British billionaire Jim Ratcliffe expressed his desire to lift Manchester United “to the top of English, European and world football” after completing his purchase of a minority stake in the iconic club on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
The 71-year-old Ratcliffe paid $1.3 billion for up to 25% of United and has already invested $200 million for additional shares, meaning he owns approximately 27.7%, the club said.<\/p>\n
United said Ratcliffe intends to invest a further $100 million by Dec. 31 “to enable future investment in infrastructure at Old Trafford.”<\/p>\n
The deal had already been approved by the English Football Association while the Premier League has cleared Ratcliffe to take up a minority share under its rules regarding who is allowed to be an owner or director of a soccer club.<\/p>\n
Ratcliffe is one of Britain’s richest people and the owner of petrochemicals giant INEOS. He agreed to a deal to buy a stake in United in December after the Glazer family, which owns the club, put it up for sale in 2022.<\/p>\n
“To become co-owner of Manchester United is a great honor and comes with great responsibility,” Ratcliffe said in a statement.<\/p>\n
“This marks the completion of the transaction, but just the beginning of our journey to take Manchester United back to the top of English, European and world football, with world-class facilities for our fans. Work to achieve those objectives will accelerate from today.”<\/p>\n
The Glazers, who also own the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, eventually opted to sell a minority stake of the 20-time English champion after also fielding bids from Qatari banker Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad Al Thani.<\/p>\n
“I would like to welcome Sir Jim as co-owner,” executive co-chairman Joel Glazer said, “and look forward to working closely with him and INEOS Sport to deliver a bright future for Manchester United.”<\/p>\n
United hasn’t won the Premier League since 2013, the last season of Alex Ferguson’s nearly 27 years as the team’s manager. United’s most recent Champions League title was in 2008.<\/p>\n
Reporting by The Associated Press.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
British billionaire Jim Ratcliffe expressed his desire to lift Manchester United “to the top of English, European and world football” after completing his purchase of a minority stake in the iconic club on Tuesday. The 71-year-old Ratcliffe paid $1.3 billion for up to 25% of United and has already invested $200 million for additional shares, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1618,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-soccer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/play-live.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/play-live.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/play-live.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/play-live.eu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1619"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/play-live.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1619\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/play-live.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1618"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/play-live.eu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/play-live.eu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/play-live.eu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}