‘Mistakes and cock-ups’ - Ineos are doing at Manchester United what they did at Lausanne and Nice

When Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s Ineos group purchased Nice in France’s Ligue 1 to add a second club to their ownership portfolio, the billionaire declared: “We made some mistakes at Lausanne, but we are fast learners.”

In February, after he purchased a 27.7% stake in Manchester United, Ratcliffe said: “In Lausanne and Nice we have made a lot of cock-ups.” Maybe it will be third time lucky?

Ineos’ record in sport is an increasingly poor one, and their first 10 months at Old Trafford has done little to make anyone believe things will finally come good at United. Mistakes and cock-ups have been the order of the day.

It is a wretched look for Ineos to have backed Erik ten Hag and Dan Ashworth as the figureheads of football operations at United in July, only to have sacked them both by December. Not only does it suggest that Ratcliffe and the team around him don’t know how they want this club to run, but it’s also a costly exercise at a time when the rank-and-file club staff and supporters are being punished for mistakes made by people who don’t have to worry where the next fiver is coming from.

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This has been a slapdash, sloppy start from Ineos, and the time for cock-ups has to be at an end. Patience is already beginning to wear thin inside and outside the club with Ratcliffe, whose decision to dispense with Ashworth on Sunday changed the narrative from his foolish comment to United We Stand on Saturday, comparing ticket prices at Old Trafford with those of Fulham in West London, a football club bordering a millionaire’s playground and clearly making a play for the tourist market.

On the football side, the decisions around Ten Hag and Ashworth suggest Ratcliffe, Sir Dave Brailsford, and Jean-Claude Blanc don’t really know what they want to be. The blame game has already begun when it comes to the decision to back Ten Hag in the summer.

Back in February, when United had already made their move for Ashworth, Ratcliffe called him “one of the best sporting directors in the world”. Now, he’s been dispensed with because of tension in the structure and because he was not visionary enough for Ratcliffe.

But a cursory internet search and half-an-hour reading old interviews with Ashworth would have told Ratcliffe that he wasn’t getting a visionary sporting director with an ability to pluck head coaches and players nobody had ever heard of and turn them into gold. In his work at the Football Association, Brighton and Newcastle, he was a structures guy, knitting every department together, making a football club flow.

Speaking as Brighton’s technical director in December 2020, Ashworth said: “The principle for a technical director, in my opinion, is to look after the medium to long-term interests of the football club. It’s not about short-term ‘get a result against Liverpool tomorrow’, it’s to try and make sure the club is set up in a way that those other departments supplement and help [the manager], but are also there for the longer-term benefits of the club.

“Another thing that’s important is the connection from the boardroom onto the pitch. Every club has a CEO and chairman – and budgets, philosophies and principles – and it’s really important we get that across, whether it’s club values or maximising the budget and making sure we’re spending the money in the right way.”

A call around those within the game would have told Ratcliffe what sort of sporting director he was getting. He’s either changed his mind about the structure he wants at the club, or just wasn’t well-informed enough in the first place of Ashworth’s skillset.

There is already too much fine-tuning this football structure on the job. Ineos have hired a lot of chefs and are now testing how it works and who does what, rather than having a clear idea of what roles need filling and the deliberation of responsibilities.

When United extended Christopher Vivell’s contract as interim director of recruitment until the start of February, it was said that Ashworth was still figuring out the structure he wanted and who he wanted in it. It seems Ineos are doing the same.

You could argue that Ratcliffe’s decision to part ways with Ashworth after five months is ruthless. It wasn’t working, and a decision has been made that could yet turn out to be positive.

But put simply, this is another mistake, another cock-up, and whether at Lausanne, Nice, or now United, the lessons keep on coming.