It is coming up to two years since Sir Jim Ratcliffe got his hands on a piece of Manchester United and set about his mission to restore the club to “the top of the game”.
It would not be a quick fix, the petrochemicals billionaire said, given the sense of decline and drift that had taken hold over the previous decade. It wasn’t a case of flicking a switch or waving a magic wand. “We have to walk to the right solution,” he told the BBC, “not run to the wrong one.”
Ratcliffe made no apologies for setting Manchester City as the benchmark that United had to emulate: first of all, off the pitch, by replicating something of their “very sensible structure” and “driven competitive environment” and, ultimately, on the pitch, where he said Pep Guardiola’s team had produced “the best football I’ve ever seen”.
The work had already begun. Even before acquiring an initial 27.7 per cent stake in February 2024, Ratcliffe had lined up his first big appointment, having persuaded Manchester City’s chief football operations officer, Omar Berrada, to lead United’s new regime as chief executive.
It was widely hailed as a coup, given Berrada’s reputation among the top-class operators and blue-sky thinkers behind City’s rise over the previous decade. One senior figure within the football industry told The Athletic at the time that it was “the first genuinely elite move” United had made in a decade. Another went further, calling it their best signing since they bought a teenage Cristiano Ronaldo in 2003.
Once that appointment was rubber-stamped, another former City executive followed: former Blackburn Rovers and England winger Jason Wilcox, who had spent six years as City’s academy director before leaving to become sporting director at Southampton. Wilcox joined United as technical director, but was swiftly promoted to sporting director after Dan Ashworth, another new arrival, was sidelined and then moved on.
Jason Wilcox (left) with Dan Ashworth, before the latter’s abrupt exit from United (Eddie Keogh/Getty Images)
The influx of former City employees at Old Trafford has gone further than that. In need of a new performance director in September 2024, United turned to Sam Erith, who had spent 11 years in similar roles at City; in need of a new academy director following Nick Cox’s departure to Everton, they hired Steve Torpey, who, before having the same role at Brentford, had spent roughly a decade as an academy coach at City; in need of another coach for their under-21 team, they hired Wilcox’s former Blackburn team-mate Alan Wright, who had spent a decade coaching at City’s academy; their new chief communications officer had previously spent eight years in marketing, communications and corporate affairs at City Football Group (CFG), the multi-club group that owns City.
There are two aspects to this. One is the quality of City’s football and business operation for the past decade, a structure containing layers of expertise across different departments — recruitment, sports science, youth academy, commercial, etc — which they built while United and others lagged behind. There are at least 115 unanswered questions about City’s business operation between 2009 and 2018, with the club denying any wrongdoing, but within the football industry, there is great admiration for the way they operate as well as for their on-pitch excellence under Pep Guardiola.
Numerous clubs have sought to lure staff away from City, often for more senior positions. Southampton, by hiring Joe Shields (now at Chelsea) as head of senior recruitment and Wilcox as sporting director, were a classic example of “City-fication”. Many other clubs, ranging from Chelsea to Bolton Wanderers and Salford City, have made similar appointments in recent years, whether at executive level, recruitment, sports science, or coaching. Only yesterday, Tottenham Hotspur announced the appointment of another former City executive, Carlos Raphael Moersen, as their director of football operations.
The second phenomenon is more localised. In almost every media interview he has done since investing in the club, Ratcliffe has spoken of the need to aspire to emulate what City are doing. In one sit-down interview with reporters, while reeling off the elite clubs in Europe, he joked that he could “hardly say” City’s name alongside Real Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Paris Saint-Germain. But he doesn’t seem to have found it that hard, given the frequency with which he has continued to mention them.
But that “City-fication” label is an awkward fit. United have appointed former City executives and coaches, but not, it seems, with the intention of copying and pasting their business model or even their football model. As an example, one of the pillars of the City/CFG model is multi-club ownership. Ratcliffe’s INEOS Sports vehicle owns French club Nice and Swiss club FC Lausanne-Sport, but, rather than capitalise on those existing links by integrating them with United, he is looking to sell those two clubs.
Sir Jim Ratcliffe with OGC Nice’s president Jean-Pierre Riviere (Nicolas Tucat/AFP via Getty Images)
The big question, ahead of another Manchester derby on Saturday lunchtime, is whether those appointments have brought United any closer to Ratcliffe’s stated ambition to knock City “off their perch”. Liverpool did so last season by winning the Premier League title and Arsenal are six points clear right now, but United are still nowhere near that conversation.
