Billionaire tycoon Sir Jim Ratcliffe has been revealed as the preferred bidder to buy Manchester United from the Glazer family, after three rounds of bidding.
The English petrochemicals magnate, 70, has been engaged in a five-month-long bidding war with Qatari banker Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad al-Thani for ownership of the club he has supported since he was a boy. The Glazers’ chosen deal-maker, the US-based Raine Group, is expected to confirm the winning bid within days, and the Sun has revealed that Ratcliffe is its first choice.
The Glazer family put Britain’s biggest football club up for sale in November. Nearly 200 days later, Old Trafford insiders told the Sun that the Glazers would prefer to sell majority control to Ratcliffe’s Ineos Sport rather than selling the whole club to Sheikh Jassim.
Ratcliffe is not new to sport ownership – he has a portfolio that includes the Ineos Grenadiers cycling outfit, a third of the Mercedes F1 team and France’s Nice football club.
From humble beginnings
Born in 1952, Ratcliffe grew up in a council house in Failsworth, a town between Manchester and Oldham. He was the son of a joiner and an accounts office worker, and the family moved to Yorkshire when Ratcliffe was 10.
“I suppose I did have this inkling that I wanted to be successful – that I wanted to be a millionaire one day,” Ratcliffe told the Daily Express in 2018. “So those things were in my head at 18. But I was just dreaming, really.”
During his school days, Ratcliffe has said he was only interested in playing football and he became an avid United supporter.
On his first day at the University of Birmingham, he was embarrassed to see he was nearly at the bottom of a list of 99 undergraduates ranked by their A-level results. However, he achieved a 2:1 in chemical engineering.
“It lacked a bit of sensitivity,” he said of his education. “But you could say it was fair. There were a lot of guys who had worked very hard at school while I was out playing football.”
Ratcliffe worked for BP during a summer holiday after graduating and was offered a job. But he was fired after three days because his boss had seen his medical report and wasn’t keen on him working there with mild eczema.
Becoming the UK’s richest man
Ratcliffe’s first proper job was with oil giant Esso. But he decided to broaden his skills to finance by studying management accounting, taking an MSc in finance at London Business School from 1978 to 1980 (he donated £25 million to the school in 2016).
In 1992, he took the risk of mortgaging his house to buy BP’s chemicals division for around £40 million, floating it on the stock market two years later.
He quit the company in 1998 – by then his 10-year marriage to his first wife, Amanda Townson, with whom he has two sons, had ended in divorce. In the same year, at the age of 45, he founded chemical giant Ineos.
During the next 20 years, he transformed it into the world’s fourth-largest chemicals company, with annual revenues of £45 billion.
In 2019, Ratcliffe topped the Sunday Times rich list as the UK’s richest man.
‘Publicity shy’, Brexiteer and avid runner
Once described by the Sunday Times as “publicity shy”, Ratcliffe tends to keep a low profile.
He lives in Monaco and Hampshire. In September 2020, he changed his tax residence from Hampshire to Monaco. This has been estimated to save him £4 billion in tax.
Before he left for Monaco, Ratcliffe was the UK’s third-highest individual taxpayer, paying £110 million to the exchequer in 2017-18, according to the Sunday Times tax list. His decision to quit Britain came soon after he was knighted by the Queen for “services to business and investment”, and the UK voted to leave the European Union.
A Eurosceptic, Ratcliffe urged the Government to adopt a tough approach to negotiations with the EU after the referendum, saying: “We must listen, we must be unwaveringly polite and retain our charm. But there is no room for weakness or crumpling at 3am when the going gets tough and most points are won or lost.”
Along with two sons with his ex-wife, he has a daughter from a previous relationship with Maria Alessia Maresca, an Italian tax lawyer.
Ratcliffe enjoys physical adventure and has undertaken expeditions to the North and South Poles, as well as a three-month-long motorbike trek in South Africa. In 2013, he completed the Marathon des Sables across the Sahara Desert.
