Do We Have A Sir Jim Problem

In February of 1989 a businessman from Arkansas named Jerry Jones bought the Dallas Cowboys. The Cowboys had been a once proud franchise. They had played in five Super Bowls in the 1970s, winning two, but by the late 80s the Cowboys were experiencing some of the lowest points in the franchise’s history.

Since the NFL rewards ineptitude by virtue of giving the worst teams the best draft picks, this was actually the best time for Jones to buy in. The year before he arrived the Cowboys had drafted future Hall of Fame wide receiver Michael Irvin. In Jones’ first year the Cowboys owned the first pick in the draft which they used to select future Hall of Fame quarterback Troy Aikman.

A year later the Cowboys should have owned the number one pick again but a questionable roster move made them forfeit the pick¹. Thanks to some big trades they ultimately ended up with the 17th pick which they used to select future Hall of Famer and the NFL’s eventual all time leading rusher Emmitt Smith.

Within two years of owning the team Jerry Jones had stumbled into three future hall of fame players who would carry the team to three Super Bowls between 1992 and 1995. Tremendous short term success that I’m sure no Cowboy fan who lived through it would trade for anything. It very much might have come at the expense of any long term success.

Jones built his wealth when the oil company he started in Arkansas became successful. He started the company himself and always did things his way. He believed in himself you could say to a fault, but this oil company hitting it big only served to vindicate him.

When Jones bought the Cowboys he brought the same I know what’s best and I’m going to do it myself attitude. Within a few months he fired longtime general manager Tex Schramm and named himself President and General Manager - two roles he still holds today.

The Cowboys are essentially Jerry’s play thing. No one has the ability to fire him and hire a real general manager. He calls all the shots. In his 35 years in charge he’s built the Cowboys into a financial juggernaut but after catching lightning in a bottle the first few years of his ownership, there hasn’t been any on-field success in 30 years.

At times Jones looked to surround himself with smart and knowledgeable “football men.²” He hired big name coaches with big personalities such as Jimmy Johnson and later Bill Parcells but he ultimately fell out with both of them when they disagreed with Jones’ ideas. More recently he’s gone with far less exciting names - such as Wade Phillips, Jason Garrett, and Mike McCarthy - whose tenures probably went on too long simply because they were “yes men” to Jones.

Jerry Jones is not the type of owner you want to emulate. You want an owner who buys the team, hires competent and qualified people to run the team, and empowers them to do their job while he sits back and just signs the checks. You don’t want someone who suddenly thinks they’re qualified to run a team simply because they had enough money to buy it.

Unfortunately for Manchester United, the tale of Jerry Jones is starting to hit a bit close to home.

It hasn’t even been two full years since Sir Jim Ratcliffe and INEOS bought a minority stake in Manchester United that gave them operating control of the club. The early returns do not give many reasons for optimism over the future.

INEOS had some early success as United won the FA Cup just a few months into their tenure. However that was coupled with - at the time - United’s worst ever Premier League finish when they fell to eighth. A year later United reached new lows, falling to 15th. They reached the Europa League final but lost 1-0 to Spurs in what was a truly tepid performance.

INEOS have been around for two summer transfer windows but many of their signings have been uninspiring while the team has gotten worse. Their handpicked manager has won just nine of 33 Premier League matches and is clearly out of his depth.

Read that again. 10 months into the job Ruben Amorim has just nine wins. Strip out the most difficult matches against the “Top Six” and the matches against the newly promoted clubs and Amorim’s record reads 3W 3D 12L in 18 games. He has lost 75 percent of his matches against the Premier League’s “middle class.”

It is simply astonishing that a club like Manchester United is allowing this to go on. It’s being allowed for one reason and one reason only. Mr Jim does not want to admit he made a mistake.

It’s almost impossible to believe that every high ranking member of the United brass including people with the C/V’s of Omar Berrada and Jason Wilcox are still behind Amorim. What is starting to look like the most plausible explanation of what’s going on at Old Trafford is that the only opinion that matters is Ratcliffe’s. If the boss wants to go in direction A, the club is going in direction A. If you don’t like it, get off the train.

Ratcliffe talked a great game when he first bought into the club. He talked about wanting to hire the best football people and let them make the decisions. He name dropped players that he believed were bad deals that the club needed to get away from. He talked about how the club was in the stone age when it came to data analysis and that the club’s financial situation and how FFP might limit what they could do in the immediate future of the market.

He sounded very competent but based on reports around the club, Ratcliffe’s action, and just seeing how he has managed the club over two years it can possibly be viewed from a different lens.

When Sir Jim first mentioned the PSR complications it sounded like he was trying to set reasonable expectations for the fanbase and explain complications. But then he kept talking about it, and the more he kept talking about it the more it started to sound like these were things he was just learning about himself.

Those players he name dropped in different interviews? They all “coincidentally” ended up in Ruben Amorim’s “bomb squad” this past summer. The one exception has been Casemiro - who was name dropped by Ratcliffe before he even bought the club and United have unsuccessfully tried to sell the past three transfer windows.

Consider this. Casemiro was United’s best player during Ruud van Nistelrooy’s short interim spell last season. When Amorim came in he followed the same schedule as Marcus Rashford: starts against Ipswich and Everton, dropped against Arsenal and Nottingham Forest, a start against Viktoria Plzen and then, with two weeks to go before the transfer window opened… that’s it³. He came back into the team against Newcastle only because injuries and suspensions left Amorim no choice.

