Jimmy Ratcliffe is an interesting option. Some thoughts I have on him.
1. First of all, there have been a lot of talk about his personal wealth. He would never buy us, it would be Ineos. Ineos owns Nice, the Cycling team and so forth.
2. From my take on JR, he is the type who have traits that could make him a bad owner or a great owner. ME owners would never be great or bad, just good. They will throw money around and hire people with a good CV to do the job. They are very experienced high level investors, that looks to have more hits than misses. Relaxed investors.
In a sense I think JR is the complete opposite. That is why he is so successful in the field he works in. All businesses are different. Investing in real estate is just extremely basic. Some businesses needs entrepreneurs, people with vision. Communicators. Other needs to be extremely tightly run.
JRs field, ie operating big industrial plants etc, they are literary the opposite of a self playing piano. A store will keep getting in customers, people will rent apartments. You can affect that business on the margin. The natural state of a big industrial production facility is to break down. The biggest reason for Ratcliffe’s success is that he acquired smaller parts of enormous cooperations (like British Petroleum) that didn’t work that well, and made them work by paying a great great deal of attention to them. That, and always keeping his eyes on the big picture, streamlining things, etc is what characterize successful leaders in industries like this. It’s a business with huge turnover but small profits, that on top of everything is highly volatile and impacted by macroeconomic factors. 3 years in a row, you can make profits of 15%, then the following 5 years market prices can be down 20 percent and you fight for your life to keep your head above water.
Does that translate well to leading a football club? Nah, it’s probably the opposite. If you buy a struggling plant with a turnover of 5bn from a company like BP with a turnover of 160bn, in the 1980s, you couldn’t come in and let everyone know that it would be
business as usual. You would have needed to question everything. This cost money, why is it done? And you better have made sure that the answer you get actually adds up, and is not something stated for whatever reason other than the company’s best in mind. Just making smaller changes can require a tremendous amount of work. You need to be super persistent.
Translated to a football environment, that would be like an owner coming in asking stuff like — and demanding answers that adds up regarding —
why do we spend money on a youth team, wouldn’t it be more effective just buying finished players? Why do we have a scouting department, can’t we get info on players from a third part service? Should we own the stadium or sell it and lease It back? We are a football club not a real estate company? We only have three backup goalies, what if all three get hurt at the same time? Makes me nervous, think we should have 5.
I am joking, but you get what I mean hopefully. But at the same time, Ratcliffe is of course not stupid. Today, his group is so big that he probably is more or less a passive owner in most regards. But if he buys this team, I am 100% certain that he would leave his mark on it. In some ways, it will be positives, and others, it could be negative. Organizing a big plant, transportation of goods, stuff like that is digital. Shipping through the Suez Canal cost more but is faster than going around Africa. A meddling owner can get a digital answer of the impact of doing it one way instead the other. There is — perhaps — not a blueprint to the same extent for how to run a football club. It’s ever-changing if nothing else.
OTOH, if he remains sharp, take in the landscape of the game as it is right now, with FFP rules that requires artificial constructions, acknowledge that by the laws of average you will make some good and some bad signings, that what worked 5 years ago might now work anymore — etc etc etc — he could be a dream owner.
I like JR. But he also scares me a bit. His type can be brilliant, but also a complete and utter train wrecks if they lose their wits a bit with age or just don’t adopt to a new environment or whatever.
3. The Red Bull group, City Football Group and Chelsea have for a long time now taken measures to gain advantages in how the football landscape looks right now, and that will help even more as the game progress with new FFP rules etc. We can say a lot about those clubs, but they do a lot of smart things.
I think there is a dream scenario here from my POV, and that would be if Ratcliffe teamed up with others,
David Beckham for example. If he looked at the Red Bull way — a competitor he knows perfectly well from the F1 circus — and tries to do what they have done, but in a bigger and better way. Ineos has a JV with PetroChina, but doesn’t to much business in Asia or the US. Could he get some of Beckham’s pals from the ME onboard to? To be able to spread the wings towards the East. Footballs growth will come from Asia.
It is as simple as this with the new FFP rules and basic rules of the game:
1. Talent cost money. The more you can spend, the more likely you are to have success.
2. With the new FFP rules, there are clear caps on how much you can spend.
3. Any expenses related to your youth team does — not — count as expenses against the new FFP rules. If you buy 10 youth players for 100m and sell one of them for 50m, it’s not a 50m loss but a 50m profit in the eyes of the FFP rules. Hence, you will be able to spend another 50m on your team. It’s the same with the arena. Investments in the arena does not count against the FFP rules, but all income from the arena does. Doesn’t have to be football related.
Others will be taking advantage of these things. To compete, we must do too. And as the rules currently are structured — you gain tremendous advantages by being large, by having resources. RB is a football talent factory. Extremely professional.
If you have the infrastructure in place. One scouting organization. One medical organization. One scheme for how to develop youths. 10 clubs can benefit from that infrastructure just as well as 1 club. But the price is born by more the biggest the group is. Classic synergy effects. Ratcliffe could build a group with a team in the Nordic’s, OGC Nice, Inter Miami, get a team in China, South America, Belgium, Portugal, Spain or whatever. Other clubs the group gets can be really cheap, they would benefit and raise in the ranks in their national leagues over time. There are so many benefits. Like the MSL plays like March to October. Zidane Iqbal aren’t playing many games right now. He could be on United’s bench for August to May, but play games in the MSL during the summer.
It wasn’t low ball, but it wasn’t higher than Boehly’s bid just different terms and it was too late to matter anyway.
Thanks! And yeah, it was extremely late. They had a four step process; initial bids, the creation of a short list, further negotiations before a preferred buyer was selected, and after a preferred buyer was selected the final negotiations were to take place (mostly formalities). JR entered the race — after — Boehly had been selected as a preferred buyer.
Don’t know what to make of that. But that process did start with a neck breaking pace. Could be perfectly legit reasons for needing a few months just to evaluate a potential purchase.
