Ruben Amorim is the worst of 19 Sir Jim Ratcliffe mistakes at Manchester United
After buying his stake in Manchester United 18 months ago, Sir Jim Ratcliffe admitted he and his INEOS team had “made a lot of cock-ups” in his other footballing ventures, Lausanne and Nice, presumably in a bid to convince the Red Devils fans that they had learned lessons from those mistakes that would not be repeated at Old Trafford.
“Huge change” off the pitch certainly hasn’t been for the better on it. Ruben Amorim is the latest Manchester United manager ‘losing the dressing room’, differing from predecessor Erik ten Hag only in sticking to a (failing) philosophy rather than not having one and seemingly wanting to be sacked rather than preferring to keep the most ill-fated job in football.
Ratcliffe’s made questionable strategic calls and ill-advised comments in interviews that are among the mistakes we’ve listed here, including some that the Ratcliffe advocates will claim weren’t his decisions, but – despite his clear ethos of passing it wherever possible – the buck stops with him.
Anyway, strap yourselves in: Ratcliffe’s mistakes ranked from minor to major.
19) Being a Grinch
It doesn’t seem all that unreasonable for a struggling organisation not to hand out £100 Christmas bonuses and instead give members of staff a £40 M&S voucher, and the employees themselves may well have been fine had it been explained to them properly and hadn’t been part of a widespread cost-cutting scheme that’s seen many of their friends and colleagues made redundant while what we assume is now half-ply loo paper is on hand the toilets.
“At least the Glazers prioritised families,” said one staffer. “And anuses,” said another, probably.
18) The whole staff email
We suspect the Manchester United fans were delighted to hear about Ratcliffe and Ineos’ plan to conduct a ‘thorough strategic review’ of the football club when the British billionaire took charge of all football operations. After years of Glazer family negligence, on and off the pitch, it was necessary.
But while we imagined people in hard hats pointing to leaks in the Old Trafford roof and football coaching svengali Jason Wilcox shaking his head on the side-lines of an Erik ten Hag training session, we didn’t foresee Big Sir Jim himself picking up dirty socks from the academy dressing room.
It’s a level of scrutiny that in some ways reflects well on the fourth-richest man in Britain – he has a hands-on approach – but upon describing the cleanliness of the youth team changing rooms as a ‘disgrace’, along with many of the other facilities on his tour of the club in a leaked whole staff email, Ratcliffe immediately managed to ‘create a toxic feeling inside Carrington’.
He labelled the Manchester United museum – quite possibly the pride and joy of several members of staff – a load of ‘crap’, and in a bid to end the work-from-home culture, told employees to head back to the offices, despite there not being enough desks for them all to work from. ‘If you don’t like it, please seek alternative employment,’ he told them.
Your Simon Jordans claimed it was a necessary shake-up, a method of sorting the wheat from the chaff, but there’s also little doubt that some very capable employees – not necessarily all Gen Z woke snowflakes – won’t have enjoyed Ratcliffe’s authoritarian day-one approach, will have taken it as a bleak sign of what was to come and taken a job in a more forward-thinking environment.
17) ‘Wembley of the North’
Ratcliffe’s claim that a “conversation” with the government was required after proposing that Old Trafford is redeveloped into the ‘Wembley of the North’ was galling, to put it mildly.
The suggestion was that the burden of financing United’s next chapter should be shared between him, a man worth around £12bn, and the taxpayers. A brazen proposal even before you consider that Ratcliffe himself is a tax exile having officially changed his residence in 2020 from Hampshire to Monaco in a move estimated to have saved him £4bn, which is enough to build two Wembleys of wherever.
16) The Spy Who Might F*** Us
We all know the guy – it’s always a guy – who suddenly appears one day, is overly friendly in a bid to gain confidences, laughing and joking one second and comically stern the next to keep everyone on their toes. Can be seen staring at walls and slowly stirring tea before snapping out of what we assume is a daydream about making a suit of human skins to ask if you’d like a cup. Yeahhh y’know, that guy.
Ratcliffe’s ‘spy’ is said to be one of the Ineos chiefs taking roles and ‘assuming greater importance’ at the club, deepening what several sources described as a “growing culture of fear”, with staff members tiptoeing around this particular individual for fear of the sack, ‘being extra vigilant about what they say in his presence’.
15) FA Cup travel
In order to give Manchester United the best chance of on-field success, no saving is off-limits in the Ratcliffe regime, as those travelling to the FA Cup final discovered.
