Inside Man United: Sir Jim Ratcliffe, Dave Brailsford and the Dunning-Kruger effect

Ruben Amorim should be very concerned.

Right now, many connected with Sir Jim Ratcliffe seem to be being dispensed with, often very suddenly and without warning. Sporting director Dan Ashworth was the first to experience Sir Jim’s intemperate wrath, transformed from “one of the top sporting directors in the world” to being sacked within five months.

Ben Ainslie, a National Treasure thanks to Olympic sailing exploits, had a dream to win the America's Cup for Britain and seemingly the perfect partner in Sir Jim. And yet Ainslie was left “astounded” last month as INEOS ditched him and vowed to set up a rival team. Irreconcilable differences have been cited and legal action looms.

Same at New Zealand Rugby. The All Blacks are one of the blue-chip global sporting brands. As such, it was a coup for Sir Jim to have his company Ineos as the shirt sponsor. Yet now the NZ rugby union are reduced to taking legal action as he has failed to pay this year’s $22m fee, something Sir Jim has blamed on “the deindustrialisation of Europe” which has forced him into “cost-saving measures.”

Funny how nebulous external forces are always the cause of billionaires’ problems and never their own lack of judgement and foresight.

Then there is Jackie Kay, head of Manchester United’s team operations who had been at  the club for 30 years, the symbolic face of the latest “brutal” job cuts at United, with 100 employees said to be at risk, coming after the 250 they sacked in the autumn. Just to complete his transformation from club saviour this time last year to proverbial 19th century mill owner, Sir Jim cancelled Christmas (bonuses), cut charity spending and ended concessions for seniors and kids.

So good luck Ruben as you navigate the back end of a season which spirals beyond worst-case scenarios. Sir Jim doesn’t appear to do patience, nor empathy. And watch your back Omar Berrada and Jason Wilcox, United’s CEO and technical director. A contact who knows them both from work at Manchester City, said: “They both look out of their depth at United. Berrada is a commercial guy not a football man so how did he end up leading the recruitment of Amorim? And Jason was a good academy head but that doesn’t qualify you to do transfers. This is a much bigger and different job.”

Next week is the anniversary of Sir Jim’s takeover of the running of the club and it seems unlikely there will be extensive celebrations given the mood at Fulham last month, where he was confronted by angry fans telling him to “sort it out” and serenaded with chants of “Just like the Glazers, Jim Ratcliffe’s a c***.” 

The giddy excitement of ousting the Glazers from the wheel has long since dissipated. Berrada’s busy-ness in being able to get to Amorim when Ashworth urged caution at employing a 38-year-old with a 3-4-3 fixation in the Premier League - which surely led to Ashworth’s exit - seemed admirable at the time. Yet as they look down at another hapless United performance from the directors’ box, Berrada and Wilcox increasingly resemble Statler and Waldorf at The Muppet Show.

Amorim spun the relative lack of activity in the January transfer window, with Patrick Dorgu the only incoming signing, as United learning from the mistakes of the past, which he needs to tell himself is true. There are alternative explanations, such as the worry about breaching Profit and Sustainability Rules. (How bad do you have to be at running a football club for Manchester United, a veritable cash machine, to be at risk of breaching PSR?). Or it could even be that, with a PSR breach in the offing and the team worse than ever, Sir Jim is reluctant to commit what little money he has to Amorim’s targets and that another spectacular fall out is brewing?

At one time, Sir Jim was going to conquer sport with his unique brand of Brexit-loving, fossil-fuel burning entrepreneurial spirit. Sir Jim and his sidekick, Sir Dave Brailsford, were like knights of the roundtable riding to the rescue of stricken causes. Now they look more like John Cleese and Eric Idle in Monty’s Python's Holy Grail, clip-clopping around on hobby horses, convinced in their own heads they’re bold disruptors saving the world.

There is a name for billionaires convinced they have the answers to every other issue on the globe and no, it’s not egotistical buffoon, nor Elon Musk. It’s the Dunning-Kruger complex, the cognitive bias that causes individuals to overestimate their abilities, demonstrated by Cornell University psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger in 1999. (The theory has since been contested and Dunning’s most recent response is here)

Ever since sitting down with Mark Goldberg, a brilliant IT entrepreneur, as he was about to take over Crystal Palace in 1998 (thereby initiating his own personal bankruptcy and leaving the club on the verge of liquidation) one theme I have constantly observed in football is the ability of outsiders and entrepreneurs to massively overestimate their abilities to transform the sport. From Tony Fernandes at QPR, the Venky Brothers at Blackburn Rovers, the private equity bros at Chelsea promising to “reinvent the wheel” with their decade-long contracts, the battlefield is littered with casualties. 

Those who have done it well are Khaldoon Al-Mubarak at Manchester City and John W Henry and Tom Werner at LIverpool. The caveat for City is that they face 130 charges of rule breaches, many of which amount to cooking the books over their most successful period. But even if City did have an open cheque book denied to others, it was still not predetermined that they would succeed. See Paris St Germain for details.

Football clearly needs outsiders. Not everything in our little world is known. There must be unknowns in the outside world that could enhance our sport. The use of data and the rise of Brighton and Brentford would be the obvious examples of the past 15 years. Yet the difference in these instances is that Tony Bloom and Matthew Benham have been immersed in football all their life. They understand the nuances of the sport because they love it.

As such, Sir Jim and Sir Dave do appear to be in the awful sweet spot of knowing just enough about the sport to convince themselves they are brilliant. Details of Sir Dave’s Mission 21 (to capture a 21st Premier League title by 2028, United’s 150th anniversary) were reported this week and it would take a heart of stone not to laugh. Leave aside for the moment the religious-like faith some people still have in Sir Dave’s transformation of British cycling, which saw one team doctor struck off from medical practice and serve a four-year doping ban after performance-enhancing testosterone was delivered to team headquarters. Sir Bradley Wiggins, left bankrupt and embittered having borne the brunt of the controversies that battered Sir Dave’s team, now describes “marginal gains” as “a load of rubbish.” 

Yet Sir Dave is clearly good at logistics and executing an end goal. As I sniggered at Mission 21, I was also reminded of the ridicule that greeted data guru Ian Graham and sporting director Michael Edwards at Liverpool, a story we covered last week.

And yet although Graham was an outsider in some respect - there weren't many Cambridge University Physics PhDs in football at the time - he did know and love the sport. Edwards had played and coached. Neither Sir Jim nor Sir Dave can claim any of this.

One year on is too soon to judge. City and Liverpool made multiple mistakes in their early years so the knights of the round table may yet come good. All you can say thus far is that they are doing a very good impression of executives determined to prove the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Further reading:

What evidence is there INEOS can bring success to Manchester United?