Full transcript of Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s interview

Manchester United co-owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe spoke to BBC sports editor Dan Roan on a range of topics on Monday.

A full transcript of the interview can be found below.

How would you describe your first year as co-owner of Manchester United?

We are roughly where we thought we would be, but it’s also been quite challenging because there’s been a lot to do, and quite a lot of issues in the club we’ve needed to resolve.

Is the challenge facing you greater than anticipated?

Yeah, I mean the nature of the challenge is what we thought it would be. But the scale of it is probably slightly bigger. We are sort of in the moment in the process of change because United has obviously, since Sir Alex [Ferguson] retired, not performed at the level that has been expected of the club.

There are reasons for that, clearly. Unless you want that to continue there has to be a period of change. We are in the middle of a period of change at the moment. Nobody likes change, it’s uncomfortable, and we are in the midst of it.

You said you are aiming for the Premier League title again within three years – by 2028. You have dubbed it mission 21 for the 21st title. When you look at the table does it seem like mission impossible, rather than mission 21 right now?

No, I don’t think it’s mission impossible. I think it’s good to have goals and objectives. It’s good to put a time rather than just a bland statement that at some stage we want to win the Premier League again.

Putting a timetable is fine. Obviously it’s the 150th anniversary of what I think is the world’s greatest football club in 2028 so I think it’s a very fine target. Whether that’s feasible…I’m not Mystic Meg. I don’t have a magic wand. I can’t see into the future, obviously.

I think if you look at Arsenal, if you look at Liverpool, if you look at the period of time it took them to get the house in order and get back to winning ways, that’s probably slightly on the short end of the spectrum. But it’s not impossible.

I look at Liverpool when [Jurgen] Klopp arrived in 2015 with Michael Edwards and Ian Graham on the data side, they rebuilt the squad over 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018 and then they won everything in 2019, 2020 and 2021.

Mikel Arteta has been at Arsenal for four or five years now, and you can see Arsenal is in a very different place than where it was five years ago. So I think we are talking about three years. Maybe that’s slightly ambitious but I think it is the 150th year anniversary so it’s a good target for us. We are here. We have to measure ourselves. Whether we are doing the things we said we would do which is to get United back to where it should be.

When you look at the table and see yourselves down in 14th – 36 points behind Liverpool – how does it make you feel to see that?

It’s obviously not where we would like to be, but we are in a period of change. We haven’t had much time to change the squad, we’ve got a new coach who came in mid-season, and we’ve got a long list of injuries.

If you look at the top eight earners in Manchester United, Ruben [Amorim] has only got four of those because the other four are not available to him. So if I actually look at the squad which is available to Ruben, I think he is doing a realty good job to be honest.

Have there been times in the past year, Jim, where you have regretted investing in United?

Regretted the transaction?

Yes…

No. Not at all. I didn’t expect it to be a walk in the park. It’s quite tough sometimes reading the press, obviously. But in a way I’d rather the press had a go at me than Ruben [Amorim] the coach.

You know I suppose I’ve stood out there and said ‘we can make Manchester United great again’ so people are entitled to their opinions. In my view are on the trajectory I thought we would be on. We are in the process of change at the moment.

We put a new management team in place. We didn’t get that all right at the beginning, obviously. But today I think we have a really good management team in place.

We are dealing with the financial issues in the club, because the club has got financial issues and we need to address those. Then we need to move on to the squad, recruitment, data analysis and those types of things. So we are on the path we anticipated we would be on.

You mentioned criticism. This has been criticism from the media but fans, too. You’ll have seen the protests before the match against Arsenal. Do you understand the anger of those fans?

Yes and I sympathise with them because Manchester United is not where it’s expected to be. We are expected to be winning the Premier League and challenging for the Champions League and we are not there at the moment. But I think we need to get the house back in order before we can get back to our winning ways.

That’s the process it takes. It’s not a light switch. I’ll give you an example, if you look at the players we are buying this summer, that we didn’t buy, we are buying Antony, we are buying Casemiro, we are buying Andre Onana, we are buying Rasmus Hojlund, we are buying Jadon Sancho.

