Manchester United needed something different: a rebrand, a rethink. So anything, other than the ghastly Glazers, was welcomed with open arms by supporters.
Even a cycling man. Leading figures from other sports had dabbled in football, with limited success, but this was a revolutionary – someone who had transformed the fortunes of an entire country’s Olympic output.
Sir Dave Brailsford’s marginal-gains methods were odd, for football, but it couldn’t get any worse than the malaise Ineos agreed to inherit at Old Trafford 18 months ago.
Or so everyone thought. The early signs that change was afoot were promising. Ineos’s director of sport made it his priority to conduct a full – and more pertinently – honest audit of workings at all levels of the club.
The results were startlingly bad. Everything needed revamping, with Brailsford setting up Mission 21 – a plan devised to win United their next Premier League title, their 21st, by 2028.
As he had made his modus operandi throughout his career, he put “market-leading” figures into key positions and set about completing the ambitious project.
Brailsford worked closely with Sir Jim Ratcliffe at Nice before his move to Old Trafford (Photo: Getty)Sixteen months later, Brailsford is set to step back from his role in charge of football operations – while retaining a director role at United – having steered the club to a worst-ever Premier League finish by a distance, overseen mass redundancies and helped alienate almost all matchgoing fans with ticket-price rises, with the Red Devils further away from their former grandeur than ever.
Quite the legacy. The reasons for Brailsford’s spectacular crash, however, run far deeper than a change of sporting environment.
Speaking anonymously to preserve relationships, those who have dealt first-hand with Ineos’s leadership team could have sounded the alarm long before Sir Jim Ratcliffe got his feet under the table in the United boardroom.
“There’s much to learn from other sports. Ineos in football could be a success. But if you are to be successful at a high level in football, you must be humble, and this was Dave’s problem,” a former senior figure at Nice, one of the other football clubs in the Ineos portfolio, tells The i Paper.
“Dave’s main job was to seduce Jim [Ratcliffe]. It was not about taking the best decision for the football club – it was always about being the only one close to God. He decided to fight against Bob Ratcliffe [Jim’s brother, then Ineos head of football], then it was others at a high level. He had to be the only one who talked to Jim.
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“He’s a really clever guy, but so strategic. When he came, he knew he didn’t know anything about football. He wanted to be close to us at senior level, only to tell us: ‘I am the right-hand man of Jim Ratcliffe – you have to listen to me.’
“I know my job,” the Nice insider continues. “Sometimes someone at the club wants to take a decision on my behalf – that is not acceptable.
“Dave quickly realised who could be controlled and who couldn’t, so he removed the ones who couldn’t.
“At the beginning, Dave came in one day a week, to observe. Then soon enough, he wanted to control everything.
“I don’t have any problem with the control, if you have legitimacy. He didn’t. Later on, he tried to build a team himself, wasted money and overpaid for players. It was a disaster.”
The most puzzling aspect surrounding Ineos’s poor record across all sports is how such successful people in business can get so many crucial decisions wrong.
Brailsford and Ratcliffe chased Dan Ashworth for months, got into a legal battle with Newcastle United and were willing to let him see out some gardening leave before taking on the sporting director role at Old Trafford.
That is how sure they were that he was the right man to awaken this sleeping giant from its slumber.
Ashworth instead lasted five months. The reasons for his early and expensive departure have never been revealed, but differences with Ratcliffe and other senior figures at United, Brailsford included, played their part. Structural instability is seemingly rampant at Ineos Sport.
“At Ineos, people on the ground get shafted, with the people at the top making millions and making poor calls,” a former senior figure at the Ineos Grenadiers cycling team tells The i Paper.
“So there’s Jim, along with his two partners or associates. Then he has a few other legal advisers who are always with him, advising him on business decisions, then he has got Sir Dave and [Ineos Sport CEO] Jean-Claude Blanc.
Dan Ashworth left United just six weeks after Erik ten Hag was sacked (Photo: Getty)“So there are already two layers of structure before you get to the team itself.In the cycling team, which I imagine is similar in a football club, you have the CEO and five or six other senior managers.
“There was another guy close to Dave, John Allert, who is now CEO, another guy, Nick Heemskirk, another senior they brought in was Scott Drawer, another finance guy, Alex Tominey. It’s a lot of names, isn’t it?”
Too many voices in the United boardroom has been cited as one of the reasons Ineos came to the ill-fated decision to give Erik ten Hag a new contract last summer before sacking him, again at great expense, three months later.
When you put so much of your own fortune into anything, you are more than entitled to meddle. It is just that Ratcliffe, not shy to conduct media interviews on United’s plight, perhaps dips his toe in a little too often.
“They’re just corporate businesspeople who liked playing games, really,” the Ineos Grenadier insider continues.
“Every decision just got over-democratised and a lot of those people who make the decisions don’t spend any time on the ground whatsoever. Any feedback anyone got came back second-hand, like Chinese Whispers.
Jean-Claude Blanc has stepped down from his role as a director at Man Utd (Photo: Getty)“They call their high-level meetings ExCos. I wasn’t allowed in one, but you basically present to Jim, like on Dragons’ Den. That was really challenging.
“We needed the right to negotiate from Jim to get anything big signed off. We would lose riders because of that delay – some we had been talking about for years. That may happen at United in the transfer market. It may have already.”
Ashworth has not been replaced, and there is no plan to bring in anyone as senior into that role.
Blanc has stepped back from his position as a director at Old Trafford, while Jason Wilcox has been promoted to director of football from sporting director, with that latter change in role occurring in conjunction with the announcement about Brailsford’s exit.
It remains to be seen whether those left can stop the rot in Brailsford’s absence. Ineos’s problems, however, do not subside as their head of sport predominantly returns to more familiar surroundings in pro cycling.
“Even though I was high-ranking, I never made a decision,” the Grenadiers insider adds.
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“Often the opinion I gave, they did something completely different anyway. I don’t know if my opinion ever reached Jim, as there were more layers of senior management to get through.
“Senior management would then hide behind us and say it was us that made these calls.
“I have great respect for Dave. I owe him a lot. But I had to become very aware that he was out to look after himself and himself first. This is common at Ineos.
“Everything was done by committee, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but certainly in cycling, there weren’t enough of those people who were knowledgeable about the sport at ground level. I can make a safe bet at Ineos that is still the case in football.”
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