Jim Ratcliffe: Ruben Amorim is not perfect but he’s doing a great job (2025)

Sir Jim Ratcliffe has said Ruben Amorim is “not perfect” but remains the right man to coach Manchester United, insisting he is doing “a great job” in circumstances he said had become so challenging that the club was facing the threat of insolvency by the end of this year.

In a wide-ranging interview at his London offices on Monday, Ratcliffe reflected candidly on his first year as a co-owner at Old Trafford, admitting to “mistakes” in allowing Erik ten Hag to remain in charge beyond last season and appointing Dan Ashworth as sporting director. Ratcliffe bluntly described the issue with Ashworth, whose exit after only five months cost United £4.1 million, as one of “chemistry”.

But Ratcliffe makes no apology for the financial decisions that resulted in 450 of the club’s 1,140 staff being made redundant, revealing for the first time that United were on course to run out of money by the end of 2025. The petrochemicals billionaire said the club was haemorrhaging cash after seven years of losses. “We found out we even had a body language consultant on £175,000 a year,” he said.

• Man Utd to leave Old Trafford for new 100,000-seater stadium

Ratcliffe, however, insists things will improve, predicting the savings they are making now will lead to United being the most profitable club in the world in three years. Further to that, he is confident Mission 21, the club’s project for delivering a 21st league title, can be completed in time for United’s 150th anniversary in 2028.

Amorim is Ratcliffe’s man

The smart Ineos offices in Knightsbridge, central London, where Ratcliffe runs his business and sporting empire tell you much about Britain’s richest man. There is a Lowry painting that nods to his northern heritage as well as his considerable wealth. On the wall of the main lift is the famous “Ineos Compass” that serves as an illustration of the company’s philosophy. “Don’t do dumb shit,” is among the many messages.

Judging by what Ratcliffe says over the course of an hour of fielding questions, making another change to the manager at United would fall into this category.

Amorim has not found it easy since succeeding Ten Hag in November, winning only five of the 17 Premier League games he has contested; a return of just 19 points from a possible 51, with United at present languishing in 14th place in the top flight.

“I think he’s done a great job in the circumstances, frankly, with the squad that he’s had available,” said Ratcliffe. “The fact he came in mid-season.

“Everybody expects miracles overnight. It’s not the way, not real life in my view. I mean, you saw the performance yesterday [a 1-1 draw with Arsenal]. It was, I thought, a really impressive performance. They could not have worked harder. They couldn’t have been more committed.

“And if you looked at the names on the bench, there weren’t many you recognised, were there? Half the squad’s missing for Ruben. If you look at the top eight players in terms of salaries in Manchester United, 50 per cent of those are not available to Ruben. You’ve got Mason Mount, you’ve got Luke Shaw [both injured], Marcus Rashford has gone [on loan to Aston Villa], and Jadon Sancho [on loan to Chelsea]. And he’s got a bunch of other injuries as you know, so I think he’s done a fantastic job.”

Amorim certainly speaks his mind. At one stage he described this United side as the worst in the club’s history. Ratcliffe is reminded that this came after he had authorised the spending of £180million in the January transfer window.

In a separate interview with the BBC, Ratcliffe said that some of the United players were “overpaid” and “not good enough”. He also denied recent reports that the club may sell academy graduates Kobbie Mainoo and Alejandro Garnacho to help to balance their books. “We won’t be selling players because of the state we are in financially,” he said.

“Three hundred million,” says Ratcliffe, laughing. “I think coaches are emotional and Ruben’s no exception to that. And he’s a young coach. And he’s not perfect. You know, he’s not a guy who … he’s got to be good on the stage, but we want him to be good on the grass. And part of that is life on the stage, isn’t it?

“You know, you’re a young guy, you’ve come into the Premier League for the first time in your life, you’ve come in mid-season, it’s not your natural language.

“You have to give the guy a bit of a break. I mean, give me a hard time, I have no problem with that. But give Ruben a break. I think he’s a good guy, he’s working hard and I think he’s doing a great job.”

Those who have followed Sir Alex Ferguson since he retired in 2013 have nevertheless struggled in the role. Is Ratcliffe sure that the 40-year-old Portuguese is robust enough to succeed where coaches of the stature of José Mourinho have failed?

“Yeah I do, honestly,” he says. “I really, really like Ruben. He’s a very thoughtful guy. Every time I go to the training ground, I speak to Ruben. I sit down and have a cup of coffee with him and tell him where it’s going wrong, and he tells me to f*** off. I like him.”

Omar Berrada, United’s chief executive, is seated alongside Ratcliffe. He nods in agreement, praising Amorim for his “courage” in sticking to his principles when it comes to how he wants United to play.

Ten Hag and Ashworth were costly errors

At a time when United have been laying off hundreds of staff, some of whom had been at the club for decades, the departure of Ten Hag and Ashworth stood out as particularly wasteful in United’s most recent accounts. Together, the bill amounted to £15million.

“Yeah, they were just mistakes,” says Ratcliffe, before conceding that the decision to extend Ten Hag’s tenure beyond last season was an “emotional” one he now regrets.

