Coaches in tears, staff stacked & millions down drain…inside local hero Jim Ratcliffe’s ‘terrible’ first year at Man Utd

JULY is usually an exciting time at Manchester United’s famous academy.

Hundreds of kids as young as seven return to the club’s Carrington training ground as they dream of following in the footsteps of Marcus Rashford, Alejandro Garnacho and Kobbie Mainoo by becoming the next protege to grace Old Trafford.

But this season it was different.

Instead of coaches greeting the potential future stars with fist-bumps and hi-fives, some of them were in tears.

The reason? New minority owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe and his Ineos minions had set their cost-saving sights on the academy.

So as kids and parents buzzed around downstairs, respected coaches were being told they were at risk of redundancy upstairs.

Shock filled the building as confused children saw coaches they loved walking down the stairs with tears in their eyes.

Some children also broke down, while others tried to comfort their coaches as bewildered parents looked on.

A dad who witnessed the scenes told The Sun: “How the club acted was outrageous.

“It was like waiting all summer and then sacking all the teachers on the first day of term — in front of the kids.

“Some of the coaches were crying, some of the kids were then crying — and parents were wondering, ‘What on earth is going on?’”

Academy Director Nick Cox later emailed parents to explain the job cuts were part of a club-wide review aimed at saving cash and becoming a “more lean and agile organisation”.

That mantra has been a familiar message from United officials as billionaire Sir Jim slashes his way through every department of the football club, earning him the nickname “The Jim Reaper”.

‘He’s had a terrible year’

Just this week, the club confirmed up to 200 more people will lose their jobs — on top of 250 loyal staff made redundant last year.

Even United legend and ex-manager Sir Alex Ferguson’s £2million ambassador role was cut.

He argues club staff become too comfortable while leaders have become too sentimental — leading to a decade of poor performance.

The problem for Sir Jim — who is worth an estimated £23billion — is that on the pitch results have been disastrous.

After spending £14million dispensing of manager Erik ten Hag and football director Dan Ashworth, he spent millions more installing Ruben Amorim in the Old Trafford dugout.

The 72-year-old can regularly be seen gritting his teeth along with the rest of United fans as his team flounder on the pitch, winning just five of 16 Premier League games.

Sir Jim has applied a similar approach to United as he has with his petrochemicals empire — where predictable costs and cost savings have reaped huge success.

But so far in the football world, he has failed to discover the right formula for the sweet science of footie.

And the man once billed as the saviour of the club from the hated Glazer family, who have loaded £1billion of debt and interest payments on the club following their 2005 takeover, is now regarded by some fans as just another businessman desecrating the club and all it stands for.

In Failsworth, the working-class district eight miles from Old Trafford where Ratcliffe started life, he was previously hailed as a local hero thanks to his business acumen.

But after sacking hundreds of United staff, putting up some match tickets to £66 a game, cancelling the Christmas party, and ending free lunches for training ground staff in favour of soup and free fruit, he has lost some of his sheen.

The Sun this week visited Dunkerley Avenue, where Ratcliffe lived until he was ten, and were offered views Roy Keane would be proud of about the Ineos boss’s stewardship of the club.

Lifelong Man United fan John Fearnley said: “I can’t understand why he is doing this.

“He knows what it is like to come from a working-class family but now that is exactly the people who he is targeting.

“He’s already put match ticket prices up and no doubt season ticket prices will follow next season.

“I think he would have put them up mid-season if he could have. Cutting hundreds of jobs is a mistake and will hurt those affected a lot.”

The 70-year-old retired contracts manager added: “My Man City mates are having a right laugh about United getting rid of the canteen and handing out free fruit.

“They keep sending me Marcus Rashford memes about how we need him back now the free meals have been stopped.”

His wife Sue, 69, added: “I am United through and through but what he is doing is wrong.

“It’s crazy that he is making all these people redundant.

“They will be the lower-paid staff and money will already be tight.

“I thought things would improve when he bought into the club.

“It’s the players’ wages that need cutting.

“They should rip the existing contracts up and if the team does well, give them bonuses.”

Mike Robinson, 56, said: “What he is doing is a disgrace.

“He is destroying the fabric of the club by sacking the very people who are the club.

“When he became the richest man in the UK and you’d tell people where you were from, some would say, ‘That’s where Jim Ratcliffe is from!’.”

“It was nice to have someone from Failsworth do so well for himself.

“But not now he is sacking ordinary working-class people.”

Rob Inkerman, 35, said: “He’s a local lad, a United fan and a billionaire.

“I thought he would have known what the club stood for and how it is the ordinary people who make the club what it is.

“But instead of improving the club, he’s making it worse. He’s had a terrible year.

“When he arrived, I think a lot of people saw him as a hero, someone who could save the club. But not any more.

“His reputation with the fans has gone and how must the staff be feeling?

“But is sacking staff and stopping the freebies really going to make much difference?

“I bet it would make more of a difference to those who used to receive the free lunches.

“He’s worth a fortune and should be spending it on the club he supports.”

‘Bespectacled bores’

And while Ratcliffe remains steadfast in his belief his hardline approach will lead United back to the top of world football, others who have always been suspicious of his reasons for buying into the club remain unconvinced.

John-Paul O’Neill, author of Red Rebels: The Glazers And The FC Revolution, said: “After all the hype and hope of Ineos’s takeover of Manchester United’s football operations, the club’s current travails can’t really come as that much of a surprise as little about Jim Ratcliffe’s buy-in makes any sense, least of all financially.

“Unlike the Glazers, the most common refrain from United fans who’ve pinned their hopes on the Oldham oligarch is ‘at least Ratcliffe’s put some money into the club’.

“But they seem to be confusing the cost of doing the deal — injecting cash that keeps the Glazers afloat — with being some sort of willing benefactor.

“Everything Ratcliffe has done at Old Trafford smacks of a two-bob operator.

“The farce of the millions wasted on Erik ten Hag and Dan Ashworth is well reported, but who authorised £200million to be spent on transfers last summer, under a manager who was a dead man walking and didn’t even make it to November, let alone Christmas?

“Journalists were being briefed by United officials this month that the latest round of redundancies is necessary to prevent the club going bust.

“If anyone is to actually believe this, just over a year after Ineos’s army of highly paid lawyers and accountants conducted due diligence on United’s accounts, it begs the question as to why Ratcliffe would have committed nearly £1.5billion to buying a quarter of it, rather than wait until the position became clear and the price crashed?

“Why would any serious business operator pay such a fortune to become a minority shareholder in a failing business saddled with a billion pounds of debt?

“It almost seems as if Ratcliffe has been brought in to be the Glazers’ lightning rod — a patsy to deflect attention — as he fronts all the decisions they wouldn’t, or couldn’t get away with making.

“Ratcliffe can sack all the staff he wants, but the fact remains that in 2025 the biggest non-football-related drain resources remains the cost of the Glazers’ 2005 takeover — and those payments could double when the loans come up for refinancing in 2027.

“Strangely, that’s one marginal gain Ineos’s bespectacled bores don’t seem willing to address.

“But when their own ‘expertise’ has already seen around £230million spent since May on ‘improvements’ that have taken United to 14th place in the Premier League, it’s no wonder Ratcliffe and his gang are seeking out scapegoats anywhere else they can find them to save those precious pennies.”