Ratcliffes have a Nice little earner
THE only prospective British owners of Chelsea have outlined the reasons why they won’t be involved in Roman Abramovich’s auction for the club but are instead refocusing efforts to guide French club OGC Nice into the Champions League and towards winning their first trophy.
Bob Ratcliffe, brother of Ineos petrochemicals billionaire Sir Jim Ratcliffe, runs the company’s football division, which looked at buying Chelsea in 2019 but rejected them and Newcastle and instead bought Nice, who look on course to make the Champions League next season and have reached the French Cup final.
Jim Ratcliffe is worth £20billion according to Forbes and initially bought Swiss club Lausanne in 2017 and then Nice for a reported £88millon in 2019. Speaking to The Mail on Sunday about the bidding for Chelsea, Bob Ratcliffe said: ‘You have seen what my brother said in the past — we don’t want to be dumb money. We look at what we paid for Nice for European competition, it’s nothing like what you pay in the UK.
‘Is Chelsea really a fire sale? I’m not sure. That’s a good story but I’m sure it’s still a very big number.
‘With Nice we’re through to the cup final in France, that’s pretty significant. It’s early days but with Nice we have proven our hypothesis. We’ve not paid stupid money to put that team together and we’re having fun with it.’ Having inherited Patrick Vieira as coach, who had got the club into the Europa League, they sacked him after a poor run of results and last summer brought in France’s most-wanted manager in Christophe Galtier, who took Lille to the title last season.
Nice, who are third in Ligue 1, also knocked Paris Saint-Germain, Lionel Messi and all, out of the French Cup and reached the final after beating Versailles last Tuesday.
‘Can we challenge PSG?’ says Ratcliffe. ‘It’s very difficult. I think we can do it like Lille did it with Christophe. Occasionally, if we get the right team together and they have a slightly less good year, we can think about attacking that gap. Can we do it every season? No, I don’t think you can.
‘But that evening winning on penalties against PSG was phenomenal. It’s not just PSG, Lyon is a bigger club, Marseille is a bigger club, Monaco has unique attributes, Rennes is a very well developed club.
‘At the moment, we’re making the model work but it’s early days.’
As well as Lausanne and Nice, Ineos have a partnership with Racing Club Abidjan in Ivory Coast. For now, it will be continental Europe rather than England where their money is invested. ‘We’ve looked at Portugal, it’s a great football culture,’ added Ratcliffe.
The Championship? ‘I know Matthew Benham at Brentford a bit and I take my hat off to him. He’s done great things but it’s tough to do and not on our radar at the moment.’