“I mean, the Erik thing is slightly mitigating. There was quite a lot of debate about that at the time. It wasn’t just the FA Cup final. The fans were clearly of the view that we’d like to stick with him and all that sort of stuff. But, yeah, they were both mistakes. I don’t think we can say much more than that.

“It’s a journey and there’s a lot of decisions that we have to make over the course of that and we’re not going to get them all right. I don’t think in the future we’ll get them all right either because we’re not perfect.”

Clearly, Ashworth is a sensitive issue, most likely because of certain legal complexities. “If we’re talking about our industry, I think we just have to say chemistry,” Ratcliffe says. “But, really, I don’t want to go down that road.

“With Erik, I think there was an emotional response [after the FA Cup final win against Manchester City]. We get criticised for being unemotional and yet there was a bit of emotion in that decision.

“Omar, you’d only just arrived. Jason [Wilcox, technical director] hadn’t been with us very long. We didn’t have many experts in play. Really, I’m not an expert. And it was hard to extract him [Erik] from the former management set-up.”

Difficult first year and insolvency threat

While Ratcliffe appears confident that the right personnel are now in place, the financial challenges remain considerable.

Ratcliffe admits that, for all the due diligence they conducted before completing the £1.03billion deal — with a further £237million provided for infrastructure projects — for 27.7 per cent of the club, it was only once they took charge of the football and business operations that they realised the full extent to which United were in financial trouble.

Ratcliffe has been nicknamed “the Jim reaper” by some of United’s more disaffected fans but the losses make for grim reading against the backdrop of strict financial regulation that limits how much a club can spend on their playing squad in return. They read as follows: £113.1million in 2024, £28.6million in 2023, £115.5million in 2022, £92.2million in 2021, £23.3million in 2020; with a profit of £18.6million in 2019 but after a further loss of £37.6million in 2018.

How would Ratcliffe describe his first year at United? Difficult? Challenging?

“Both I suppose,” he says. “I mean, I don’t think we thought it was going to be a walk in the park, because obviously it was after 12 difficult seasons. It takes a while to get your arms around what the scale of the problems are and what the actual problems are.”

Business-wise, as tough a task as he has faced?

“Yeah, I think it is,” he says. “Manchester United is a lot more than a business. It’s also a very emotional entity. But if you think about Manchester United as a business, it’s gone off the rails. It’s gone off the rails a long way, really.

“If you look at the numbers, the numbers were fairly scary, really. Because they’d sort of lost control, I think, of where the ship was headed. And the costs had got out of control.

“If you think of it in really simple terms, you’ve got the operating costs, which are all the staff and the fixed costs of running the business. And then you’ve got all the squad costs, player salaries and player purchases.

“In super simple terms, the club has been spending more money than it’s been earning now for the last seven years, and it ends in a very difficult place. And for Manchester United, that place ended at the end of this year, the end of 2025, with the club running out of cash.

“I think it’s the first time we’ve probably said that in public, but that’s the fact of the matter.”

He is asked to explain what that means. “There’s no money left in the club,” he said. “And that is after my 300 million.”

Could they not see those projections before buying their stake?

“No, it wasn’t as crystal clear as that,” Ratcliffe says. “There’s a sort of forest of numbers at Manchester United. And in football there are variables. If you get into the Champions League, it’s one thing. If you don’t get in the Champions League, you get in the Europa League, it’s a different thing.

“If you get in the Conference League, it’s a different thing again. If you come fourth in the Premier League, it’s one thing. If you come 14th in the Premier League, it’s a very different thing. It is a forest of numbers that you have to walk through. And it takes time before you get absolute clarity.

“You look at the period of time the club’s been losing money, and yet the head count increased by 250 people. So you’re going through this period where you’re losing lots of money and at the same time you’re recruiting heavily. It doesn’t make any sense really.

“In that time the cost of running the club has gone up by 100 million. The cost of the players is up by 100 million. So the cost has gone up by 200 million but the revenue has gone up by 100 million. It’s lost £320million in cash in the last four to five years. So that’s a third of a billion.

“Eventually you run out of road. We have got a lot of criticism in the media for some of these difficult things that we’ve been doing but they are an absolute necessity at Manchester United.”

Optically, cutting free lunches for staff at Old Trafford, charging them for coach travel to Wembley, is it worth the criticism? The rise in season-ticket prices led to a demonstration by thousands of fans at Old Trafford on Sunday.

“It needs to become a lean, efficient organisation that cuts its cloth according to its income,” says Ratcliffe.

“And it isn’t there at the moment. So there are structural changes that need to happen at Manchester United to get it to a place where it’s stable financially. That’s sort of the first thing you have to do.

“Then we can move on to the difficult things like recruiting. We’re in a period of change. It’s not fun, particularly making the changes. But when we come out the other side, we will be back on the rails.”

Cutting Ferguson’s money and staff lunches

He scoffs at the criticism for cutting staff lunches. “Nobody ever gave me a free lunch,” he says.

But one of the more sensitive decisions was the termination of Ferguson’s £2million-a- year consultancy contract.

