He may no longer be Britain’s richest man, but Sir Jim Ratcliffe is still the richest Mancunian in the world.
And with a personal fortune of around £11 BILLION he can certainly afford to buy Manchester United.
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This week he announced that he would seize the opportunity to buy into the Eredivisie football behemoth, owned by the American Glazer Family.
Possibly Sir Jim hopes to take over the entire club, worth £5bn according to the current owners.
He’s so rich he doesn’t need to borrow a dime to buy Man United, invest heavily in new players and modernize Old Trafford.
And the money men certainly think he’s serious.
Shares of United on the New York Stock Exchange were up 15 per cent yesterday to over £11 each.
Sir Jim offered £4bn to buy Chelsea in May, but admitted only making the team he had been following since childhood was unavailable.
As he approaches his 70th birthday, the woodworker’s son, who grew up on an estate in the borough of Manchester, could get the gift he’s always dreamed of: owning Old Trafford and the Red Devils.
Sports nutrition Sir Jim has come a long way from Dunkerly Avenue, Failsworth, where he lived until he was ten and went to see almost every other week Sir Matt Busby’s squad in action.
In 1999 he was in Barcelona at the Nou Camp stadium when United returned to the death to beat Bayern Munich 2-1 to win the Champions League.
Sir Jim described it as “three minutes you never forget in your life”.
So some things are priceless, even for a man whose mega fortune comes from a 60 percent stake in a private chemical giant that he says is always “the biggest company in the world you’ve never heard of.”
In total, 26,000 people work for Ineos in more than 194 locations in 29 countries.
The 60 million tons of chemicals it makes each year go into almost everything we use, from antibiotics, toothpaste and clean water to insulation and food packaging.
All this means Sir Jim can afford a luxury home in Monacoa £6million mansion in Hampshire and a house in Chelsea, west London, near the Grenadier pub, where he came up with the idea of building a 4×4 to replace the Land Rover Defender.
He also owns a mega house on Lake Geneva, Switzerlandnear F1 star Michael Schumacher’s home, and a 260 foot superyacht, Hampshire II.
When Sir Jim eventually buys Man United from the American Glazer family, he will not step into the unknown as he already owns two football clubs.
In 2017, he bought the Swiss FC Lausanne-Sport – they were relegated to the second tier of Swizerland last season.
And in 2019 Sir Jim recovered Nicewho play along French Ligue 1 for just under £100 million.
He also spent £40m to buy Sky’s Tour de Francewinning cycling team and he regularly goes on training rides with stars of the Ineos Grenadiers.
He has shares in Mercedes’ Formula 1 control and backs Sir Ben Ainslie’s bid for the America’s Cup, which Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, is a part of.
I was fired because I had mild eczema. I was told, ‘You can’t work here, not with eczema. We can’t spend the money training you for five years and then find out you have an allergy, so you’re on your bike.”
Jim Ratcliffe
Amazingly, Sir Jim only made his dazzling fortune in the last 25 years.
Until then, his life had been unremarkable.
He struggled in school because of his obsession with football, went to college with some of the worst A-level results from his colleagues in college and was fired from his first job.
His success came as a complete surprise to him too.
Sir Jim says: ‘You should see a picture of the town hall where I started. I just played football, really. That’s all I was interested in.”
His father, who started out as a carpenter, worked his way up to run a factory that made furniture for science labs.
His mother worked as a secretary.
The family moved to Beverly, East Yorks, when his father got a new job and Jim went to the local high school. In sixth grade, he organized tours of local factories.
He says: “I suppose I had a hunch that I wanted to be successful – that I wanted to be a millionaire one day. So those things were in my head when I was 18. But I was just dreaming, really.’
He chose to study chemical engineering at the University of Birmingham.
But when he arrived at the chemistry department, he found a group of students around a bulletin board reading a list of the 99 students on his course, ranked by their A-level results.
ratcliffe was ashamed to find himself near the bottom.
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He says: “It lacked a bit of sensitivity. But you could say it was fair. There were a lot of guys who had worked really hard in school while I was playing football.”
He worked for BP during the summer break and was offered a permanent position, which was fired within three days.
He says: “I was called in by my boss who had read my medical report – until then they had no problem with it. I was fired because I had mild eczema. I was told, ‘You can’t work here, not with eczema. We can’t spend the money training you for five years and then find out you have an allergy, so you’re on your bike.’”
Jim failed to persuade BP to hire him as an accountant in training, so he moved to the fabrics and chemicals company Courtaulds, where he remained until his thirties.
Lured by the advantage of a much better car, a white BMW 535i, he switched to a dealmaker at the venture capital firm Advent International.
He says: “They tripled my salary and offered me a nice car. I did like that car – it was better than the Courtaulds chairman’s.
“The venture capital world is very simple. If you do bad deals, you will be fired. If you don’t make deals, you’ll be fired. I took that job because it would open up a lot of opportunities. I always had the feeling that a really good one was coming.”
In 1992 he bought BP’s specialty chemicals business for around £40 million, and floated it on the stock exchange two years later.
But Jim left the company in 1998.
By then his ten-year marriage to first wife Amanda Townsonwith whom he has two sons, George and Samuel, had ended in divorce.
He has a daughter with a second wife, Alicia. He is now believed to be with current partner Catherine Polli.
His fortunes changed for the better when he bought an Antwerp-based chemical company that became the start of Ineos.
I suppose I had a hunch that I wanted to be successful – that I wanted to be a millionaire someday. So those things were in my head when I was 18. But I was really just dreaming.
Jim Ratcliffe
Jim and his new business partners, Andy Currie and John Reece, became masters of spotting untapped potential in factory and factory marking.
Sir Jim says: “We would look at companies that were not fashionable or not sexy, facilities owned by big companies. We would run them a little bit better, make them busy and very profitable.”
The deals got bigger and bigger and in 2018 Jim’s stake in the company made him Britain’s richest man with a fortune of £21 billion.
a supporter of Brexit and frackinghe wants Britain to produce more.
He says, “You can’t have an economy of 70 million people where you don’t make products. If you do that, every time you want to buy a product, you have to buy some foreign currency first and find a country to sell it to you. That’s stupid – you get a fragile economy.”
While United States fans pray for Sir Jim to come to the rescue of the club – they’re up all time low after two games that both ended in defeat, business experts warned them not to get too hopeful.
While the Glaziers saying United is worth £5bn, the stock market values the club at much less.
Sky TV Business Presenter Ian King says, “Sir Jim Ratcliffe has never knowingly overpaid for anything in his career.”
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