Sir Jim Ratcliffe listens to Sir Dave Brailsford
Sir Jim Ratcliffe and his Ineos director of sport Sir Dave Brailsford (left) are supposed to be returning Manchester United to elite status Credit: Shutterstock/Javier Garcia
Nobody across Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s captivating 11-month experiment in how not to run a football club drew such rave reviews as Dan Ashworth.
“A 10-out-of-10 – a very good fit for Manchester United,” Ratcliffe gushed in February.
“Clearly one of the top sporting directors in the world,” he rhapsodised in July.
So implacable was the billionaire’s conviction that Dan was indeed the man that he tolerated a five-month wait before finally prising him out of gardening leave at Newcastle. And yet fast-forward another five months and he is gone. Surely there could be no more telling reflection of the absurd vaudeville act United have become than the fall of Ashworth, a supposed saviour whose performance lasted as long as the overture.
The timing could scarcely be worse. No sooner has Ratcliffe positioned himself in a United fanzine as the man to rescue the club from mediocrity than he concedes that one of his most prized appointments is not the answer after all. True, this could be spun as evidence of his ruthlessness, of his refusal to abide even a fleeting failure to deliver. But this rationale disintegrates when you consider how wretchedly he is bungling everything else.
Technical director Jason Wilcox and Sporting director Dan Ashworth
Dan Ashworth, on the right with Jason Wilcox, has left Manchester United prematurely Credit: Getty Images/Eddie Keogh
Take the ticket price hike, for example. Ratcliffe justified his wildly unpopular move to impose a blanket minimum of £66 for the rest of the season on the grounds that he needed to make “difficult and unpopular decisions”. The trouble is that the economic imperative of such a policy collapses on first contact with the Ashworth story. Removing ticket concessions for children and pensioners will save United, it is estimated, around £1.5 million. But the club paid around double this in compensation to Newcastle to secure Ashworth – only to jettison him after a mere 15 league games.
While Ratcliffe is unabashed about his hatchet-man image, the penny-pinching that has taken place on his watch is increasingly difficult to justify. It is all very well removing staff travel privileges to an FA Cup final at Wembley, but not when you spend £21.4 million on replacing Erik ten Hag with Ruben Amorim straight after giving the Dutchman a contract extension. And that is before we survey the catalogue of misfiring players on whom Ineos signed off over the summer.
United fans, weary at the slide to 13th in the table, have every reason to ask what on earth Ratcliffe is doing. He paraded Ashworth as the brilliant mind his childhood club required, but what achievements can be cited to support that faith? In this brief, ill-starred chapter, United paid more for Joshua Zirkzee than his release clause, gambled £60 million on unproven teenager Leny Yoro and splurged another £50 million on Manuel Ugarte after he flopped at Paris St-Germain. It does not exactly encourage belief that there is some peerless brains trust at the wheel.
Ratcliffe advertised his vision for United with the notion that everything would be “best in class”. But after the worst results since the 1980s, with just 35 points from 28 league matches since his acquisition of a minority stake last Christmas Eve, that boast is fast being exposed as a delusion.