Sir Jim Ratcliffe decision exposes tough Manchester United plan for the future

manchestereveningnews.co.uk:

Sir Jim Ratcliffe hasn’t been shy in talking about the need for change at Manchester United. Having acquired a 27.7% minority stake in the club at the turn of the year, the 71-year-old British billionaire founder of chemicals company Ineos has sought to ring the changes at Old Trafford in a bid to refocus and re-strategise the club to return it to former glories.

Removing club credit cards, threatening to cancel Christmas parties, lambasting the state of facilities in an email to club staff, as well as bringing about sweeping changes to the executive team at Old Trafford have all arrived over the course of the last seven months.

But on Wednesday the biggest bombshell yet was dropped when, after a period of review by Ineos into United’s personnel, the decision was made to axe 25% of the club’s 1,112-strong workforce, with the decision ratified by the Glazer family, the club’s majority owners who have handed over football and strategy oversight to Ratcliffe and his Ineos team. ALSO READ: United to make 250 employees redundant as part of Ratcliffe's cull ALSO READ: United redundancies news live as Ratcliffe axes 250 jobs at the club “It’s a sports club, it needs to be a competitive environment,” Ratcliffe told Bloomberg in a sit-down interview last month. “It needs to have a degree of intensity, it needs to be driven, all those things.

We will have a new chief executive, a new sporting director, and a new technical director and that will set the tone. “I would say that everything we’ve looked at has presented itself as an opportunity, which you could interpret as saying there is room for improvement everywhere we look with Manchester United.