Ratcliffe is a no-nonsense control freak - that's bad news for Ten Hag

They all have a tale to tell about Sir Jim Ratcliffe in the one haven of his sporting empire where things are going to plan. Among them is an English sailor named Freddie Carr, who was part of a pretty dire America’s Cup run in Auckland in 2021 and is integral tothe campaign that is currently pursuing history in Barcelona.

Carr has been there with Ben Ainslie the whole way, since long before the latter met Ratcliffe for a gin in Mayfair six years ago, when they agreed on a collaboration that, to date, has run up a £250million bill.

An outgoing and fun sort, Carr is easy to like. And Ratcliffe feels the same, so they’ve chatted about all kinds of topics, often football, and frequently during long cycle rides on the bikes borrowed from another of Ratcliffe’s acquisitions, the INEOS Grenadiers.

Those rides started several years before Ratcliffe bought into Manchester United. But kilometre by kilometre, up the climbs and down again, his boss’s boss would talk about the club he supported, reeling off names and stories of United players from the '60s and '70s.

‘He’d go into amazing detail,’ Carr told me a few months back. ‘Everything with Sir Jim is about the details. He is obsessed with little nuggets of information about absolutely anything and everything. Great guy.’

Ainslie recounted similarwhen we spoke in February, as it happens. For each step of this partnership with Ratcliffe there has been the ping of a WhatsApp notification on his phone - such is Ratcliffe’s intrigue in the minutiae he isn’t the most silent of partners. Those messages regularly contain queries around items of technology and whether concepts from his hook-ups with the Mercedes F1 team, the All Blacks or cycling would be of assistance.

In the past few weeks, I gather that has extended to texts to more peripheral figures in the operation. Ratcliffe has been checking in on the progress of legal documents and boring administrative processes; the nitty-gritty stuff that is doubtless important, but possibly unnecessary for Ratcliffe to busy himself with.

The more of these snippets I’ve heard, the more interesting and unusual it has seemed, because Ratcliffe has paid experts to handle those discussions for him. Maybe it’s just smart levels of diligence. Or the natural curiosity of a man who has made fortunes from digging for buried fuels.

We should add here that Ainslie doesn’t say a bad word about Ratcliffe. Quite the opposite. He values the interaction and nurtures the interest, and together they are on the crest of a wave – INEOS Britannia are the first British team in the America’s Cup final since 1964 and if they beat the sailors of New Zealand they will end a losing streak that stretches 173 years.

For Ainslie, now 47 and 12 years on from leaving the Olympics for new glories, skippering a Cup winner is the missing piece in the most wonderful of legacies. So too for veterans like Carr.

But it’s tempting to view the coming week in the context of Ratcliffe’s own sporting reputation. He needs a win, too, to show that his ability to mine success from dirt can be a transferrable skill on the stranger terrains of sport.

Across the past decade, since he began diversifying his interests, it hasn’t gone especially well. Not relative to the money he has spent. We know this.

The insurmountable force of Team Sky’s cyclists, dubious as some of their methods may have been in the good times, are now punching below their resources as the INEOS Grenadiers. Of those areas where Ratcliffe has a less influential stake, Mercedes can’t get within a postcode of Red Bull in F1 and the All Blacks are down to No 3 in the world.

And then you get to Manchester United, the crown jewel in the INEOS sporting portfolio whose every detail in the current day makes for a punchline. A club whose place in Ratcliffe’s heart would suggest he is across every cough and splutter.

When he was asked if he had faith in Erik ten Hag last week, he made a clumsy attempt to sidestep the grenade, saying: ‘I think I don’t want to answer that. I like Erik. He’s a very good coach but at the end of the day it’s not my call.’

It was hardly an endorsement and also a smudge disingenuous - it was quite laughable to suggest he holds a backseat role. If Ratcliffe is chasing the paperwork of a sailing team, you can be sure his fingerprints will be over the biggest decision of his early time at United, where the initial buy-in to the table was five times what he has put into efforts to win a yacht race. His star cast of advisors will have their say, but Ratcliffe evidently fancies himself to wear the big boy’s hat.

There’s nothing wrong with that. Actually, it can be preferable when owners want to be present and get their hands dirty. But it is therefore necessary to put Ratcliffe’s judgement under a microscope.

We are prone to believing in messiahs when it comes to sport, just as those who arrive from success in other realms often see messiahs when they look in the mirror. For Ratcliffe, eight months in, it is no longer enough that he isn’t named Glazer.

That United’s results on the pitch have continued to be dire is a fault traced to many places, but the ongoing malaise under Ten Hag walks straight to Ratcliffe’s door and those he appointed around him. They opted to keep him in the summer in the face of decent evidence, just as they are now deliberating the wisdom of their choice. Perceptions of that cohort are directly tethered to Ten Hag’s results, which is a choppy sea to live on.

In one corner of Ratcliffe’s sporting world, there are at some people convinced he will get it right at United. Ainslie is chief among them.

He once told me of a boss who has ‘zero tolerance for bull****’ and an unmatched ability to smell it. It’s why Ainslie came clean to him prior to the ill-fated America’s Cup challenger series in Auckland in 2021, when Ratcliffe had been led to believe his sailing team was on track, contrary to what everyone knew on the ground. Ratcliffe liked the honesty, bankrolled another campaign, and now he has a boat in Barcelona that has gone further under a British flag than any other for 60 years.

If the next week pans out to a winning conclusion, he will have achieved the ultimate vindication for his patience, judgement and obsession with curious little details. He would deserve it.

At Manchester United and a few of his other projects, he is not nearly so close to calm waters.

Farewell to a champion 

We will soon say a sporting farewell to Rafael Nadal, among the finest to ever do it and the friendliest too. 

One friend who works behind the scenes at all of the Slams recently shared an innocuous memory of a practice day at Wimbledon, when the grounds were largely deserted save for this Spaniard laughing manically to himself as he chased his baseball cap for 50 yards after it took off in a strong wind. 

He has a smile for everyone and knows all the courtesy car drivers and court staff by name – charming little touches beyond many of his peers, she said. Another staff member spoke of a guy without equal when it came to tipping the locker-room helpers. Not a bad player, either. 

There's no fault in Carsley's dummy run  

I admired Gareth Southgate greatly, but there was nothing so daft as trialling Trent Alexander-Arnold in midfield during the Euros. 

By the same logic Lee Carsley warrants a modicum of credit for saving his misadventures, including the use of Jude Bellingham as a false nine, for a game against Greece in a largely meaningless tournament. 

It might not do his England audition any good, but there is a time and place to try new things and he at least got that right.