Casemiro made a grand total of one appearance for 19 minutes in the month of January. Then, as soon as the transfer window slammed shut, Casemiro was back in the team - playing 89 minutes against Tottenham. Concerns over the lack of match fitness were non-existent. He played nearly every minute of the knockout rounds in the Europa League while being rested a little more in the Premier League - except for playing all 90 minutes against Liverpool and Manchester City, the two most difficult matches.

That doesn’t sound like a manager not liking a player or having issues with him. That sounds like a manager keeping a player in bubble wrap as management tries to sell him.⁴

Most fans probably believe they can run a football club better than the people who are currently doing it. Frankly, some of them probably can, but we’ll never get that opportunity.

Sir Jim had the means to buy that opportunity and his first priority has been trying to rid the perceived mistakes of the previous regime. I use the word perceive because Ratcliffe might have the same idea, he just doesn’t like that it was someone else’s.

This was most prevalent in United’s summer transfer window. Two years ago United signed a project striker in Rasmus Hojlund. After a promising season he took a major step back last year under Amorim. United decided they needed to replace him but not with a proven striker, but simply another project striker whose potential was much higher than anything we’d seen on the pitch so far.

Last season United signed Joshua Zirkzee who had a paltry three goals and 0.19 goals per 90. Yet it was Hojlund who was pushed out of the club this summer as The Athletic reported, “Hojlund was tarred by being bought by previous recruitment staff in a way that Joshua Zirkzee, signed last summer, was not.”

It wasn’t that Hojlund was bad. It was that he belonged to someone else. Sir Jim wanted his own Hojlund.

The decision to even sign Sesko after signing Mathues Cunha and Bryan Mbeumo is questionable. Ratcliffe talked about how United data analysis department was in the stone age so he set about hiring new people. Those people have even taken to LinkedIn to brag about the advanced data that lead to making these signings.

Except United’s recruitment didn’t look advanced at all. It looked rudimentary.

United did not score a lot of goals last year. They massively underperformed their against their xG. Rather than diving into why this might have been happening, the joke - which has been made by many - is that they simply went to the shooting table on Fbref, sorted it by npG-xG, and went for the top two players on the list⁵.

When you sign two players like Mbeumo and Cunha you’re signing them to carry the goal-scoring burden. In order to do that and maximize their ability you’re going to want to get them the ball.

According to The Athletic at this point United began weighing up moving for a midfielder only for the lack of goals last season to be brought up again and United to target a goal scorer. Ratcliffe backed that call.

This is such rudimentary analysis. To call it surface level might not even be accurate as it might be above the surface. This more aligns with some of the people I speak with at the pub who say things like just get us a proper striker and we’ll score goals. The age of those people tends to skew much closer to Ratcliffe’s age than mine.

For any paid data scientist to come to this conclusion would be concerning - particularly when you think of the future analysis they would be doing. There’s only two explanations here. One is that the data scientists United hired are really bad. The other is they’re not being listened to.

Maybe this nothing more than cope but the latter is starting to make an awful lot of sense.

On the recent episode of the Talk of the Devils podcast, Laurie Whitwell echoed previous reports - that former Director of Football Dan Ashworth was sacked for being the dissenting voice in the decision to hire Ruben Amorim.

This was literally what Ashworth was hired to do. Make decisions regarding football matters and if you don’t think something is a good idea, voice that opinion.

You can cover up Ashworth’s sacking by saying you want everyone to be on the same page. To a certain level that’s true, but at United it’s nothing more than Jim Ratcliffe’s page.

There have been whispered accusations that those at the top of the club, such as Berrada and Wilcox, are afraid to challenge Ratcliffe. That they are merely “yes-men.” The Athletic has reported that INEOS Head of Sport Sir Dave Brailsford is the only person who talks honestly with Sir Jim.

How is that going? In February Brailsford was described as being “all in” on Manchester United. He relocated his family from Monaco to Manchester so he could be present at Carrington every day. In June it was announced that Brailsford was stepping back from Manchester United. Maybe honesty isn’t the best policy?

There is no doubt that Ratcliffe meant it when he said he wanted to hire good football people. However it’s nothing more than self-validation. He wants the best people but he wants them to agree with him because if the smartest people agree with my ideas and think they are good, then I must be as smart as the smartest people.

If the top people might start losing their jobs for so much as disagreeing with the direction Ratcliffe wants to go they’re quickly going to figure out that they should keep any disagreements to themselves. At that point, it doesn’t matter how smart they are or how good they are at their jobs.

Jim Ratcliffe had the means to do what many of us wish we could - run the football club the way we want to. He may not have football experience but his success in the business world has made him believe that he’ll figure this out too.

It’s no different than Jerry Jones, only Ratcliffe didn’t inherit three future Hall of Famers to jump start his tenure.

I don’t have enough inside information to present any of this as fact. Maybe I’m just coping due to the general malaise of the club. But from where I’m sitting it looks like there are one of two options. Either Ratcliffe has hired bad people who have not made a lot of good decisions in their first year(s) on the job, or it doesn’t really matter who he’s hired because Ratcliffe is way too hands on and doing whatever he wants to do regardless of what any of the people he hired say.

I’m not sure which of those options is worse, but neither of them are good.