Keane hits out at Ratcliffe over Man Utd hypocrisy as Neville votes for ‘ownership change’ after interview

Roy Keane says Sir Jim Ratcliffe “lost” him when he started talking about football and claimed hypocrisy over the Manchester United co-owner’s “money saving” spiel.

Ratcliffe conducted a number of interviews this week in which he claimed several United players were “overpaid or not good enough”, hailed the “excellent job” Ruben Amorim is doing and engaged in some easily debunked player salary whataboutery along with a lot of other nonsense. 

Keane said he was “lost” when Ratcliffe spoke out on the “football side of things”.

He said: “When he started talking about the football side of things, he lost me a little bit – talking about the squad, the budget, the players available, as they should still be doing better. But it was nice of him to front up.”

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The British billionaire was also questioned by Gary Neville over the club’s decision to stop paying for staff lunches and stopping insignificant payments to former players in their bid to right the sinking ship before announcing plans for a new £2bn stadium the very next day.

And Keane wasn’t comfortable with the juxtaposition of the poor treatment of staff and ex-players due to budgetary concerns with the Old Trafford announcement.

Speaking on the Stick to Football podcast, Keane said: “He [Jim Ratcliffe] is on about saving money at the club and we know the way that a lot of ex-players have been treated, the fund they had available, the staff that have been at the club for years – on one hand he’s still treating them badly, and I understand it’s a business and you’ve got to try and make the right decisions, but the next day they’re building a £2 billion stadium for their fans around the world. You have to show loyalty to people that have been at the club for years.

“From the business side of it you’d think he knows what he’s talking about but saying that, on one hand they’re getting rid of lots of people and on the other, they’re going to spend £2 billion on a stadium. He can still look after people a little bit better.

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Neville claims the “optics are terrible” for United after he spoke to the club about their cost-cutting decisions.

He said: “I rang up the club about the former players trust and the employee food thing, I rang the communications people and as a journalist I was entitled to ring them. I thought they weren’t right [decisions], there are solutions around it. You can’t be spending £1 million a month on one player and take away food from staff – optically it’s terrible.

“The £40,000 for the ex-players, these are players from the 1960s and 1970s and they were funding some of these players funerals who can’t afford it. Players who have played for United 10, 15, 20 times and can’t afford their funerals, that’s what they’re funding, they’re not funding Wayne Rooney or Gary Neville’s petrol for their cars. These are players from 50-years-ago who are struggling to live.”

Neville also said that if he was to change one thing about the club it would be the ownership, claiming the fans should have a stake.

He added: “[If Gary could go back in time and change anything] I would change the ownership of [Manchester] United and make sure that nobody really had a hold of it. It’s always been owned by local family or an American family. The idea that fans that don’t have a position in football clubs and don’t have an ownership stake of 10%, 15%, 20% so they always have a golden share of some kind is wrong.”