Editor’s note: This piece was first published on May 5 2022. It has been updated following the news Manchester United are to vote on selling a 25% stake in the club to Sir Jim Ratcliffe, the British billionaire and chief executive of Ineos.
He is the son of a joiner who grew up in a council house in Oldham but now splits his time between mansions and luxury flats.
He is the union-busting owner of a company that turns fossil fuels into plastics, employs thousands, champions manufacturing and believes capitalism can solve the planet’s biggest environmental problems.
He is a tax exile who moved his company’s headquarters back to the UK from Switzerland and kept Scotland’s largest refinery open, but then rowed back on a bid to build the “spiritual successor” to the Land Rover Defender in Wales, choosing to do it in continental Europe instead.
He backed Brexit, albeit a soft one, but thinks the UK government’s stance on fracking is “pathetic”.
He is a chemical engineer who turned to finance but has spent the last five years buying up sports teams and a fashion label.
He is a lifelong Manchester United fan who sold Golden Goal tickets as a teenager at Hull City, considered buying Chelsea or Newcastle United (among other Premier League clubs) a few years ago but bought Nice of the French top flight instead, and then tried to buy Chelsea again.
Ladies and gentlemen, meet Sir Jim Ratcliffe, a chap who sounds as complicated as the polymers he sells but who named his Defender-inspired 4×4 after a pub and who wants that vehicle to be something “you can hose down, inside and outside”.
A billionaire of the people, then, but which people?
But none of you really wants to read a business profile of Ratcliffe, how he founded Ineos at 45, spent a decade buying petrochemical businesses with borrowed money, navigated the global recession of 2008 and then diversified into businesses you and I have actually heard of, like sports teams.
You want to know if he is about to buy into Manchester United. And if he is, how he will use his new power.
The good news on that front is that for someone with a reputation for valuing their privacy, the 69-year-old has been remarkably willing to answer questions when asked.
Put “Sir Jim Ratcliffe interview” into a search engine and you will find conversations with leading journalists, ‘Ask the boss’ sessions for the Ineos YouTube channel and relaxed chats about subjects ranging from gas storage to beers with Sir Ben Ainslie, the most successful sailor in Olympic history.
Sir Jim Ratcliffe, right, with 15-time Olympic and world champion sailor Sir Ben Ainslie in 2018 (Photo: Lloyd Images/Getty Images)
In May 2022, this shy, shy man spoke to the BBC in Madrid. He was in the Spanish capital to watch Real Madrid vs Manchester City in the second leg of their Champions League semi-final.
Asked why he wanted to buy Chelsea, as he did at the time, he said he has made no secret of being interested in buying a Premier League club. He has a house in Chelsea, his company HQ is up the road in Knightsbridge and he has been a regular at Stamford Bridge for years. He then said football is the world’s most popular sport, the Premier League is the world’s biggest league and Chelsea are one of the best clubs in that league.
He admitted to having a “split allegiance” between Manchester United, the club of his youth, and Chelsea, the club of his adulthood, but when asked why he does not try to buy United, he gave a businessman’s answer: They are not for sale. We will come back to that.
On his vision for Chelsea, Ratcliffe opened up.
“I’ve always had this view that London and the UK are very much in the centre of the world of football — it’s where most of the money in football is and, of course, we’ve been very successful as a country in the biggest competitions recently,” he said.
“We have six great clubs — three in the north, three in London — but, if you look at London, it’s never had a team of the stature of Bayern Munich, Real Madrid or Barcelona, (one) that’s consistently been in the last eight of the Champions League. So, our ambition for Chelsea, because I think Chelsea would be a great candidate to be that club in London, would be to be that club that could hold its own always.
“In other words, a club that would have the same stature as the city of London. That’s how we would measure ourselves if we were successful in buying Chelsea.”
Flag-waving nonsense? A cynical appeal to a populist government desperate for British success stories?
Maybe, but Ratcliffe has a track record of expensive patriotic ventures.
That drink with Ainslie, Britain’s most famous sailor, turned into a £100 million punt on trying to become the first British winner of the America’s Cup. They came up short in 2021 but have already thrown down the gauntlet for the next edition of the 171-year-old contest in 2024. Their sailing team is called Ineos Britannia.
He also bought Manchester-based cycling outfit Team Sky in 2019, rebranded them Team Ineos and then Ineos Grenadiers. Grenadier, by the way, is the name of the aforementioned 4×4 and that pub in London’s Belgravia. The cycling team have continued to win races, too.
And in 2021, he bought a third of UK-based Formula 1 team Mercedes-AMG, teaming up with another British sportsman and tax exile, Sir Lewis Hamilton.
And we should also mention that Ratcliffe’s first investment outside the more business-to-business world of petrochemicals was Belstaff, the clothing label founded in Stoke in 1924. Famous for its motorbike jackets, it is an inherently British brand based on that idea of aristocratic sportiness but it had “fallen” into overseas ownership until Ratcliffe rescued it in 2017.
Lewis Hamilton, left, celebrates with Ratcliffe after winning the 2021 Barcelona Grand Prix (Photo: Joe Portlock – Formula 1/Formula 1 via Getty Images)
But the thing you must never forget with Ratcliffe is his patriotism has limits. He thought Chelsea and Newcastle were too expensive in 2019, so he bought Nice. A year later, he thought he was paying too much income tax in the UK, so he moved his tax residence to Monaco, saving billions. He also thought building the Grenadier would be too expensive in Wales, so he opted for a French factory.
