Why Man United fans have so much more to fear in year two of Sir Jim Ratcliffe, reveals RIATH AL-SAMARRAI

A birthday is approaching at Manchester United and it will be accompanied by a few questions, one of which might be: does Sir Jim Ratcliffe have enough spare cash to spring for a cake? Another: if he doesn’t, are there any members of staff still minded to splash out on his behalf?

This coming Thursday will mark a year since Ratcliffe finalised the purchase of his stake in the club, but moods turn quickly in these parts. United fans of today are now less drawn to the notion of a white knight so much as the mystery of why Britain’s richest man appears to be riding around on a three-legged horse.

This has been quite a week for him, ending with a 1-0 defeat at Tottenham on Sunday. On the occasion of small mercies, any heckling was drowned out by the local views on Daniel Levy.

But when Ratcliffe was last seen at a United match, away against Fulham in late January, there was a distinct chant from the Putney End. It was crass, but it caught on: ‘Just like the Glazers, Jim Ratcliffe’s a ****.’ And that was an evening when United won.

As he sat in his car waiting to go home, an hour or so later, more feedback was issued through a window by a smaller cluster of supporters. Their four-letter word of choice was the same, and the aggression was deeply unpleasant, but if you’re going to hike ticket prices for the privilege of watching a dumpster fire, and cost-cutting is your only tangible contribution, then some opposition is to be expected.

For Ratcliffe, the battle for hearts and minds is not going terribly well. He’s taking a hiding, actually. Not being named Glazer is no longer enough.

We’ve seen the benefit to the Glazers of having him onboard – they’ve been paid a 10-figure sum and received a lightning rod to absorb most of the disgruntlement, so that transaction ranks among the sporting deals of the century for them. But what good has Ratcliffe been to United? What has he delivered in his 12 months, beyond hundreds of redundancy notices and overseeing a slide from sixth to 13th in the Premier League?

We have to be proportionate when we talk about on-field matters and the ownership of clubs – footballing failures have many fathers. Meaning that when we add Tottenham’s 27 points this season to United’s 29 and fall one short of Liverpool on 57, blame spreads far further than Levy and Ratcliffe.

But in a subdued body of work, Ratcliffe’s past month in particular has raised alarms across his sporting portfolio and the most recent week has been outright concerning.

Let’s break it down – in January, he divorced from his partnership with Sir Ben Ainslie in the America’s Cup, having fallen out with a four-time Olympic champion about how best to run their sailing operation, and in the same month Ratcliffe’s cycling team put the feelers out for backers to share the financial load.

Those are breadcrumbs that lead to intrigue. But what unfolded in the past seven days goes to a trickier place, raising serious doubts over whether difficulties faced by his core business interests are impacting on his ability to have a jolly time in sport.

That surfaced in the All Blacks debacle. The disclosure on Monday that New Zealand Rugby have taken legal action over a breach of their sponsorship contract by Ineos should not be overlooked by any United fan, especially in light of the response it drew on Tuesday.

That’s because Ineos spoke of the ‘deindustrialisation of Europe’ and said their European business had been hammered by carbon taxes and high energy costs. The latter has been Ratcliffe’s bugbear for some time, but this was a public clarification of another point: when his day job suffers, the pinch will also be felt on his hobbies.

So how severe is the pinch? That’s where it might get worrying for all the tentacles, from balls to spokes to spinnakers.

On Wednesday, a new report came out and it sat in the Guardian’s business section. The gist was that debts at Ineos’s chemical empire are forecast to reach almost £10billion this year, with two leading credit rating agencies estimating the burden to be five to six times the size of the company’s annual earnings. One of the agencies believes Ineos will be ‘weighed down’ until 2027; both have given Ineos a ‘negative’ outlook.

Hefty debts are nothing new in those worlds. Ditto at United. But suddenly there is a temptation to study the ripples in Ratcliffe’s sporting ponds and wonder what is causing them. From there, you might also question if expensive distractions are really what a billionaire fancies at 72. They’d have reason to doubt it in cycling, rugby and sailing.

There is a plausible school of thought that with United in Ratcliffe’s hands, those prior investments are less worthy of the fuss. But the belt-tightening he has overseen at Old Trafford has been relentless and, occasionally, quite baffling. My colleague Mike Keegan revealed on Wednesday that a further 100-200 redundancies are due, following 250 last summer.

According to United’s fourth-quarter accounts for 2024, the initial round of trimmings will generate savings of £40m-£45m a year (an average saving we can calculate to around £160,000 per head, which might surprise the many they let go from the rank and file), and the next batch are part of the same plan to reduce a bloated staff.

The principle would be sound in any business, but the execution has been an awful look for a man once heralded as a saviour and double when it is dressed as a means of supporting the first-team.

The idea United (annual turnover in excess of £660m) need to claw pennies from travel allowances, Christmas gift vouchers and staff lunches in order to buy a new player is laughable. More so when the human cost is stacked against the losses tied to renewing Erik Ten Hag’s contract in the summer, the five months of Dan Ashworth, all those feeble signings, and whatever is paid for the wisdoms of Sir Dave Brailsford.

We might agree that the time was right to cut off Sir Alex Ferguson’s £2m-a-year gratitude payment. We should also highlight, and never forget, that so much of the mess is down to the Glazers, including Ruben Amorim’s solemn declaration on Friday that he must sell a player before he buys one.

But what of Ratcliffe’s biggest decisions in the past 12 months? He might yet earn cuddles for the stadium project, but to date can we say he has got any of the major calls right? The opposing list, up to and including his absence from Denis Law’s funeral on Tuesday, makes for substantially longer reading.

When we rewind to his arrival, he said a few catchy things. One was that this would be ‘the beginning of our journey to take Manchester United back to the top of English, European and world football’.

Only the most incurable romantics thought it would be easy. But no one thought the white knight we were looking at was in fact a hatchet man. Or worse, a white elephant.

The magic of the FA Cup 

I was at Exeter’s FA Cup game with Nottingham Forest on Tuesday – one of those Cup ties that lift the soul. 

It was also the kind of game you’d watch if it wasn’t up against, say, Manchester City versus Real Madrid on a different channel. 

Whoever dreamt up the competition’s idea for a five-day weekend should never be permitted such responsibilities in future.

Levy looks to stay 

To go by one report this week, prospective new owners for Tottenham can be found in Qatar. And they have an idea about keeping Daniel Levy in post. 

We await phases two and three of this masterplan, but do not discount the possibility of appointing Sol Campbell as manager and erecting a statue to Tony Adams on the High Road.