Sir Jim Ratcliffe and Manchester United: ‘I don’t think I am throwing my money away’
Loath as we are to writing stories about tweets that “go viral”, there was a good one posted by a theatre director from Lancaster called Carl Woodward during Elton John’s recent Glastonbury farewell.
As the Rocket Man approached the climax of his set, Woodward tweeted, “I often think about Elton John’s memoir”, above a picture of a paragraph from the superstar’s 2019 autobiography, Me.
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“I don’t need a psychiatrist to tell me that material possessions aren’t a replacement for love or personal happiness,” wrote Watford’s famous former owner and honorary life president. “I have spent enough miserable, lonely nights in houses with beautiful things to have worked that out for myself a long time ago.”
The passage then continues with a warning about shopping after “three-day cocaine binges”, as you might wake up “confronted by bags and bags filled with absolute crap you will not remember buying”.
Or, in his case, a tram. Not a model tram, “an actual tram… that the voice at the end of the phone is now informing you has to be shipped from Australia to Britain, where it can only be delivered to your house by two Chinook helicopters”.
Reading it made me wish more football club owners would write books about what motivates them. So you can imagine my delight when I was sent an advance copy of Grit, Rigour & Humour: The INEOS story.
It is published next week to mark the 25th anniversary of the founding of INEOS, the chemicals to bicycles conglomerate co-founded and run by Sir Jim Ratcliffe.
Pre-orders have taken it to the top of the Amazon best-sellers chart for “business ethics”, but it is not deemed eligible for the “sports” chart, which is a missed trick as the book tells us more about why Ratcliffe wants to buy Manchester
Read on theathletic.com
