Clubs. The Glazer family has finally sold, after a year of procrastination, part of Manchester United to the British billionaire Jim Ratcliffe, founder of the petrochemical group Ineos, eager to restore its former glory to the English giant, with its faded track record). announced Sunday December 24, 2023 the English football club. The American owners remain in control, of course, but the sale of 25% of the shares to the 71-year-old industrialist represents a first significant disengagement since their arrival in 2005. Before, perhaps, a more significant withdrawal?
The boss of Ineos, already owner of OGC Nice among others, paid 1.25 billion pounds (around 1.44 billion euros) to enter the capital, it is specified. The agreement provides that Ineos will have “responsibility for the management” of football-related matters. Ratcliffe recently declared that he wanted to see Manchester United, currently in sporting difficulties, “find their place again”.
The club is eighth in the English Premier League, 12 points behind leader Arsenal after its defeat last weekend at West Ham (2-0), its eighth in 18 days. In the Champions League, “MU” was eliminated in the first round, in last place in Group A.
This is not the epilogue that the new minority shareholder, eager to buy the club in its entirety, dreamed of, nor the supporters of the Red Devils, angry by nearly two decades of decried governance and synonymous, in their minds, with sporting decline. . The latter accuse the Glazers of having put the club in debt at the time of its takeover and of not having invested enough to allow the Mancunian institution to remain competitive.
Work at Old Trafford
They therefore welcomed with relief and optimism the announcement, in November 2022, of a reflection concerning “all strategic alternatives, including a new investment in the club, a sale or other transactions involving the company”. The past year has been marked by successive offers from Jim Ratcliffe, one of Britain’s richest people, and Sheikh Jassim Ben Hamad Al Thani, chairman of the Qatar Islamic Bank (QIB).
The agreement provides for an investment of 300 million dollars (272 million euros) for the renovation of the famous Old Trafford stadium. Ratcliffe also promised to improve the Carrington training center and attract players capable of putting the Red Devils back at the center of Europe. The dust has indeed begun to cover the trophy cabinet of Manchester United, one of the most successful in the kingdom, but whose last league title dates back ten years (2013) and the last of its three Champions Leagues, fifteen years (2008).
The former club of Bobby Charlton, David Beckham and Cristiano Ronaldo now lives sportingly in the shadow of neighbor Manchester City (owned by the ruling family of the United Arab Emirates), but it nevertheless retains a certain attractiveness throughout the world. At the end of October, he announced a turnover of 648.4 million pounds (744 million euros) for last season, during which he won the League Cup and finished in fourth place in the championship.
According to the press, the owners were demanding a check for 6 billion pounds (6.9 billion euros) for the total sale of a club acquired by the late Malcolm Glazer, the father, in 2005 for 790 million pounds ( approximately 910 million euros). The amount requested and the procrastination got the better of Sheikh Jassim’s patience. And Jim Ratcliffe, an avowed supporter of the Red Devils who grew up as a child in social housing near Manchester, remained alone in the running in the final stretch.
The entrepreneur knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2018 founded the company Ineos twenty years earlier, which became an industrial giant employing more than 26,000 people in 29 countries, at the cost of multiple company buyouts and cost reductions. anything goes. A fierce negotiator, particularly with unions, he defended “Brexit” as favorable to the United Kingdom, “a very creative and hard-working nation”. “ We don’t need people in Europe telling us how to run our country,” he said.
This political bias is due less to assumed patriotism than to its desire to circumvent European environmental standards, according to NGOs which point out the devastation caused by its petrochemical company (air and water pollution, plastic waste, etc). Ineos, of which it owns 60%, has increased its investments in the world of sport, whether in football (Lausanne, Nice), cycling (Ineos Grenadier), Formula 1 (participation in Mercedes) or even sailing (Ineos Britannia), the British challenge for the America’s Cup. The Ineos Sport branch is managed by Frenchman Jean-Claude Blanc. (With AFP)
© SportBusiness.Club December 2023
