'Best in class, you're having a laugh' - Ratcliffe doesn't have a clue and should be embarrassed

Sir Jim Ratcliffe is being hoisted by his own petard at Manchester United. Almost everything he has said about the club has come back to haunt him in the last 32 months.

It was in February 2024 when Ratcliffe's investment in the club was confirmed, and he sat in Ineos' Knightsbridge offices and talked confidently about what had gone wrong and how he intended to fix it.

Unfortunately for the British billionaire, he has discovered that in football, identifying the problems is the relatively simple bit. Actually fixing them is considerably more difficult than it might be in petrochemicals, report the Manchester Evening News.

On a churn through managers since Sir Alex Ferguson left, Ratcliffe said the "only conclusion you can draw is the environment in which they were working in didn't work."

Ratcliffe is about to change managers at Old Trafford mid-season for the third season in a row. What does that say about the environment he has created since taking control of the club?

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It's fair to say that it's a rhetorical question. We've long since known that Ratcliffe doesn't really know what he's doing when it comes to running United. Supporters lumped him in the same bracket as the Glazer family long ago.

The 74-year-old wasn't at Old Trafford for the latest capitulation against Bournemouth, but his ashen-faced executives were there. Jason Wilcox and Omar Berrada copped plenty of flak from a fanbase that has seen enough and had enough.

But if Ratcliffe was watching on, and we can only presume he was, there was one moment that should have had him squirming on his expensive settee, wondering what on earth he had done since February 2024 and whether the only way to fix it now was to clean house.

'Best in class, you're having a laugh' rained down from the Stretford End after Bournemouth had made it 3-0 at Old Trafford once again. Ratcliffe's own catchphrase, the one he thought would lead to a turnaround in fortunes at United, was now being used against him.

And frankly, he must be having a laugh. Nobody in a position of power at Manchester United is best in class. Not off the pitch, and not on the pitch.

"What you need are the foundations to be in a good place for Manchester United to be successful, which means that, from our point of view anyway, you need the right organisational structure," Ratcliffe said in February 2024.

"Which means not having a coach reporting to the chief executive, for instance, which is what they've got at the moment. You need the right organisational structure, and that's not going to be too complicated.

"Then we need to populate all the key roles with people who are best in class, 10 out of 10s, and there’s clearly a lot of interest in those roles in Manchester United, because it’s one of the biggest, if not the biggest football club in the world but it's also a fantastic challenge to take it from a difficult place to hopefully where it should be at the top of the pyramid. It does attract a lot of interest from very, very capable people. So we need to populate it with the right people, that sort of same thing."

Would Wilcox or Berrada rate their work as 10 out of 10? Wilcox fell into the role of director of football because Ratcliffe appointed the football executive widely considered the best in the country, a master at getting a structure right, only to sack him four months later because he didn't like him.

Remember when Dan Ashworth suggested the idea of appointing Ruben Amorim mid-season was a bad one, and that United might be better served going for a Premier League-proven head coach in Eddie Howe? Well, this is awkward, isn't it?

The only thing best in class at United is the ability to turn themselves into a punchline. The butt of the joke once again. However bad it gets at other big clubs, it always seems to be United who plumb the depths. Even Tottenham, twice surviving Premier League relegation by the skin of their teeth, now appear to be on an upward trajectory.

For the modern Manchester United, owned by absentee Americans intent on creaming every last cent they can off the club and run by a septuagenarian obsessed with building a new stadium that matchgoers don't want, we might only just be getting started when it comes to how bad it can get.