A core strength of Ineos is direct accountability. Matrix structures are by definition amorphous, confusing, and create places for people to hide.
H mm. That does sound bad, Sir Jim. Talk me through it one more time, these frustrating corporate shields, these blame-avoidance tactics you’re so worried about. But first could you please just come out from behind the table. And stop doing that admittedly very good Donald Duck voice.
Taking in the full text of this year’s annual Sir Jim Ratcliffe lecture, conveyed on this occasion via newspapers, TV and a gruelling 40 minutes with Gary Neville, is a genuinely confusing exercise. Not just because Ratcliffe has once again come armed with a script, key lines, boilerplate defences, which he repeats with impressive accuracy but also subtle variations. But because almost everything he says, despite being delivered in a hammy, straight-talking gunslinger style, needs to be stared at with hawk-like focus just to work out what he’s actually saying.
Two obvious points leap out. The most obvious, one that should concern not only supporters of Manchester United but frankly everyone, given we are all now stakeholders in this regeneration project, is the extreme and visceral levels of BS involved.
The phrase “BS” is used advisedly here. This is, like the quote on matrix structures above, another borrowing from the famed Ineos corporate “Compass”. Both are listed under the Words we don’t like section. Except it seems that sometimes we do like these things, given the sheer density of double-speak, evasion and vagueness contained in the latest Ratcliffe instalment. Compasses. John Donne was right. These are treacherous things.
As ever there is something galling in the idea Ratcliffe should be given credit simply for answering questions and “fronting up” in this way. This is essentially his job. What is he anyway? A slash-and-burn merchant, a cost-cutter, a purchaser and repackager of distressed assets. This is how he reached this stage. As such he is a handy frontman for the Manchester United leisure project; and above all an investor with a very keen eye on his own stake.
Spend money like it’s your own.
So we get this now-familiar tableau, Ratcliffe sitting there looking like Guido Fawkes is in charge of a recruitment consultancy and wants to talk to you about opportunities in conference management, spouting things that are, at best, a little questionable.
It is hard to say which was the most jaw-dropping moment. The implication that low-paid people whose perks include a plate of food are essentially freeloaders. Or the ability to list every element of financial peril, but not his fellow owners the Glazer family, who have created and overseen almost all of these problems.
As ever it is hard to avoid marvelling at the Glazers’ efficiency, the incredible job they’ve done by bringing in the perfect front. Ratcliffe is ruthless enough to act as a kind of anti-Rashford, here not to give you your lunch but to take it away, all the while presenting himself as the local boy, financial Gandalf, a picture of reassuring Ducal Englishness. Plus he’s prepared to say whatever it takes to gloss that cognitive dissonance. Maybe the problem with Sheikh Jassim, who may or may not have been a stock photograph, was that he was just too reasonable. Guys, I’m not saying all that. Sack who?
Hiding. Wafflers. Wasting time.
More from the Words we don’t like section. Or do we? It is worth itemising the more obviously questionable statements. The top line in Ratcliffe’s address is the assertion the club would have gone bust by Christmas without his penny-saving exercise. No evidence was produced to support this. In reality Manchester United are not going bust if you don’t sack the tea lady. Forget the guaranteed income and the scale of the business. It’s also owned by the one of the richest men in Britain, who keeps saying he’s a fan, but who now seems to be saying: I would not bail this club out and would instead watch it die. In the end this is basically a threat. Go bust or do it my way. Which one do you want?
So it went on. Ratcliffe said the club’s true state of financial peril was hidden in a “forest of numbers”. Hang on. Here we have a famously shrewd tycoon who spent a billion pounds on his share, apparently without doing full due diligence because there were just too many numbers and it was “overwhelming”.
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Meanwhile everyone knows the numbers are terrible. This is a club that owes £300m in transfer fees and has paid a billion in debt repayments, where the only certainty in any dealing is you’re owed a lot, whose current defensive left side is literally Yoro-Dalot. Which option is more alarming here? Not actually knowing the numbers? Or pretending not to?