Should this surprise us, though? He is hardly the first wealthy Brit to move to somewhere with a less onerous tax regime, and he was previously one of HM Revenue and Customs’ biggest individual benefactors. Ineos owns 194 sites in 26 countries, employing 26,000 people. It has a turnover of almost £50 billion and made almost £1.7 billion in profit last year. It did not achieve that by putting passports ahead of pennies. His patriotism is pragmatic.
But is he punctual?
When asked by the BBC why his bid for Chelsea came in so late, he admitted it was late and accepted, “that’s our fault”.
But he then explained, “it’s a big decision to buy a national asset of the importance of a club like Chelsea… a big responsibility and a big commitment, both in terms of time and money, because we aren’t there for five years or for 10 years, we’re there for the long term”.
As The Athletic reported, Ratcliffe and his team at Ineos were watching the takeover process from the sidelines with growing interest. It took them longer than the American sports entrepreneurs who jumped at the chance to buy Chelsea as soon as Roman Abramovich’s circumstances changed, but Ineos then decided £2.5 billion was a fair price for club football’s reigning world champions.
Ratcliffe has made his fortune out of spotting value in the market. Ineos is basically a conglomerate of businesses he bought between 1998 and 2008, which are still run in a relatively loose, federal style. In this regard, he is exactly the same as Todd Boehly, the investor who ultimately won the Chelsea takeover contest.
Boehly, Ratcliffe, Josh Harris, Steve Pagliuca and all the other business brains who bid for Chelsea saw the Premier League’s popularity, the potential to monetise that global fanbase in new ways and the possibility to cement the club’s position among football’s elite, with new sponsors and revenue streams and a bigger stadium. And the fact that a Russian oligarch had done a lot of the heavy lifting already in terms of building the brand and talent pipeline at Stamford Bridge was even better.
But Ratcliffe had a much closer relationship with the UK government — simply because he has run one of Britain’s biggest and most strategically-important companies for more than 20 years — than any of the other bidders.
This was relevant because Chelsea was a frozen asset owned by an individual who cannot benefit from the proceeds of its sale for as long as he remains on the UK’s sanctions list. This sale could only proceed with government permission.
“The decision is partially Roman’s but equally, the government has to decide that the owner is a good owner for the future, and the supporters should have a say on what sort of owner they want to see in the future,” Ratcliffe told the BBC.
That last comment is a veiled reference to the fact that two-thirds of the money Boehly spent on buying and bankrolling Chelsea came from Clearlake Capital, a California-based private equity firm. Ratcliffe knows a thing or two about private equity firms, having worked for one before deciding to actually assemble and run his own business.
“It’s a simple business: You persuade a pension fund or an insurance company to give you some money to manage, you manage the money with the intention of increasing the value, and if you increase the value, you get share of the profits,” he told the BBC.
“Your focus is always on, ‘How do I invest and make that money grow?’ and it’s typically a five-year time horizon. In America, the big sports clubs won’t allow those people to come in and buy the clubs. So you can’t buy an NFL club, but in the UK you can.”
That last point is partly true, as American football’s NFL has strict rules on the size of ownership syndicates and how big a stake in one of its 32 clubs can be owned by a fund. Basketball’s NBA has recently relaxed its rules on investment from funds but would not permit a takeover under the same terms as the Boehly/Clearlake bought Chelsea.
“We’re not interested in making money out of Chelsea,” Ratcliffe told the BBC. “Can we run that club really, really well and turn it into one of the finest clubs in Europe? That’s our ambition with Chelsea. We make lots of money in chemicals, we don’t need to make money out of (Chelsea). We don’t think of it as a financial asset.”
But remember, he does not throw good money after bad, either.
Ratcliffe at a match between Nice and Paris Saint-Germain in 2019 (Photo: Valery Hache/AFP via Getty Images)
He also already owns two football teams: Lausanne-Sport, the club he bought in 2017 when Ineos was still based in Switzerland; and Nice, his other “local” club in the south of France, 13 miles west of Monaco.
Until last year, these clubs were run by Jim’s younger brother Bob Ratcliffe, who was Ineos’ head of football.
Lausanne got relegated in their first season under Ineos control but came back up as champions a year later. Unfortunately, they went down again but they do have a new stadium now.
Nice have been much more successful. They are currently mid-table in Ligue 1. But that could represent a problem, as UEFA does not let clubs with the same owner compete in the same competition.
Bob Ratcliffe previously talked about Nice being a “three-to-five-year project” and the “priority” for Ineos’ football arm. He also previously said it was difficult to rationalise the cost of clubs in the Premier League, so things have clearly changed.
His brother, however, suggested to the BBC that they would be looking for a way to keep Nice and Chelsea if they had managed to get the latter deal over the line. So we shall see what happens with Nice and United, if that latter deal ever happens.
The Golden Goal story mentioned at the start of this piece came from one of those ‘Ask the boss’ interviews.
A member of staff asked him if Ineos would buy Hull City. Ratcliffe laughed, saying the Yorkshire club were “not high on our list” but then talked about the job he did at Boothferry Park, Hull’s old ground, after his family moved to England’s east coast from Oldham on the outskirts of Manchester. He spoke fondly about the reward being a free seat in the club’s best stand.
But nobody seriously thinks Ratcliffe should buy Hull. The Championship club were bought recently, anyway.
If Ratcliffe does buy into Manchester United, there would be no need for any of that half-and-half-scarf nonsense about “split allegiances”.
(Photo: VALERY HACHE/AFP via Getty Images)