These are all things from the past but whether we like it or not we have inherited those things and we have to sort it out. For Sancho, who obviously now plays for Chelsea, and we pay half his wages, we are paying £17m to buy him in the summer. So it takes time for us to move away from the past into a new place in the future.

To what extent are you still dealing with the problems from the past? Or after a year is this on you to some extent now? Do Ineos have to take some responsibility?

I just think when you are in a period of change, it is disruptive. It does, if you will excuse the pun, take people’s eye off the ball a bit. We have got a club which was in a level of financial difficulty. Manchester United would have run out of cash by the end of this year – by the end of 2025 – after having me put $300m (£232.72m) in and if we buy no new players in the summer. If we hadn’t have implemented the cost programmes and restructuring that we have done over the last 12 months.

So we have to deal with all those things, and there’s only so many things you can deal with at once. We have a new management team, we have to deal with the financial restructure, then we have to move on to the squad, data analysis, and moving forward.

But we are in the process of change and it’s an uncomfortable period and disruptive and I do feel sympathy with the fans. But I am not actually surprised where we are in the league because Ruben’s only got a certain size of squad he can deal with, and quite a number of those players are injured or not available to him.

A year ago you were seen as a saviour for the club by many fans…now a lot see Ineos as part of the problem and they would look to some of the decisions which have been made, and the costs of some of those decisions financially. So do you accept that you have contributed to the predicament the club finds itself in?

We are not perfect, and we are on a journey, and there have been a couple of errors along the way, but I think in the main all the things we are doing are the right things for the club. And the club’s going to finish up in a very, very different place in three years’ time to where its been in the past, in my view.

I think it will become the most profitable club in the world. In three years’ time Manchester United will be. That will be my prediction for Manchester United – it will be the most profitable club in the world. I think we may well finish up with the most iconic football stadium in the world, and I think we will finish up winning silverware again.

Can you tell us about the stadium. There’s been a task force looking at whether to rebuild or replace Old Trafford. What is the latest on that?

We obviously have the day tomorrow [Tuesday] where we will talk about that in quite a bit more detail, but we have those two alternatives and we have looked at them in great detail. The government has announced three major growth projects for the UK, of which the regeneration of southern Manchester is what they describe as a shining example of their growth strategy for the future. And it would be the biggest regeneration project in Europe, assuming it goes ahead.

If it goes ahead then we would, I think, underpin that with a new stadium. Because with regeneration projects you need a nucleus, you need a heart to a regeneration programme, otherwise it’s just a housing estate. But I think if we were to build the most iconic football stadium in the world, which I think we will do, then that will attract the billion fans we have got round the world. They will all want to come to Manchester.

The value added to Manchester of that, and to the north of England, is enormous. It’s five, seven, billion [pounds] a year. It’s an enormous amount. You’ll hear more about that tomorrow.

I know we will hear more but in general the big question is how will you pay for this?

The financing is not the issue, I think it’s eminently financeable. But the detail of that we’d rather talk about in the future. It will be financeable, I think.

To go back to the financial situation the club was facing… for those who need to understand this, explain how precarious it was and what is the prospect going forward right now? How close was the club to being bust?

It’s a simple equation. If you spend more than you earn eventually that’s the road to ruin. So for the last seven seasons, if you include this season, the club would have lost money. Seven consecutive seasons.

I think that totals about £330m, so about a third of a billion of cash that’s gone out of the club in the last four or five seasons. The costs of running the club in the last seven years have increased by £100m. The cost of the player wage bill in the last seven years or so is £100m. The increase in the revenue during that period is £100m. And that sum doesn’t work.

If you are losing money every year, and at the same time you are increasing your costs of running the club, it doesn’t work and it ends in trouble. And that’s where this club would have finished up at the end of this year.

All of the things that we are doing are essential, are necessary to the club. They are not easy things to do, but we’ll get through that process and we will come out of the other side in the summer. Some of that is all finished and done with now.

How close were you to breaching PSR? (Under the Premier League’s profit and sustainability rules (PSR), clubs can lose up to £105m over three years)

PSR. I think the principle…