RIATH AL-SAMARRAI: Manchester United fans cling to the hope that Sir Jim Ratcliffe is their decaying club's saviour but his track record is more Hojlund than Haaland

‘Let me tell you something my friend. Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane.’

Red to Andy, Shawshank Redemption

What hope is there for Manchester United? How many more yards of foulness and sewer must they crawl through before they emerge from the other end of the pipe? Or to put it another way: is Sir Jim Ratcliffe their rock hammer?

Maybe he is the perfect man for this metaphor — he knows his way through rock better than most. Fracking is his game. He fracked his way to a fracking fortune and those are thick walls at United, a club imprisoned by their past and sealed in on all sides by the incompetencies of their present.

But this is a thought about the future. Of what comes next and whether Ratcliffe is the man to bust them loose.

That is the perception, or rather that is the hope, because Sir Jim is right around the corner. Sir Jim is the white knight and the silver bullet. Sir Jim is going to run the football operation and maybe it will all be OK now. Maybe weeks like this one, when they whimpered out of Europe, will soon be over-written by a better tomorrow.

But doesn’t that overlook and overplay a few things? Doesn’t it all veer a little too closely to believing in mythical saviours?

I have met Ratcliffe only once. It was in a sparse room adjacent to the Roger Bannister running track at Oxford University a few years ago, when he was announcing his collaboration with Eliud Kipchoge and their 2019 bid to run a marathon in under two hours.

He spoke that day of his investment in ‘superhuman’ endeavours, that sport was filling a worthy hole for a billionaire who had everything, and ultimately it all worked out. Kipchoge, in springy shoes and protected by 41 pacemakers and windbreakers, got there with 20 seconds to spare. That made a lot of headlines and a few have followed in the years since when some of the shine came off — three of Kipchoge’s pace men in Vienna have been busted for doping violations.

But that was one of his successful ventures into sport.

The same wouldn’t be said of his partnership with Mercedes in Formula One. Across a period of almost three years since Ratcliffe acquired his 33 per cent, they haven’t won the drivers’ championship — Max Verstappen has wings on his Red Bull and Lewis Hamilton is dragging anchors.

Ratcliffe and his teams are all about innovation, but Mercedes’ margins of defeat are only growing. In 2021, it went to the last race, in 2022 it was done with four to spare, and this year it was five. They are going backwards.

We can argue likewise for his investment in cycling in 2019, when Ratcliffe took over the tarnished dynasty of Team Sky, an operation that used the biggest budget and a few other interesting means to dominate the biggest races.

The transition started well when Egan Bernal claimed the 2019 Tour de France, their seventh in eight years, but INEOS Grenadiers haven’t won a single one of the past eight grand tours. They seem to have gone backwards, too.

At Nice, in French football, they are doing well at the minute. They are second in the league, but they were top-four in two of the four seasons before he arrived in 2019 and are on their fifth manager under his control.

One of that five, Christophe Galtier, stood trial on Friday for accusations of racism during his time at the club — it is a situation that has prompted the question of how it was all handled by Sir Dave Brailsford, the Svengali-like figure entrusted by Ratcliffe to run most of his sporting projects.

Of lesser consequence were the questions raised by supporters of Ratcliffe’s other football interest, FC Lausanne-Sport, who have balanced two relegations and two promotions and encountered a public backlash when they tried to change the club crest.

So, is that the profile of a saviour? Or is Ratcliffe a rich man who has found, just like the rest of them, that sport is unpredictable? That those waters can be tricky, as he noticed when his expensive collaboration with Britain’s America’s Cup team was trounced in the final of the 2021 challenger series. If north of £100million doesn’t buy you any guarantee in a yacht race, it buys you even less at a big football club.

Naturally, there is a huge amount of excitement among those who follow United that a new broom is coming in. It might only be 25 per cent, but that is 25 per cent out of the hands of the Glazers. It feels like progress. It feels like hope.

But getting Ratcliffe through the door, when it finally happens, isn’t the acquisition of a Haaland or Kane — to go on his track record in sport, it is closer to Rasmus Hojlund. It is promising but unproven. It is not a sure thing. It will take time and given the state of the place, a huge amount of it.

Had Ratcliffe arrived 15 years ago or more it might have felt a little different. It might have stopped the slide before it began, because that would have been a simpler moment, for United and the game, when it was easier for the extremely wealthy to make an impact. But this is the era of state-ownership, of Manchester City at full speed and Newcastle United ready to spread their Saudi Arabian wings.

In this present-day landscape, Dave Brailsford’s marginal gains might mean a better pillow and catchphrases but pillows and catchphrases won’t tackle Erling Haaland. Would the Qatari option have opened more doors to a competitive future at the top level? There is logic in the argument but that is moot, of course, and a separate conversation.

For now, it seems to be enough that Ratcliffe isn’t the Glazers. It is a new set of eyes and new expertise and an injection of wealth, but it is the same club. A club who have gone a decade without a title. A club of sustained inertia and decay. A club who have made a habit of serious cock-ups in all departments, from pitch to boardroom.

Can much of it be fixed by a petrochemicals billionaire with an underwhelming history away from his chosen field? That’s the hope many will cling to. And as Andy told Red, hope is a good thing. Maybe the best of things. But it might also drive you fracking mad unless Ratcliffe develops a knack for finding treasure in the dirt.

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