We learned that the real problem is that the club lost “£254m” over three years due to inherited financial bungling. But since Ratcliffe began running the football side United have spent £200m on players who have made almost zero impression. Millions more have gone on fiddling about with managers. This is not a forest of numbers. It’s an orderly olive grove. Everyone can see it. What Ratcliffe is saying with these numbers is: the choices we have made mean the club would have gone bust. Losing money. Arrogance. Entitlement. You said it, Compass.
The Compass also tells us politics and turf wars “erode efficiency”. But the departure of Dan Ashworth was still about “chemistry”, a clash of personality that “I wasn’t prepared to live with”. As for blame culture, well, this is apparently fine when it comes to listing players who are letting you down, those who are still being paid for, out on loan or not in the team. How is this supposed to help the dressing room or the sell-on process? Don’t do dumb shit. Also the Compass there.
Finally, of course, there was the blame-avoidance stuff. Time and again Ratcliffe sought refuge in his own matrix structures. “It’s not just me. It’s Omar and Dave and lots of the other guys you don’t see.” Hmm. Those other guys, eh? A decision on a player “isn’t just for one person, it’s a group”. Who actually runs the club? “At the end of the day its the management team that operates Manchester United.” OK, OK. So who appointed Ruben? “All of us”
Us seems a key word in this context, as in: us and them and us and you. It isn’t hard to see what Ratcliffe’s real interests are. Essentially this boils down to two things. His investment in the club makes no sense without some idea of a return. At which point, enter the Old Trafford regional regeneration project. This was unveiled on Tuesday morning, complete with drawings of Norman Foster’s proposed new stadium, which looks like a Pac-Man ghost, or like someone threw a massive handkerchief over Dubai.
“We’re not going to ask the government for any money to build the ground,” Ratcliffe said, but this is also mild double-speak as the ground and its surrounds are inextricably linked. The transport, the infrastructure, the piazza twice as big as Trafalgar Square are all key to making the stadium profitable on the desired scale.
So the stadium announcement is essentially a pitch for public money. “Manchester United has thrown its support behind the government’s growth agenda,” was a very funny, passive-aggressive way of putting this. Jobs, homes, growth and very large random sums of money are all promised. The regeneration is vital to the area. It will make a substantial difference to many people’s lives. But who is it going to enrich along the way? This is what Ineos does with its assets, with a public handout a very handy addition. This is of course the same billionaire who announced that “nobody ever gave me a free lunch”, while taking away someone else’s. Banter. This is also on the Compass.
Plus Ratcliffe is of course a shield and enabler for the real owners, and a far more palatable face for any regeneration money. Gary Neville was pretty good at holding his feet to the fire over acting as “an umbrella” for the Glazers, who have taken £166m out in dividends, and who remain the chief cause and beneficiaries of all this cost-cutting.
This brought forth from Ratcliffe a reel of nauseating excuses about being thousands of miles away and about the incompetence of previous placemen regimes. But then the job here for Ratcliffe is to keep the wheels turning, to offer a distracting plausibility at a club so bound up in its narrative of crises even the current unhappiness has become a kind of brand-fuel, something to be retailed. Wait. Do we have an official protest partner? And where are you getting those bulk black shirts?
Meanwhile football is once again giving us a lesson in how the world works, the post-truth dynamic where money moves, power goes to work, and in the foreground people make noise and say distracting things.
Mainly the feeling with Ratcliffe is a kind of sadness. Here we have perhaps the richest person in the country. This is our guy. This is England, all cost-cutting and double speak, too small to sustain its own parts, out there still selling off the family vinyl. Watching Ratcliffe trawl through this waffle is like realising dad doesn’t actually know what he’s doing. Or, even worse, that he’s not actually here to help.
At least the Ineos Compass has a few more words of wisdom. Among the most recent high-level departures announced at Old Trafford is the head of human resources. Let’s just get that straight. Ineos is now making the person who oversaw its redundancies redundant. Does this come under out-of-the-box thinking?
