The Billionaire Tycoon Who Can’t Stop Buying Sports Teams
Jim Ratcliffe is about to purchase 25% of English soccer behemoth Manchester United. He’s becoming one of the world’s most influential armchair sports fans.
Jim Ratcliffe, the British petrochemicals billionaire, was on a 5,000-mile motorcycle journey through the Andes a few years ago and feeling pretty bored with the state of sports. No one was really going after the biggest barriers in human performance anymore, he thought. What was even left?
Then, somewhere on the road in Argentina, he settled on a sporting achievement that actually excited him: Ratcliffe wanted to see someone run a marathon in under 2 hours. So he hired some of the best scientists in sports and the best marathoner in the world to make it happen. And in 2019, on a closed course in Vienna, Eliud Kipchoge ran 26.2 miles in 1 hour and 59 minutes.
This, Ratcliffe realized, was how he wanted to spend his time. Being Britain’s richest man wasn’t enough, he was also in the process of making himself one of the world’s wealthiest, most influential armchair sports fans.
Over the next four years, Ratcliffe’s empire would expand from the Ineos petrochemical firm to include the professional cycling outfit formerly known as Team Sky, soccer clubs in France and Switzerland, a stake in the Mercedes Formula One team, and this week, a 25% share in the English soccer behemoth, Manchester United for around $1.5 billion.
Yet the most remarkable thing about Ratcliffe’s sporting enterprises is that he appears to be growing them not for profit but purely for his own amusement. Some sports fans buy streaming packages and season tickets to serve their entertainment needs. The 71-year-old Ratcliffe, who splits his time between the U.K. and Monaco, simply went out and bought the teams he liked. And with a fortune widely estimated to exceed $30 billion, he could afford it.
“There’s no clear strategic direction that’s led to the choices that have been made,” Fran Millar, the former CEO of Ineos Sports, told The Wall Street Journal in 2019. “Jim’s a very passionate guy…He’s at a stage in his life where I think he’s making decisions based on what’s a fun, interesting, cool thing to do.”
A spokesperson for Mr. Ratcliffe didn’t respond to a request for comment.