24 April 3, 2022The Sunday TimesSport
David
Walsh
Want to turn winners
into losers? Just ask
billionaire Jim Ratcliffe
to back you and,
as Ben Ainslie, the
All Blacks and
others have found
out, you’ll fall
under the
curse of Ineos
winner. That deal was agreed in
March 2018. A year later Ratcliffe
agreed to buy Team Sky, the
WorldTour cycling team that had won
the Tour de France in six of the
previous seven years. That, too, was a
considerable commitment as the
team’s annual budget was about
£50 million and likely to increase year
on year. What the hell, the owner was
worth £21 billion. Three months after
he took over, Team Ineos won the
Tour de France with its 22-year-old
Colombian, Egan Bernal.
Encouraged, Ratcliffe then hitched
his wagon to the Mercedes F1 team,
agreeing to a five-year £100 millionsponsorship deal in February 2020.
Ten months later Lewis Hamilton
claimed that year’s F1 drivers’
championship. Now sure that you get
what you pay for, Ratcliffe bought a
one-third share of the team for an
estimated £350 million.
“This is a unique opportunity to
make a financial investment in a team
at the very top of its game, but which
still has rich potential to grow in the
future. We could not wish for better
partners than Mercedes-Benz, and a
team of proven winners led by Toto
[Wolff ],” Ratcliffe said. At that
moment in December 2020,
Mercedes were the dominant F1With Ineos’s £100m
Ainslie took his
British team to the
America’s Cup in
New Zealand and
lost 7-1 to the ItaliansI
love the story of when Ben met
Jim. There they were, on a
March day in 2018, two blokes
sharing a beer, shooting the
breeze in a London pub. Well,
maybe it’s a little disrespectful
to speak of them as two blokes.
Ben was Sir Charles Benedict
Ainslie, the four-times Olympic
gold medallist and the greatest
ever British sailor. Jim was Sir James
Arthur Ratcliffe, founder of the
petrochemical company Ineos, multi-
billionaire and arguably Britain’s
most successful entrepreneur.
They met because Ainslie needed
someone with lots of money and a
willingness to invest it in a sporting
dream. After retiring from Olympic
sailing, Ainslie set his mind to
winning the America’s Cup, which
was first contested in 1851 and is now
the greatest race on water. That first
race round the Isle of Wight was won
by an American schooner. A British
boat has never won the cup.
As might be imagined, this failure
offends Ainslie’s and Ratcliffe’s sense
of Britishness. “It’s a poor show really
when you think about it,” said
Ratcliffe when announcing his
partnership with Ainslie. “One
hundred and seventy years, it is an
omission in our history.”
At the time of their meeting,
Ainslie had a small group of loyal and
wealthy backers — Sir Charles
Dunstone, Sir Keith Mills, Chris Bake.
He also had sponsors. Another £20-
30 million, Ainslie thought, and the
team would be seriously competitive
at the 2021 America’s Cup in
Auckland. After their meeting,
Ratcliffe made Ainslie an offer that
could not be refused. Get rid of all
your backers and sponsors and let mewrite the cheque for the entire
project. Instead of trying to keep
multiple interests happy, Ainslie
would simply have to report to
Ratcliffe.
Ainslie had to make gut-wrenching
phone calls to Dunstone, Mills, Bake
and others. They were out. Ratcliffe
was in. “We are writing a cheque for
£100 million and we’re not casual
with our money,” Ratcliffe said. “We
feel we have the Usain Bolt of sailing.”
No one would have disagreed with
that assessment.
I once spent an hour asking
Ratcliffe questions about his
involvement in sport. He made the
point that the difficulty for someone
who can buy whatever he wants,
without having to save for it, is that he
can easily make the wrong call. This
was four years ago, Ratcliffe was in his
mid-sixties and at a point in his life
when he realised that no matter how
long he lived, he would never be able
to spend all his money.
He was competing in triathlons at
the time and, passionate about sport,
he wanted to become a player. In
November 2017 he bought FC
Lausanne-Sport, who played in the
Swiss Super League. It was, he later
said, a dipping of his feet in the water.
