Sir Jim Ratcliffe has insisted that Manchester United will reverse six successive years of losses and become “the most profitable football club in the world”.
The 20-time English champions have not been in the black since 2019 and took their cumulative losses over that period to around £400m last year.
Manchester United topped Deloitte’s Football Money League, which ranks clubs by revenue, as recently as 2017 but their income has failed to keep pace with European rivals as results on the pitch have steadily declined.
“Those numbers will get better,” said Ratcliffe, who has a minority stake but effectively runs the club’s football operations.
“Manchester United will become the most profitable football club in the world, in my view, and from that will stem, I hope, a long-term, sustainable, high-level of football.”
Billionaire Ratcliffe hit back at criticism of wide-ranging cuts that have seen 450 staff axed and those who survived the cull lose access to catering privileges.
“The costs were just too high,” he told The Business podcast, produced by The Times and The Sunday Times.
“There are some fantastic people at Manchester United, but there was also a level of mediocrity and it had become bloated. I got a lot of flak for the free lunches, but no-one’s ever given me a free lunch.”
Ratcliffe defends ‘really nice’ Glazers
United showed some signs of stemming the bleeding in their most recent annual accounts as losses retreated from £113m to £33m, thanks in part to the cost-cutting.
“The biggest correlation, like it or not, between results and any external factor is profitability,” said the Ineos boss.
“The more cash you have got, the better squad you can build. So a lot of what we have done in the first year is spend an awful lot of time putting the club on a sustainable, healthy footing.
“We’re not seeing all the benefits of the restructuring that we’ve done in this set of [financial] results and we were not in the Champions League.”
Ratcliffe also defended the Glazers, the American family who have taken more than £1bn out of United since becoming majority owners in a controversial leveraged takeover in 2005.
He said: “They get a bad rap… but they are really nice people and they are really passionate about the club.”