A ‘culture of fear’ has turned Man Utd into a tragedy - and Sir Jim Ratcliffe is the latest culprit | OneFootball

The phrase that is coming out of Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s Manchester United is that there’s a “culture of fear” within the club, because so many people are afraid for their jobs. It sets up sour punchlines to two particularly bad jokes.

One is what a twisted distortion that description represents of United’s historic pride in their actual culture, not to mention Ratcliffe’s own comments in February 2024 about creating “a positive, supportive, friendly and high-quality environment”. The other regards Omar Berrada’s email warning staff that they could lose their jobs if they leak information, when many were already afraid, as underwhelming performances on the pitch continue under Ruben Amorim.

Except, once you announce more cuts, people have much less to fear. That is one reason for the flood of details about how absurdly parsimonious United have become, right up to how staff will be given fruit instead of being afforded a proper canteen.

While details like this capture attention, they really should only sharpen focus on what is actually important here. Hundreds of people are losing their jobs. These are jobs that involve salaries far removed from footballers’ wages too. This has a real everyday effect. People’s lives are changed by a club that didn’t just employ them, but was supposed to represent them and enrich their lives.

What association will laid-off employees and their families have with their local club now? That matters.

Before any arguments are made about the supposed business logic behind such decisions, it’s worth considering the one fact in all this that should loom over everything.

Ratcliffe has warned that United are now a club that badly needs such cuts, but this wasn’t the case 20 years ago. Then, they were a fully self-sustainable elite club that had been debt-free since 1931. Had that continued, as should have happened, there would be no need for any of this.

That is what should really resonate through all these headlines. This is all so needless - or at least would be were it not for the endless need of billionaires to just make more money, no matter the cultural cost.

What remains so galling is that English football just lets it happen.

In May 2005, the Glazer family completed the takeover of United through a leveraged buy-out, where half a billion pounds’ worth of borrowings were loaded onto the club. The institution’s success was almost used against it. An inspirational - yes - culture founded on youth, adventure, defiance and glory was literally traded off.

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Sir Jim Ratcliffe has introduced a series of cost-cutting measures in his first year at Manchester United (PA Wire)

To go from all that to this, and especially through the ultra-cynical capitalist mechanism that a leveraged buy-out represents, is an English football tragedy. It should provoke as many questions about the direction of the game as the Super League and the demise of Bury, especially amid discussions about an independent football regulator.

That United are one of English football’s great clubs should only deepen the concern rather than temper it.

They’ve become a symbol in a different way, of a sport that has lost its way pursuing a particular model of hypercapitalism.

This, to bluntly repeat something that should always be restated, is not what the game is for.

It is almost too galling to wonder how much money has gone out on interest payments alone since 2005, now ordinary people are paying the price.

Of course, the Premier League can say they have since capped such leveraged buy-outs. That still couldn’t stop what happened next.

One of the reasons that we are here, and Ratcliffe’s INEOS have made these decisions, is because the Glazers’ model ultimately reached a reductio ad absurdum of modern football. They wanted to keep making money off the club, but found that couldn’t really happen without investment. Old Trafford needed work. So, the Glazers explored options.

And what was the choice from that?

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Man Utd confirmed another round of redundancies (Manchester United via Getty Imag)

Well, it was another arch-capitalist in Ratcliffe - a Brexit voter who is also a tax exile in Monaco - or a state through Qatar’s Sheikh Jassim.

It’s just another “choice” that shows how football has obliterated its own sense of freedom by so hyperactively pursuing neoliberalism.

And before anyone goes there, the problems with one potential ownership do not justify another. The choice should never have been sportswashing or seemingly being stripped clean.

But that reflects football in 2025, where the world’s game is largely being pulled between two lofty poles. Autocratic states are trying to extract football’s political capital. Mostly American “institutional money” is trying to extract good old-fashioned financial capital.

The last few months have certainly soured the optimistic image that Ratcliffe portrayed on buying his stake from the Glazers last year, but they conform to the picture from his career. Observers compare this to the Grangemouth 2013 “survival plan”, which broached the following measures for staff at the beleaguered Scottish oil refiner after an INEOS purchase in 2005. They were wage freezes for three years, no bonuses and a money purchase pension scheme. Ratcliffe’s own co-written book published in 2018, ‘The Alchemists’, details how “Jim wasn’t prepared to make any new investments before significant cost savings were made”. It sounds familiar, as well as like a significant removal from railway workers coming together to form a club in Newton Heath.

Standing conspicuously in the middle of all this is Old Trafford.

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Ruben Amorim has struggled to make an impact at Manchester United (Peter Byrne/PA Wire)

The great question is how much INEOS will invest into the stadium redevelopment, especially since any plan will probably require £2bn. Such expenditure, it should be remembered, would not be included in the PSR calculations that INEOS has been so keen to point to. It is infrastructure, legacy, culture. Is this not supposed to be the point of all this?

‘The Alchemists’ does take pride in how Grangemouth was saved, and that trade union Unite subsequently had a “much lower profile” there. The point is also made that staff later had two significant pay rises, as well as considerable bonuses.

INEOS might similarly argue that critics of United's decisions have not built up businesses in the way Ratcliffe has.

That’s fair, but an equally fair response is that he hasn’t yet built a successful football club. And football clubs are different. For one, they don’t exist to make profit - just to play sport and represent their community. Anything else is another twisted distortion of that.

It’s why two important counterpoints can also be made to any business arguments about these decisions. It remains inarguable that these cuts are negligible next to the rivers of money going out on football wages and related costs.

There’s also the danger of the worst type of false economy. Savings here won’t materially affect the football, but the emotional toll might. The cuts create a dismal atmosphere, that can’t but reach the players. They now know they’re playing for everyday people and, even if that can be an incentive, guilt has never really been as strong a motivation as inspiration and collectiveness; everything that football is supposed to be about.

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Man Utd continue to underperform on the pitch under the Ineos leadership (AP)

United of course generate enough money that they can weather even this. There is a force of numbers, no matter how long it takes.

It’s entirely plausible that, in a few years, people will laud the “hard decisions” taken by INEOS now.

No matter what they win, though, it will be impossible not to feel something significant has been lost here.