By Ed Warner
Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s minority investment in Manchester United is fraught with pitfalls for the British billionaire, writes Ed Warner.
Imagine for a moment that you’ve set your heart on buying a stately home in desperate need of repair and have the cash to do it. You’ve lined up your tame kitchen designer and chosen the curtain fabrics.
At the last minute the selling family calls to say they’ve decided to stay put, but that you are welcome to buy a quarter of the property – say, the stable block they keep their thoroughbreds in, which does come with staff accommodation.
Are you interested? The stables do need a new kitchen. And some better horses. The family wouldn’t mind winning a few races, after all.
It would have to be a pretty special pile to enter such an arrangement, especially when you’d set your heart on having the run of the property. Such was the dilemma presented to Sir Jim Ratcliffe by the Glazer family, controlling shareholders of Manchester United.
Hard to think what any of us might have done in Sir Jim’s shoes, given we’re not worth tens of billions of pounds and probably haven’t the depth of imagination required.
One analysis of the arrangement between the Glazers and Ratcliffe in the media last weekend concluded with a thinly-veiled insinuation that the industrialist was performing a role as the family’s “useful idiot”.
Football can scramble the greatest business brains, true, but one has to assume that in the detail of the agreement between the two parties is squirrelled Ratcliffe’s route to full control or an honourable and profitable exit in time. Otherwise idiocy really will be an appropriate tag.
“The cleverest owners will, like the Glazers, find a useful idiot to do all their dirty work – signing the right players and losing the wrong ones, hiring and firing managers, cutting the jobs that need to be cut – while they continue to rake in the spoils of ownership. But in no circumstances will a full sale ever be seriously considered.
“The ultimate aim of ownership in global football today is to stay an owner. The exit these investors seek is not an exit at all, but a kind of commitment-free lifetime tenure.”
The parties have negotiated standard “drag along” and “tag along” rights. Expect the detail to be pored over by journalists and Manchester United’s supporters in the coming years.
Meanwhile, Sir Jim has folded in Sir Dave Brailsford, his go-to performance guru. First in line for fan flak will be the cycling knight if the club does not succeed on the pitch and in the transfer market.
Ratcliffe will likely be held to account over the refurbishment and expansion of the Old Trafford ground, for which he is committing $300m (£236m) on top of his $1.3bn (£1bn) equity investment.
Brailsford’s star does not shine nearly as brightly as it once did – think Beijing 2008 through to London 2012 – for well-documented reasons. Ratcliffe’s sporting enterprises to date, with Brailsford at his side, have not proved particularly successful.
Indeed, take away the eye-catching project that broke the two-hour marathon barrier and there is really nothing to crow about, including at football clubs in Switzerland and France.
Football people will tell you football is different (granted, I hear that said from most sports about themselves – although footy’s scale and wealth gives the claim extra bite). The past season and a half at Chelsea shows that money alone is insufficient to overcome inexperience of the game.
History also suggests that the industry sees ingenues coming and has them on toast – my least favourite example being Terry Venables’ return as manager of Crystal Palace under the chairmanship of the hapless Mark Goldberg.
First I heard from Manchester United fans on the Ratcliffe announcement were expressions of joy, swiftly followed by analysis of what (expensive) squad upgrades are urgently required. On balance, I’d say this soap opera is the Christmas Eve gift that will keep on giving for the rest of us.
DRS says ‘not out’
And so it comes to pass, the failure of the England and Wales Cricket Board’s efforts to engineer wholesale change at Yorkshire Cricket.
Former chair Colin Graves now needs only a members’ vote in favour to take control of the county that has been propped up for years by a loan from a trust in his family’s name. In so doing, its insolvency will be averted.
So much for the efforts of three Yorkshire chairs in the two and a bit years since the racism scandal broke.
Lord Patel of Bradford appeared crushed by the role; Baroness Grey-Thompson always seemed a poor appointment as interim chair given the nature of the financial task at hand; Harry Chathli, less than three months in post, has found himself on the stickiest of wickets facing Graves’s bowling.
Graves is one of the ECB’s own. He presided over Yorkshire as CEO and then chair from 2002 to 2015 before going on to chair cricket’s governing body for five years.
Azeem Rafiq, whose complaints about racism broke open the scandal, played for Yorkshire from 2008 to 2018. That’s some calendar overlap.
Spanish fly
Nothing to see here? Just because a nation or sport isn’t found guilty of any doping violations, doesn’t mean it hasn’t a problem. The World Anti-Doping Agency last week outed Spain for alleged systemic failings in the war on drugs cheats.
“We are well aware of deep-seated issues within Spanish anti-doping… If they are not dealt with quickly and effectively, then it is clear there will be significant consequences for Spanish sport.”
Doping rumours have swirled among the chatterati about at least four Spanish sports down the years. The raw numbers in WADA’s most recently published report on testing globally, covering 2021, does not tell this story though.
Spain’s anti-doping agency conducted 1,279 tests that year with 0.5 per cent resulting in an adverse finding indicative of a possible doping offence. The equivalent stats for UK Anti-Doping were 1,605 and 0.2 per cent. Worldwide there were 177,082 tests with a 0.7 per cent “fail” rate.
It’s not just what you do, and how often you do it, but the way that you do it too – as WADA’s beef with Spain makes clear. The Olympics start in 197 days.
Ed Warner is chair of GB Wheelchair Rugby and writes his sport column at sportinc.substack.com