As joyous as that day became, any staff attending did so without recourse to former privileges. They each paid £20 towards travel costs that previously came as a perk of the job, while packed lunches were also seen as a luxury they could do without by the penny-pinchers at a club that saved a whopping £6,500 on the day before revealing record revenues of £660m shortly after the Wembley win.
Top lad Bruno Fernandes offered to pay for the staff travel but the Ineos chiefs rejected that proposal because they thought ‘it would reflect badly on the regime’, and apparently didn’t think anyone would have an issue with ‘thousands being shelled out on chauffeured cars’ to take them to the very same event.
14) Cutting the disability budget
Not nearer the top because they only ‘considered it’ but even thinking about cutting the disabled supporters’ association budget in half is deplorable.
As David Ornsein said, it’s “terrible optics” for a football club that has routinely spunked tens of millions of pounds on average footballers to believe that a viable and reasonable method of cutting costs is to make the lives of their disabled supporters harder. The audacity would almost be impressive if it wasn’t so shameful.
13) Katie who?
It would be unreasonable for Ratcliffe to know the name of all, or even most, Manchester United employees. There are a lot of them; far too many in his opinion. But we reckon the captain of the football club should have been in the top ten names learned by Ratcliffe before he rocked up.
We would have thought Katie Zelem wearing a training kit and boots might have been a bit of a giveaway as Ratcliffe doddered towards her like a 99-year-old royal and asked: “And what do you do, little lady?” Disappointed that the competition winner hadn’t curtsied as he approached.
12) Revoking Busby Babe privileges
One good decision Ratcliffe has made was to end the club’s financial commitment to Sir Alex Ferguson. Cutting the jobs of 250 Normal People while continuing to pay £2m to a manager who retired over a decade ago would have been laughable, legend or not.
But the co-owner can consider himself very fortunate that Ferguson still has his ear to the Old Trafford ground having reportedly advised him against an extraordinary move that would have been a PR disaster of epic proportions and speaks to Ratcliffe’s lack of knowledge of what’s important to the football club.
Anyone asked about landmark events in the history of Manchester United would talk extensively about the Busby Babes, who came through the youth ranks and were touted to dominate European football before the Munich air disaster. Their story is woven into the fabric of the football club.
What you don’t want to be doing as the new figurehead of Manchester United is dishonouring those young men or anyone associated with them in any way whatsoever, which makes his supposed plan to ‘revoke the privileges given to the families of the Busby Babes at United’ a truly incredible one.
‘The families of players involved in Sir Matt Busby’s legendary side are regulars in the directors’ box at Old Trafford, but the club’s part-owners had threatened to put an end to those positions’ the report claims, with Ratcliffe’s view presumably that those seats could instead be given to very rich people from faceless companies who may throw a few million his way. Find another way, you berk.
11) Mid-season ticket price increase
We don’t think we’ve ever heard of a club increasing ticket prices during a season; as MUST said, the idea that the fans must pay their ‘fair share’ for the club’s excesses and/or mismanagement — and above all, the Glazers lack of investment over two decades — is offensive.
And we would suggest that a parent wanting to take their child to a game and having to shell out £132 for the privilege almost certainly doesn’t give a sh*t about the need to improve ‘operational efficiencies’ and ‘stabilise revenues’. They want to watch good football (alright, baby steps) for less than the cost of their monthly council tax.
In response to the backlash, Ratcliffe said Manchester United are “mediocre” (no arguments here) when “it’s supposed to be one of the best football club’s in the world”. And in every interview he gives he talks about this gap between what they once were and what they are, in a We’re All In This Together sort of way, as if he’s suggesting every United fan should be direct debiting part of their salary to fix problems they have nothing to do with.
The money the fans have already given has been wasted for years, and you want them to pay more to watch arguably the worst collection of footballers in Premier League history? Jog on, mate. An ‘outright rebellion’ is in the post.
10) RIP, but what about the season tickets?
Before Ratcliffe arrived, even under the ownership of those horrible Glazers, Manchester United is said to have felt like a family club despite its global reach. Kath Phipps had a helluva lot to do with that.
She first joined the club as the switchboard operator in September 1968, and was seemingly beloved by anyone who came into contact with her, acting as a bridge that crossed multiple eras.
Sir Alex Ferguson, David Beckham and Jonny Evans were among her famous, frequent visitors in her last months in care, with her friends at the club, including several who had been ousted in the cuts, running a daily rota via WhatsApp to ensure she was never alone until her passing, two days after which her next of kin got a phone call from the club.