It is usually the coach and the players who are held responsible for on-pitch failings — and of course, the owners, which in United’s case means the Glazer family rather than just Ratcliffe. But the nature of Ruben Amorim’s sudden departure, after 14 disappointing months in charge, has sharpened the focus on Berrada, who led the coach’s appointment in late 2024, and Wilcox, who clashed with the coach in the tumultuous week that led to his departure.
“You’ve got Jason Wilcox, Omar Berrada and others who previously worked at City,” former United midfielder Paul Scholes told The Times recently. “City have been successful for a long time, so it’s understandable to want some of that, but it’s not really what a Manchester United person would want — and probably not what the fans want either.”
The obvious rebuttal here is that if someone is the right person for the job, it should not matter one jot that they have worked for a rival club; if anything, it might be considered a positive. The same applies to those, such as interim coach Michael Carrick, who have previously worked for United. But conversely, it should not be a prerequisite to have played under Sir Alex Ferguson at United or worked under Berrada at City.
The success or otherwise of a coaching appointment tends to be judged purely on results. A chief executive’s performance is far harder to evaluate because the role is so far-reaching across the entire business. Likewise that of a director of football; if it is reasonable to say that signings such as Senne Lemmens, Bryan Mbeumo, Matheus Cunha, Benjamin Sesko, Patrick Dorgu and indeed teenage defender Ayden Heaven should be judged over the longer term, and likewise the investment in upgrading the club’s training facilities, then it is obvious to state that the same applies to Wilcox’s performance as director of football.
Nevertheless, the first two years of Ratcliffe’s involvement — which means the first 18 months of Berrada as chief executive — have seen a continuation of the erratic decision-making that has blighted United ever since Ferguson and long-standing chief executive David Gill left the club in 2013: retaining Erik ten Hag in the summer of 2024, only to sack him less than three months into the following campaign; hiring Ashworth as sporting director, only to part company with him inside seven months; hiring Amorim as coach (contrary to Ashworth’s advice), only to sack him within 14 months.
Ratcliffe might claim to know where he wants to take United, but there has so far been little to suggest that he and the rest of the new regime have a clear picture of how to get there.
Remember Ratcliffe’s insistence in early 2024 that a new executive team, led by a head of football (briefly Ashworth, now Wilcox), would establish a vision of how United should play — “and the coach will have to play that style”?
“Look at Manchester City,” he added. “All 11 clubs (teams) play to the same formula, and we need to do that.”
In that context, their subsequent appointment of Amorim made such little sense. Rather than adhere to an existing United vision, Amorim spent 14 largely miserable months trying to impose his preferred 3-4-3 formation at first-team level, with very little success, while Wilcox and the club’s youth-team coaches were trying to introduce a more uniform playing style at academy level.
Darren Fletcher explained last week, during his brief temporary spell in charge of the first team after Amorim’s dismissal, that he coached the under-18s team with a back four because “that’s a style and a system that the club thinks is best for developing players”.
Ruben Amorim’s time at United was a failure (Oli Scarff/AFP via Getty Images)
That suggested there might, after all, be an overarching vision, just waiting to be deployed — not just by Carrick, who has taken charge of the first team until the end of the season, but in informing the decision of who should coach the team in the longer term.
But again, the “City-fication” label does not quite fit. This is less a case of copying the neighbours and more a case of following what has long been recognised within youth development circles as best practice.
So many of the problems at Old Trafford in recent years come back to the fact that while City and other clubs modernised and established some kind of identity or vision that shaped their recruitment and their playing style during the 2010s, United have spent years drifting under the Glazer family’s ownership.
There have been times over the past decade when United officials have laughed off suggestions that they had fallen behind City or Liverpool. There have been other times when, after an overdue shake-up of their recruitment operation or their academy or their data department, they have convinced themselves they have moved back ahead of the curve — only to find out once again, another two or three years down the line, that they had not.
That line about walking to the right solution, rather than running to the wrong one, is an appealing one. But to be going into another Manchester derby as underdogs, under another interim coach, offers a stark illustration of how, in the first two years under Ratcliffe’s influence, they have wasted so much time and money walking from one wrong solution to another and looking to their once-downtrodden neighbours for inspiration.