and its surrounding area. This week, Chancellor Rachel Reeves offered her support for the project, albeit alongside an insistence from Government that no public money would be available for rebuilding the stadium.
But criticism has been levelled at Ineos for the expensive departures of previous manager Erik ten Hag and sporting director Dan Ashworth, who had been poached at considerable expense from Newcastle United but only spent five months in post. The compensation bill for both men has been put at more than £25m – and in the meantime, according to one estimate, Ratcliffe has seen the paper value of his investment in United fall by £588m.
In much the same way that football managers live in fear of “losing the dressing room”, Ratcliffe who was born in Oldham and supported United as a child, risks losing the terraces.
Dr Paul Widdop, a specialist in sports business at Manchester Metropolitan University, who also lives close to Old Trafford, said: “Ratcliffe has a narrative – he can say he knows what the club was like when he was growing up. But ultimately he’s adopted a very transactional, American-style approach. That feels different from the way the Saudis are running Newcastle or Abu Dhabi is running Manchester City, which is more embedded in the community.
“There is a concern that some of what is happening is quite ‘un-Manchester United’ by looking for savings at the bottom end of the pay scale.”
Such sentiments were doubtless brought home this week when the Manchester United Supporters Trust (MUST), the largest fans’ group in the country, wrote an open letter to Ratcliffe to provide “honest counsel” on rising “discontent” at the issue of ticket price rises.
The trust said: “This discontent could lead to outright rebellion.”
A spokesperson for MUST told The i Paper: “We would urge him to give the maximum focus to Manchester United over the coming period. With ticket price rises off the field and dreadful performances on it, we would expect the whole management team to be absolutely obsessive in turning the club around.”
For its part, the United management argued last week that the club is making unsustainable losses – some £300m over the last three years – and “difficult choices” are required.
To suggest Ineos and its owner have endowed their sporting investments with a reverse Midas touch would be wrong. Its partnerships in rugby union and distance running are performing well. Ratcliffe’s undisclosed investment to buy a 33 per cent share of the Mercedes Formula One team in 2020 appears to have reaped handsome dividends.
But it is also clear that for Britain’s foremost industrialist, defeat can be a bitter pill.

His alliance with Ben Ainslie was founded over a gin and tonic in a London pub in 2018, during which Ratcliffe agreed to finance the Olympian’s bid to win the America’s Cup for Britain for the first time in its 173-year history. As Ratcliffe put it: “It was the most expensive gin and tonic of my life.”
Ineos is thought to have invested some £200m in the effort which culminated in the British team reaching the final of the 37th edition of the trophy, only to be comprehensively beaten by the defending champions, New Zealand, in October last year.
The relationship between the two knights of the realm now seems to have irretrievably broken down after Ineos abruptly announced it had parted ways with Sir Ben, 47, and intended to pursue its own challenge for the next edition of the famously expensive competition.
Sir Ben declared himself “astounded” by the Ineos decision and strongly hinted the matter would be heading for the courts, saying the announcement “raises significant legal and practical obstacles for them that will play out in the coming days and weeks”.
At the very least, the scene is set for a determined tussle between two of life’s grittiest, no-nonsense winners for the right to confront the Kiwis in the 38th edition of the competition.
A spokesperson for Athena Racing, as Ainslie’s team is now known, told The i Paper it had no further comment on the dispute with Ineos, but added: “Athena Racing is the Challenger of Record for the 38th America’s Cup.”
Grant Jarvie, professor of sport at the University of Edinburgh, points out that while Ineos Sport’s travails are likely to have emerged for a mixture of reasons, they suggest a merging of business and sporting ethoses may not be an obvious route to success.
As he put it: “The Ineos venture into the sports industry has only had moderate success in the short-term, which may suggest that standard business models do not always apply. The Ineos sports way is still a work in progress – and is at best unproven.”
Sir Jim’s sporting portfolio
Football
Manchester United: 29 per cent co-ownership stake
FC Lausanne, Switzerland: Full ownership
OCG Nice, France: 17 per cent minority stake
Total cost: c.£1.26bn
Formula One
Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1: principal partner and co-owner with a 33 per cent stake
Total cost: Initial investment unknown but team now worth £3.2bn
Sailing
Ineos Britannia: team until recently headed by Sir Ben Ainslie to compete for the 37th America’s Cup
Total cost: An estimated £200m, with a further £100m to compete in the 38th America’s Cup
Cycling
Ineos Grenadiers: full ownership of the professional cycling team with ambitions to win the Tour de France
Total cost: Estimated cumulative cost of £35m per year since 2019 – £175m
Rugby
New Zealand All Blacks: “Performance Partner” and training sponsor
Total cost: £22m a year for six years – £132m
Running
NN Running Team – “Performance Partner” to stable of 80 leading athletes including marathon legend Eliud Kipchoge
Total cost: Unknown