A message of condolence presumably, maybe from Ratcliffe himself, letting the bereaved individual know that everyone at the club is thinking of them. That should probably be the minimum when the longest-serving employee of the football club you own dies.
But no, what they received was a call from the football club that had been Kath’s life to enquire about the status of her two season tickets. Scarcely believable evidence of the ‘heart and soul’ of the football club eroding under Ratcliffe.
It being the dearly departed Kath Phipps makes it worse, of course it does, but to think that it would also happening to other Manchester United fans is also really, really horrible.
And if you’re one of the many, many United fans currently shouting It’s Not Sir Jim That’s Making The Phone Calls, you’re absolutely right, but while it’s also probably not Ratcliffe forcing the poor member of staff to take on this abhorrent task, it’s he who has created an environment where money needs to be saved at all costs, including the feelings of the very recently bereaved and the once-highly respected reputation of the football club.
9) Job cuts
The optics aren’t great when only a few months after staff members were all told they were crucial in helping contribute to on-field success, 250 of them were made redundant as part of Ratcliffe’s determination to slash costs by scrapping ‘non-essential’ activities.
Nearly a quarter of United’s employees lost their jobs and many of them, understandably, may well have pointed out that poor first-team recruitment has wasted far more money than will have been saved by cutting the rank-and-file workforce.
And those redundancies were made before the club spent £200m in the summer of 2024 on further under-performing footballers, and another £200m this summer on players we can only assume will be similarly underwhelming.
Each of the 250 employees would have to be earning £55,000 per year to make getting rid of them more cost effective than paying Matthijs de Ligt his salary, and that’s without considering the centre-back’s transfer fee, which would have been enough to keep those staff members in their jobs on that wage for three years.
8) Women’s team
At the end of June, four months after his purchase of 27% of Manchester United (yes, Manchester United as a whole), Ratcliffe was asked whether he had considered spinning off the women’s team, with Chelsea having recently announced that their side will become a standalone entity.
“We haven’t got into that level of detail with the women’s team yet. We’ve been pretty much focused on how we resolve the first team issues.”
We understand why the men’s team is the priority. It’s the cash cow and what him and his team will ultimately be judged upon. But word to the wise Jim, don’t call them ‘the first team’. The women aren’t reserves just because they’re not men.
A slip of the tongue, maybe, but a telling one which when added to him moving the women out of their training facility and into portable buildings to make room for the men, hardly paints Ratcliffe as a beacon of equality.
Asked in the same interview about what they are doing with the women’s team, Ratcliffe replied: “Well they’ve just won the FA Cup” as if he a) cared having not even watched the game, and b) had anything whatsoever to do with that success.
And imagine if he had given the same answer about the men when – as he well knows – the 2024 FA Cup win deflected from a poor league season and much deeper problems. He did not seem to have the same grasp of the issues with the women’s team, who finished 20 points behind champions Chelsea in the WSL that season.
7) Changing Ten hag’s coaching staff
Instead of sacking Ten Hag in the summer of 2024 (more on that to come) they got rid of his two assistant coaches, Steve McClaren and Mitchell van der Gaag, replacing them with Rene Hake and Ruud van Nistelrooy, who are arguably the two guys to have been most screwed by Ratcliffe and INEOS’ bungling.
Ruben Amorim brought his own coaches because it would be mad to leave behind the people who have played a significant role in his success at Sporting, meaning Ruud moved to Leicester to destroy his reputation and Rene et al. were out on their ears after three months at Old Trafford.
A lucky escape some would argue and they’ve been well-compensated, as were Sporting for United nicking their manager and coaching staff, which all-in-all left United too close to the PSR line to do anything of significant in January to help Amorim.
6) Not signing a midfielder
Going for Senne Lammens over Emi Martinez or any other clear No.1 goalkeeper is weird, but it can at least be explained away with a view to not paying exorbitant wages and with an eye on the future. But there is no reasonable explanation for spending well over £200m and failing to fix the biggest problem in the team.
No-one at that football club can believe that Manuel Ugarte is good enough, that Bruno Fernandes can play as one of the two in midfield or that Casemiro still has it in him. They also know, without doubt, that Amorim isn’t going to change his system. So why the p*ssing hell did they not buy Carlos Baleba or an alternative midfield machine?