“I take my hat off to Alex,” Ratcliffe adds. “I sat down with Alex, just the two of us in the room, and I said, ‘Look, the club isn’t where you may think it is. It is spending more than it’s earning and we’re going to finish up in some difficulties. Honestly, we can’t really afford to continue to pay you £2million a year.’

“I said, ‘I’m going to leave it with you, let you have a think about it.’ It was very grown up. Maybe a little bit grumpy at the beginning but he got it, and he came back three days later, after talking to his son, and said, ‘Fine, I’m going to step away from it. My decision.’ I think it reflects really well on Alex, because he put the club before himself.”

Amorim can rebuild once cost-saving is over

This summer a considerable amount needs to be spent on players already at United, owing to the fact that there are outstanding transfer payments to be made.

“This summer we will ‘buy’ Antony, Sancho, Casemiro, [Lisandro] Martínez, [Rasmus] Hojlund and [André] Onana and they’re all about 17 million quid each,” he said. “Because that’s what is outstanding. If we buy nobody else we’re buying those players.

“But it will be a very profitable club. We believe that in three years’ time it will be the most profitable football club in the world. And it will be in a very, very different place. But we need to go through the change. Nobody likes change.

“When you run out of cash in a business, you go and talk to the insolvency guys. In reality what you do is you go and raise some more money. You go and talk to the banks and try to renegotiate with the banks. Trust me, you don’t want to go there.

“But that’s our job, isn’t it? You’ve got to look forward. You’re walking towards problems, so you get it sorted out. And we will sort it out.”

So United will be able to spend money while complying with the financial rules?

“The changes that we’ve made over this season, plus the ones that have been announced recently [more redundancies], will put us in a position to be able to do that,” he says. “At Ineos we run a lean organisation. As my mother said, you look after the pennies, the pounds look after themselves. We can sound flippant about free lunches but if you give all these perks, first-class train fares, free taxis, it’s not coherent. It goes bust at Christmas.

“We’ve made some really tough decisions and now we’re seeing staff understanding what we’re trying to do. There’s a clear vision of what we’re trying to achieve.”

Future-proofing … new build or rebuild

Part of that will be the delivery of either a new 100,000-seater stadium or the redevelopment of the existing one. The smart money seems to be on new build rather than rebuild, with an update due very soon.

However, at a time when Ineos is reportedly in debt to the tune of £10billion, is such a project financially viable?

“I think it is financeable,” says Ratcliffe. “But key to it is being part of the government regeneration project for southern Manchester, which, you know, [chancellor] Rachel Reeves has talked about as one of those three major planks of their growth strategy.

“We’re not going to ask the government for any money to build the ground but we can’t afford to do all of the other stuff around it.

“But we want an iconic stadium and I would like to think those billion fans around the world will all want to come to Manchester and see it, which will create value for the club and the north economy. If you look at Oxford Economics they estimate £7billion per annum.”

Ineos debt won’t halt club’s progress

Ineos is said to be billions in the red. “It’s what we use for finance,” Ratcliffe said.

“But Europe, at the moment, is a tough place for business. In the motor industry as well as the chemical industry. They’re both having a tough time. But we’re building a huge new facility in Antwerp, about £4.5billion. So we’re still investing, so we’re doing better than pretty much anybody else. But, I mean, everybody’s under the cosh in Europe, because energy is five times the price of America.

“We’ve got this glorious idea that some green lobby had of applying carbon taxes to finally put us out of business. Yet America pays no carbon tax.”

He blamed the “deindustrialisation of Europe” for the early termination of a sponsorship deal with the All Blacks. That has become a legal battle. His cycling team, Ineos Grenadiers, are looking for new sponsors, while there has been an acrimonious split with Sir Ben Ainslie in their pursuit of the America’s Cup. They also want to sever ties with Tottenham Hotspur, where they sponsor the dugouts and promote their car, the Grenadier, on the digital advertising boards.

Ratcliffe says it is only in regard to the sponsorship, “not ownership”, that they are making savings. So the cycling team and one-third ownership of the Mercedes F1 team continues. He won’t discuss what happened with Ainslie but he said it was not a reflection of the performance of the Olympic gold-medal winning sailor despite his defeat by the New Zealand boat.

Mission 21 – performance on the pitch is key

At United, Ratcliffe understands, performance on the pitch is key; commercial success follows.

Is Mission 21 — the club’s aim to win a 21st top-flight title — realistic? Berrada answers. “You have to set an objective, right?” he says. “So you focus everybody’s minds on where you’re trying to get to and it can’t just be open-ended.

“We’re going to try to win the Premier League. We want to do it within a certain time frame and we want to focus all of our efforts and energy on trying to achieve that. That’s ultimately the point.”

Ratcliffe adds his views. “We have to test ourselves, don’t we?” he said. “Liverpool is quite a good example on timing, where Jürgen Klopp arrived in 2015 and they had Michael Edwards [as sporting director] and Ian Graham [as director of research].

“The process of rebuilding the squad in Liverpool started in the summer of ’15, they rebuilt the squad in ’15, ’16, ’17 and ’18 and then in the next three years they won everything.”