It was back in March when Sir Jim Ratcliffe offered the best insight into his relationship with Ruben Amorim. We might conclude that it said much about both men.
‘Every time I go to the training ground, I speak to Ruben,’ he said. ‘I sit down and have a cup of coffee with him and tell him where it’s going wrong… and he tells me to f*** off. I like him.’
Five months on, the mind can turn cartwheels in processing what that all meant and where it has left Manchester United today.
Ratcliffe won’t have liked what happened on Amorim’s watch at Grimsby on Wednesday night. And you have to wonder if he has enjoyed any of the past 18 months since he bought an over-priced stake in the club.
Who has had the best of that deal? It isn’t Ratcliffe – he has pumped upwards of £1.3billion into a crumbling old castle, the upkeep is hideously expensive and chunks are still falling off by the week.
It isn’t the fans, either, because their white knight has spent much of the past year-and-a-half making decisions that inspire little or no confidence, all while their team plummets down the Premier League. The rank-and-file staff? Too many redundancies and cuts to the lunch budget to argue that one.
Sir Jim Ratcliffe offered a revealing insight in March into how he views his relationship with Manchester United manager Ruben Amorim
Amorim’s side were humiliated at Grimsby Town on Wednesday night, losing to a fourth-tier side for the first time ever
So who does that leave? The Glazers. We can imagine they love old Jim. Folk like them ordinarily spend fortunes on PR to protect their image, but they flipped the dynamic. Ratcliffe paid them and now he’s the one called a ‘c***’ at matches. Smartest deal the Glazers ever made.
But let’s go back to the United canteen and those coffees, because it boils down to two guys with too much trust in their own instincts.
To appreciate the shortcomings in Ratcliffe’s approach to sport, we should start with the debate around Amorim. He is so wedded to his way of playing, to his 3-4-2-1, that even the worst Premier League season in United’s history could not convince him to alter his path.
He has carried his system into this campaign, which is why his best player and captain, Bruno Fernandes, has spent three games stationed deeper and therefore away from the advanced spot where he finds most comfort and impact. But to follow Amorim’s doctrine, the system is king and kings do not bend. Tell him he’s wrong and he might tell you where to go, just as he does Ratcliffe.
Is Amorim’s belief his superpower or a chronic lack of imagination? The results so far guide us to an unfavourable conclusion, but a few minutes in Amorim’s company, a coffee even, can inspire leaps of faith.
Maybe that is down to his likeability. His honesty and strength at talking a good game. Perhaps it is the mitigation we afford to a manager who walked into a shambles of a club. Or is it simply a collective, innate affinity we have on some level for tortured artists?
And that takes us to Ratcliffe, whose career in sport can be defined as a series of misadventures and a susceptibility to get suckered in by good talkers.
There is a perception of Ratcliffe as a hard, unyielding man. That comes as much from his savage cuts to United’s budgets – the boss who severed Sir Alex Ferguson’s golden parachute and butchered the headcount – as it does his success as an industrialist who extracted gas from rocks.
Ratcliffe has been a shield for the Glazers, even as he swings the axe on club legends like Sir Alex Ferguson (right)
Amorim’s rigidity in tactics means his captain and best player Bruno Fernandes is now playing out of position in his system
But, increasingly, emotion appears to be his weakness, especially during this sporting phase of his life.
Emotion led him to keep Erik ten Hag after a good day out at Wembley. A willingness to believe in magic is why Sir Dave Brailsford, a fallen guru from cycling, was able to chat his way into becoming Ratcliffe’s right hand man.
Diluting Brailsford’s frontline influence at United remains one of the shrewder calls Ratcliffe has made, but it was only necessary because he put him there in the first place.
Sources at United dispute that Brailsford was a failed enterprise, and that the revamped Carrington training ground will be a truer legacy of his work, but there are plenty in sport who have worked with or against him and rolled eyes the very moment his role at the club was announced.
Today, in the absence of evidence of what good he did at United, it sits in the same conversation as the doomed, short-lived appointment of Dan Ashworth when we deliberate the big calls that Ratcliffe got wrong.
Just as he got Ten Hag’s extension wrong. And elements of the Mason Greenwood fallout, not to mention the explanations for how they have navigated PSR concerns – would United really have gone bust by Christmas, as he claimed, if they hadn’t have streamlined so extensively, including a cull of ex-players from ambassadorial roles to save £40,000?
It took one simple line of questioning from Gary Neville to reveal how that might have been avoided by selling a few tickets to a few dinners.
All of those decisions were tricky, no doubt, and each has been underwhelming to differing extents. Now we are reviewing the major one to keep Amorim, a good man and quite persuasive over a coffee by most accounts.
Emotion cost Ratcliffe and United dear when it meant that Erik ten Hag kept his job last summer after winning the FA Cup, despite clearly not being up to the task
Ratcliffe has staked the house on Amorim – can he really turn his back on him now?
Ratcliffe has staked the house on him, which has meant backing his manager in every conceivable way. That covers disputes with Marcus Rashford and Alejandro Garnacho and the fortunes spent in the market this summer, despite all our reservations about whether this masterpiece will ever come to fruition.
None of that should be mistaken for poor intentions – fans of many clubs would love such shortcomings from their owners if it was set against sheer indifference.
But we can legitimately question the wisdom of Ratcliffe’s judgments, of his apparent belief that his gut responses are up to the job of turning around Manchester United.
So far, only the Glazers could say with a straight face that it has been successful.