That season, Lausanne were
relegated as Ratcliffe discovered that
the water could get cold.
Not long afterwards, there was an
evolution in the billionaire’s thinking.
Why, with so much money, should he
buy anything other than the best?
The plan was then to buy into
teams, individuals and brands that
guaranteed success. That’s why he
was prepared to bankroll Ainslie’s
sailing team and rename it Ineos
Team UK. Ainslie was the ultimateteam, having won seven consecutive
drivers’ championships and
constructors’ championships.
If it’s winners you want, you
wondered, why hadn’t Ineos aligned
itself with the All Blacks? Then last
July, the New Zealand Rugby Union
announced they had signed a six-year
£25.3 million deal with Ineos.
Another feather in Ratcliffe’s cap.
Two weeks before the F1 season
started I sat at a table in a restaurant
at Harvard Business School in Boston.
There were seven or eight of us
around the table and I thought the
moment was right. “How do you
feel,” I said to Toto Wolff, “to be
burdened with the curse of Ineos?”
He laughed but then expressed some
curiosity. Clearly, I needed to explain.
With Ineos’s £100 million, Ben
Ainslie had gone to the 2021
America’s Cup in New Zealand and
been beaten 7-1 by Team Luna Rossa
in what was effectively a semi-final.
Not good. As for the cycling team,
after winning the 2019 Tour de
France everything changed for Ineos.
The Slovenian Tadej Pogacar came
along and won the next two Tours.
Pogacar is 23 and getting better. No
one has any idea when the Ineos
Grenadiers, as they’re now known,
might win another Tour de France. In
the 2021 the team performed pretty
abysmally. And the All Blacks? Three
months after Ineos signed up, they
came to Europe and lost to Ireland
and France on consecutive
weekends. When did that last
happen, I asked Toto and the others?
There was no response.
So, I said to Mercedes’s team
principal, watch out for the curse.
Toto laughed again, though this time I
detected a hint of nervousness.Southgate is
right – let’s not
get carried
away about
Bellingham
There were things to like about
England’s performance against
Ivory Coast at Wembley on Tuesday
evening, not least the team’s refusal
to overreact to some crude tackling.
It seemed to me England’s players
were prepared for it and had
decided to let the referee deal with
it. Some opponents at the World
Cup may play in the same way and
this game was a worthwhile dry run
for that challenge.
The other impressive part of the
evening came in Gareth Southgate’s
post-match interview and his
response to a question inviting him
to jump on the bandwagon ready to
whisk 18-year-old Jude Bellingham
all the way to the summit of world
football. Southgate would have
seen this coming from Bellingham’s
14th-minute flick with his instep
that reversed the ball into Raheem
Sterling’s path.
Asked to eulogise, England’s
manager preferred to offer an
uncomfortable truth. Young
England players tend to get built up
too quickly, he said. A few good
games and they’re considered
special when, in fact, they are
merely promising. Bellingham
has a lot of potential and will
certainly be contending for a
starting place in Qatar but let us
not get carried away.
Right now, he probably remains
third in the list of central midfield
players, still behind the more
experienced Declan Rice and
Kalvin Phillips.
Some may forget how well
Phillips performed at Euro 2020.
Southgate will not. And in the swell
of excitement about Bellingham’s
performance, the England
manager was right to point out
that other countries are also
producing very good young
players, Spain and Portugal being
the obvious examples.
I admit to being a fan of
Southgate’s management style. He
has given the players more
ownership of the team than any
England manager of recent
memory and this has been key to
the team’s continued growth. Look
at what has happened to Italy since
last summer’s Euros final.
Admirable, too, was Southgate’s
expression of annoyance with
those England fans who booed
Harry Maguire.
Not the least of the manager’s
attributes is that he’s lucky. The
United States and Iran plus
Scotland, Ukraine or Wales is as
kind a World Cup draw as any
England fan could have wished for.
It’s like 2018 all over again. If a
potential quarter-final against
France looms as a serious threat,
the world champions should be as
anxious about that game as anyone
on this side of the channel.Hamilton,
left, and
Valtteri
Bottas give
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