Sir Jim Ratcliffe lays the blame for the ongoing mess at Manchester United at the door of the Glazer family, who “made a complete cock-up” of running the club.
After saddling Man Utd with £600m worth of debt following their leveraged takeover 21 years ago, many of the problems the club has suffered since, on and off the field, can be attributed to the absentee Glazers.
Ratcliffe meanwhile, promised the “best in class” when he arrived in February 2024 and has done the exact opposite. No top football club would have Jason Wilcox and Michael Carrick as the pair responsible for carrying out their footballing vision.
Manchester United are currently weighing up whether to sack the third permanent manager of Ratcliffe’s reign. The British billionaire will have the final say on whether to send Carrick packing with the Red Devils in the relegation zone for the international break.
The Guardian reports that director of football Jason Wilcox is ‘leading the review’ and will consult with CEO Omar Berrada before giving a recommendation to Ratcliffe.
Carrick was nearly let go after a 3-0 defeat to Bournemouth followed the 4-1 humiliation at the hands of Como in the Champions League. He was given three games to save his job and led United to a 2-0 defeat to Chelsea, a 3-2 comeback win over Roma and the dramatic 4-4 draw with Aston Villa at Old Trafford.
The fans continue to make their feelings clear on the ownership of the club.
A banner reading ‘We don’t want a new stadium, we want new owners’ was unfurled prior to kick-off and shown once again before the end of the first half on Sunday before being confiscated by stewards as fans were told it was blocking the view of others in the stand.
A year on from acquiring a 27 per cent stake in Man Utd to take control of football operations, Ratcliffe didn’t hold back in his criticism of the way the club had been run under the Glazers.
“The [Glazers] just managed the club and left the football side alone and they’ve made a lot of very poor decisions over 12 years, stupid things,” Ratcliffe told The Times in March 2025. “They made a complete cock-up of it, shocking really.
“They couldn’t see where they were headed. The first management group [led by Ed Woodward] thought they understood and wanted to get involved in buying footballers, but they didn’t have the knowledge to buy footballers so they went in the marketplace, spraying money around and it was just random. I wouldn’t have tolerated Ed Woodward or [his successor] Richard Arnold.”
A penny for his thoughts on the job Omar Berrada has done as CEO under his ownership.
But for now, according to one former Premier League executive, Ratcliffe is pinning the current chaos on the Glazers.
“I don’t think Jim listens to many people,” they told ESPN. “In my experience, it takes about five years for owners to learn their lessons and take some responsibility. That’s when humility starts to land. Up until Year 3 or 4, they are still putting the blame on what they inherited.”
While not as detested as the Glazer family, Ratcliffe has done nothing to endear himself to the Manchester United fans, who now see him as firm and significant part of The Problem.
And we wonder if a banner denouncing his ownership through a play on words with one of the UK’s most notorious sexual predators constitutes the sort of abuse that would lead him to walk away, as he vowed to do in that 2025 interview.
He said: “So, eventually, if it reached the extent that the Glazer family have been abused, then I’d have to say: ‘Look, enough’s enough, guys, let somebody else do this.’”
But if ‘Jim can’t fix this’ then who can?
