Sir Jim Ratcliffe has humorously remarked that he would consider selling the minority stake held by Ineos in Manchester United “to the Qataris or something” if he lost faith in their ability to resolve the club’s issues.
Sheikh Jassim, the chairman of Qatar Islamic Bank (QIB), made a notable attempt to acquire United in the same year that Ratcliffe’s Ineos became minority stakeholders. However, the son of former Prime Minister of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber bin Mohammed bin Thani Al Thani, ultimately withdrew his bid after several months of negotiations.
Ratcliffe has now, in a candid manner, indicated that he would sell “to the Qataris.” However, he clarified that this would only occur if his confidence in their capabilities were to wane.
The comments came when joining Gary Neville on The Overlap. “Change requires some unpopular decisions,” Ratcliffe acknowledged. “And I have to accept I’m going to be unpopular. I don’t know how long I’ll be unpopular; maybe I’ll be unpopular for a long period of time, but I think it’s worth being unpopular to fight our way through the changes that are necessary to get Manchester United back to where it should be, and hopefully, the attitudes will change a bit if we come out the other side with a successful outcome.”
Ratcliffe continued: “I think, ultimately, we’ll come out of this difficult period, and we’ll find ourselves in a much sunnier place, I do. I mean, otherwise, I couldn’t deal with what I’m having to deal with at the moment because it’s not very nice when you go home to Manchester, and you’ve got people saying some quite unpleasant things; that’s not very nice; I don’t need that, really, to be honest, at my age.”
He then clarified: “[I’m doing this] because I really like Manchester, you know, Manchester United’s been my boyhood club, and I believe that we can sort it out; if I didn’t believe it, I wouldn’t do it, would I? I’d sell it to the Qataris or something… [but] I think we’ll get there with Manchester United.”
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