They are quite clearly f***ed and will continue to get f***ed without one. And we know Ratcliffe probably isn’t involved in transfer strategy, but a huge fan as he purports to be, with the chequebook in hand, should be insisting on a midfielder as the priority. Don’t have another £100m? Fine. Don’t use all of your cash on three forwards. Absolute madness.
5) Refusing Amorim resignation
It now looks as though Ratcliffe has missed the resignation boat as Amorim has now dug his philosophical heels into the Old Trafford turf, insisting after the 3-0 defeat to Manchester City that “If they [United hierarchy] want it [the philosophy] changed, you change the man.”
But he had at least one opportunity to get rid of Amorim without the need for compensation, instead opting to talk Amorim down from the ledge following the 3-1 defeat to Brighton in January when he was ‘prepared to resign’, and reports after the embarrassing defeat to Grimsby Town claimed there was once again a ‘feeling at the club that the head coach may resign unless results pick up’.
It suggests little more than a nudge in that direction may have been required to bring his doomed tenure to an end.
READ MORE: Amorim next? Resignation reasons include transfer walkouts, Keane anger and no beachfront dwelling
4) Dan Ash-not-Worth
It was very, very funny, and embarrassing to the point where Ratcliffe must have considered ploughing on with a guy he clearly had no time or respect for as sporting director purely to avoid the humiliation.
They spent no little time and money to haul him out of Newcastle, only to mutually consent him out the door after just five months in which the club spent £180m on players who have made next to no difference to their fortunes and hired a new manager who’s now as doomed as the one they got rid of.
Amorim’s appointment was supposedly the big disagreement between Ashworth, Omar Berrada and the rest of the United brains trust, with Ashworth wanting either an English coach (Gareth Southgate specifically), Thomas Frank or for Ruud van Nistelrooy to stay in interim charge until the end of the season. He knew his stuff, eh?
‘Who would you appoint if we sacked Erik ten Hag now?’ should have been the very first question in Ashworth’s interview.
3) Not sacking Erik ten Hag in the summer
Handing someone who had just overseen the worst season in the club’s history a contract extension is one of the worst decisions made by anyone ever. They played well once, in the FA Cup final, having embarrassed themselves in the semi-final against Coventry, the entire Champions League campaign and the vast majority of their league fixtures. Manchester United were awful.
Their excuse for not replacing Ten Hag being the lack of suitable alternatives was quickly exposed as nonsense given the manager they’ve now hired was so available in the summer that he flew to London to meet West Ham on the eve of his side’s crunch clash with Porto in their title run-in.
2) Buying players for Erik ten Hag
We were told that Jason Wilcox, brought in as the new technical director, would be the man to ‘determine and drive the move to a clear “game model” – effectively a cohesive playing style and identity United intend to replicate across all age groups.’
And apparently, unbelievably, after ‘providing a detailed assessment of Ten Hag’s strengths and weaknesses’ as the first duty in his new post, Wilcox reported back that not only was Ten Hag the right man for the job, he was also so good at his job that the club should continue to sign players to fit his system rather than individuals with a broader ethos in mind.
Wilcox and the other directors may claim it’s a happy coincidence that the style of their former first-team coach was also the new Manchester United Way, though wouldn’t be at all surprised if the new Manchester United Way is actually more in line with Amorim’s ethos, which has required a host of his players rather than the bunch bought for Ten Hag that clearly aren’t fit for purpose as the perpetual cycle of Red Devils managers being five to six signings away from challenging for the title continues.
1) Hiring Ruben Amorim (mid-season)
Ashworth ‘warned’ them and they didn’t listen. He correctly foresaw that there would be ‘mass disruption’ if Amorim and his very specific ideas and playing style arrived mid-season. He must be p*ssing himself as that disruption continues unabated into the Portuguese manager’s first full season at Old Trafford.
Ashworth wanted to ‘minimise upheaval’ after the squad had already had to adjust to a new backroom team under Ten Hag before being told to forget all that and to get used to a system most of them had never played before, with no time for adaptation with games coming thick and fast.
Liverpool had considered Amorim but went for Slot as the Portuguese manager’s ‘three at the back and general philosophy jarred with the squad’. United made no such consideration having cared only about Amorim’s impressive ‘aura’. Boy are they regretting that now.
Ratcliffe wanted United to be ‘chest out and bold’ and was ‘desperate for charisma’. Little did he know that that’s apparently all Amorim has.
He told the club that he wanted to wait and join in the summer, but Omar Berrada told him it was ‘now or never’. If offered the chance to choose again, it would definitely be never.
