After the Glazers put Manchester United up for sale, Britain’s richest man, Sir Jim Ratcliffe, said he was interested in making a bid to buy the club.
Sir Jim, the 70-year-old founder and boss of the huge chemical company Ineos, is a football fanatic who supports Brexit. His decision to leave Britain for the tax haven of Monaco recently caused a lot of controversy.
The tycoon, who is worth an estimated $13.3 billion, bought the French team Nice for £91 million in 2019. This was two years after he bought the Swiss team FC Lausanne-Sport for the same amount.
After failing to buy Chelsea last May, he wants to buy Manchester United outright. The hated owners of United, Avram and Joel Glazer, said in November that they wanted to sell the club. It is thought that they want £5bn before they leave Old Trafford.
Sir Jim was born in 1952. He lived in a council house on Dunkerley Avenue in Failsworth, a small town between Manchester and Oldham, until his family moved to Yorkshire and he went to Beverley Grammar School.
On his first day at the University of Birmingham, he was embarrassed to see that he was almost at the bottom of a list of 99 undergraduates ranked by their A-level scores. However, he went on to get a 2:1 in chemical engineering
He got a job offer from BP because he worked there during the summer after he graduated. But after only three days on the job, he was fired because his boss read his medical report and didn’t want him to work there because he had mild eczema.
Sir Jim went on to become an accountant trainee at a pharmaceuticals company, then moved to Esso and then Courtaulds. In 1992, he put his house up as collateral to get about £40 million to buy BP’s chemicals division.
He only started his first business a few weeks before he turned 40. He started Ineos when he was 45 years old, in 1998. Over the next 20 years, he turned it into the fourth largest chemicals company in the world, making £45 billion a year.
Sir Jim has always been a fan of Manchester United, but he also has season tickets to Chelsea.
He recently said, “I’ve had season tickets to Chelsea for a long time, but I’m really a Manchester United fan.” Or was!’
He gives money to the Ineos Grenadiers, a professional cycling team that used to be called Team Sky and won the Tour de France seven times.
In 2020, he was criticized for moving from the UK to Monaco, like a lot of other wealthy Britons, such as Topshop boss Phillip Green and his wife Tina. By moving to Monaco, he is expected to save about £4 billion in taxes.
People who live in Monaco for at least 183 days a year do not have to pay income or property taxes. In the UK, the highest tax rate is 45% for people who make more than £150,000 a year.
The Sunday Times tax list says that Sir Jim paid £110 million in taxes in 2017-18, making him the third highest taxpayer in the UK.
Soon before the move, the Queen knighted him for “services to business and investment.”
The businessman was also criticized when it came out that he had given almost 800 of his employees time off from their jobs at his luxury hotel groups.
Sir Jim married Amanda Townson for the first time in 1985. They had two sons together, George and Samuel.
They had two boys and got a divorce in 1995.
With his second wife, Alicia, he has a daughter. People think that he is dating Catherine Polli right now.
He stays in shape by running long distances and competing in triathlons.
This year, the businessman tried to buy Chelsea, but his late offer was turned down because the club was already owned by Todd Boehly and a group of investors.
Ratcliffe made a last-minute offer of £4.25 billion to buy the Stamford Bridge team in May, but now that he has shown interest, he wants to buy Manchester United.
The billionaire has made it clear that he thinks Manchester United has lost its way. In 2019, he criticized the club for picking “bad” managers and spending “dumb money” on “players like Fred.”
Sir Jim has been linked to Chelsea many times, but he has said that the club’s Stamford Bridge stadium is a big problem for anyone who wants to buy it.
Ratcliffe told BBC Five Live, “There was some early talk, but we were a long way apart on prices.”
“Chelsea’s stadium is the problem. We’re all getting older, and it will take you ten years to fix that.
And in 2019, he told The Times, “Even though clubs are worth that much now, no one has ever paid that much.”
“Did Abramovich pay £100 million for Chelsea?” What’s £500 million to the Glazers? You can say it’s worth $3–4 billion, but no one has ever paid that much for it.
“Ineos has always tried to do things in a smart way. We don’t like to waste money, because if we did, we wouldn’t be where we are now. It’s in our genes to try to spend money wisely.’..
