sport news MARTIN SAMUEL: Why would Sir Jim Ratcliffe get involved in Manchester United? trends now
Elon Musk’s takeover wasn’t even the biggest joke at Manchester United’s expense this week.
The richest man on the planet was only teasing when he pretended to be buying the club in a tersely enticing tweet, and that was bad enough. On the same day, however, in an interview with the Financial Times, Mercedes chief Toto Wolff said he had studied the club — in an effort to find out why great teams fall apart.
Wolff wasn’t mocking, merely, as the leader of a Mercedes unit who had dominated F1, seeing Manchester United as a similar sporting enterprise before their recent fall. ‘The human gets complacent,’ he said. ‘You are not energised in the same way you were before. You are maybe not as ambitious.’
Even so, it reinforced the idea of United as a punchline, the way Manchester City used to be. ‘The Theatre of Screams,’ Sir Alex Ferguson would call Maine Road. There was a faux-clicker in a corner of Old Trafford detailing the years since City last won a trophy. All of this, and more, can be applied to United now.
The biggest players in sport are studying them for a crash course in how not to do it. So why would Sir Jim Ratcliffe want to get involved with the club in its present state?
Much as when Musk tweeted, there was great excitement when the wealthiest man in Britain seemed to suggest he would be interested in a stake in United. Yet we’ve been here before. Ratcliffe was also keen to buy Chelsea from Roman Abramovich, once the deadline for bids had passed. You will notice he does not own it now.
Elon Musk was only jesting on social media when he said that he was going to buy the club
A New York based private equity group, Apollo, are in negotiations to secure a minority stake from the Glazers, with only two of the six Glazer siblings said to be interested in staying on. Yet, and here is the key, Joel and Avram Glazer wish to keep the majority stake and control the day to day running of the club. So what is in it for a private, individual, investor like Ratcliffe?
The estimated valuation of the business is £5billion — ironically, if the team had performed as well there would be little problem — and let’s say the Glazers offered up as much as 30 per cent. That’s still £1.5billion, and who would want to plough that much into a company and leave people in charge who have become a case study in how to mess up?
Not everything that goes wrong at the club is down to the ownership — players, managers and staff must also take some blame — but this decline is all on the Glazer family watch. Surely, the bottom line for any serious investor must be regime change? If Ratcliffe is boarding this plane, he cannot surely be comfortable flying with the same pilot who seems baffled by the controls? He didn’t get to be worth close on
