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Billionaire grows a football network

Networks of football clubs in shared ownership are a growing phenomenon. The best known is City Football Group which controls Manchester City alongside a global network of clubs. Red Bull Salzburg in Austria has substantial influence over RB Leipzig in Germany. Controversial Charlton Athletic owner Roland Duchatelet tried to construct his own network which ran from Spain to Hungary via England and Belgium. It has now been largely dismantled.

The latest network is being constructed by Jim Ratcliffe, a reclusive 67-year old Briton who has made his money through his low profile petrochemicals company Ineos. He has an estimated fortune of £18bm.

He has invested in a wide array of sporting assets from sailing to cycling (he is a Manchester United fan). All football clubs in a network benefit from shared scouting networks, data analysis teams and coaches. But at Ineos, each club could get an edge from experts in different sporting disciplines, such as nutritionists and physiotherapists.

The first venture into football by Ineos went wrong when months after buying Lausanne-Sport in 2017, the club was relegated from the top tier of Swiss football a few months later. A search was then started for another team that could compete in the Champions League.

They toured Chelsea's training ground, but thought that the £2bn price demanded by Roman Abramovich was excessive. Bob Ratcliffe, the chief executive of Ineos Football and Jim Ratcliffe's brother, commented: 'How do you get a £2bn plus valuation for a club in a league with total revenue of £5bn and a total net operating profit of £500m?'

A bid was also considered for Newcastle United, but rejected as not offering sufficient value.

Moving beyond what was seen as the overpriced Premier League, Ineos settled on Nice in Ligue One. It is thought that relatively little spending, sixth in the league before its suspension, towards qualifying one of France's three Champions League places.

Environmental activists argue that Sir Jim is using sport to 'greenwash' his companies, although in fact few people have ever heard of them. People close to him say he is chasing financial returns rather than emotional ones.

Football economics guru Stefan Szymanski from the University of Michigan is sceptical. He told the Financial Times: 'Successful businessmen - always men - believe that they can manage a football club better than the managers who came before them. History shows that this belief is almost always false.'

He explained to the Pink 'Un: 'The problem is that the secret of a profitable business is typically the discovery of a mechanism to isolate it from the forces of competition - but this formula does not extend to football, where intense competition is inescapable.'

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