Man United only have two years left to fulfil Sir Jim Ratcliffe promise
Manchester United co-owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe made a major pledge to the club last year
Sir Jim Ratcliffe made a big promise to Man United in 2025(Image: Getty Images)
Sir Jim Ratcliffe has just two years left to deliver on his promise to transform Manchester United into the world’s most profitable football club. There is some work to be done if that 2028 goal is to come to fruition, however.
United dropped four places to seventh in this year’s Deloitte Football Money League, which was released in January. The club raked in £666million but were eclipsed by Arsenal, Man City, Liverpool, Paris Saint-Germain, Bayern Munich, Barcelona and Real Madrid, who topped the table with £975m.
It was on March 11, 2025, that Ratcliffe reflected openly on his first year as a co-owner at Old Trafford. The INEOS chief addressed a wide range of topics with The Times, including sacking Erik ten Hag, controversially cutting costs across the business, and even backing Ruben Amorim, who was dismissed as United manager earlier this year.
“It will be a very profitable club,” Ratcliffe said as he discussed the club’s perilous financial standing early last year. “We believe that in three years’ time it will be the most profitable football club in the world. And it will be in a very, very different place. But we need to go through the change. Nobody likes change.”
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Change indeed has come to Old Trafford. Michael Carrick has replaced Amorim on an interim basis as head coach, while Ratcliffe has presided over drastic measures designed to cut costs since spending £1billion to acquire a 27.7 per cent shareholding in the club in February 2024.
Up to 450 jobs have been culled at United under Ratcliffe, while free meals for club staff were also axed. Defending his savage cost-cutting decisions, Ratcliffe said: “The costs were just too high.
“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 also angered United fans by raising match-day ticket prices to £66 per game, with no concessions for children or pensioners. “Manchester United is a lot more than a business,” he said in his infamous interview.
“It’s also a very emotional entity. But if you think about Manchester United as a business, it’s gone off the rails. It’s gone off the rails a long way, really.
“If you look at the numbers, the numbers were fairly scary, really. Because they’d sort of lost control, I think, of where the ship was headed. And the costs had got out of control.”
Although United’s men’s team are without European football this season, they did generate an operating profit of £32.6m in the first six months of the fiscal year, compared with a £3.9m loss for the same period last year.
The operating profit for the most recent quarter was £19.6m, compared to £3.1m in the same period last year. However, the latest financial documents have revealed that the club must repay £295m in borrowings and £238m in transfer fees within one year – and may also need to pay more to the sacked Amorim.
The recent figures for the second quarter of the financial year have already stated that United’s debt is approaching the £1.3bn mark. Ratcliffe also plans to build a new 100,000-seater stadium, expected to be completed by the 2030/31 season.
The glitzy new arena is estimated to cost £2bn, but it remains unclear how exactly this will be funded. United’s co-owner was also supremely confident that ‘Mission 21’, the club’s moniker for the project that aims to deliver them their 21st top-flight title, would be completed in time for United’s 150th anniversary in 2028.
Speaking in October 2025, Ratcliffe reiterated his ambitious plans for United. “Those numbers will get better,” he said. “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.”
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