Jim Ratcliffe has zero tolerance for bulls***. If you’re off your game, you’re in big trouble: Sporting legend Ben Ainslie on how the new boss will get Man United back on top

There aren’t many who can lay their hands on more gold than Sir Ben Ainslie, but he’s thinking back to the day he found one. It still makes him smile.

‘It was a great gin and tonic,’ Ainslie tells Mail Sport, and with it comes the origin story of his relationship with Sir Jim Ratcliffe.

The year of that drink was 2018, the place was the private members club at 5 Hertford Street in Mayfair and to date the tab is running somewhere close to £250million.

‘It was a mutual friend who got us together,’ Ainslie adds. ‘I mean, there’s maybe only a handful of people you meet in your lifetime and come away thinking, “Wow, that person was really impressive”. You can immediately see how that person has had success and that was the case with Jim.

‘It was just one of those conversations. It wasn’t just sailing – it was about sport, business, the challenges he has taken on. He is a fascinating person to just sit with and shoot the breeze. He was clearly interested in what we had going on, our plans, and very quickly afterwards he came back to me and it took off from there. Here we are.’

Ainslie, the most successful British sailor in Olympic history, is the INEOS Team UK captain

He remembers the first time he met with Man United’s part owner at a private members club 

Here is Barcelona and the point of interest has long-since developed into their shared obsession with breaking British sport’s longest losing streak at the America’s Cup.

We are sitting in Ainslie’s office, a matter of months until they learn if their second crack at a 173-year-old prize has been more successful than the first. On the wall is the torch Ainslie carried on the opening leg of the mass relay ahead of London 2012, where he won his fourth Olympic gold medal, and beneath is a framed copy of Ratcliffe’s wheel of terms he likes and those he does not.

Among the latter is ‘winging it’, which might sting a few who find themselves now working under him at Manchester United. There’s also ‘things that break down’, so there might also be some awkwardness around the training yacht downstairs that caught fire a weeks before we met.

Mail Sport’s Riath Al-Samarrai

There have been setbacks on this campaign, and indeed the previous one, to the extent it would be a significant upset if INEOS Britannia rule the waves this October. But the ship requires less turning than the one Ratcliffe acquired at United and Ainslie has been watching those developments with a sense of deja vu.

‘It’s straight out of the Jim Ratcliffe playbook – get in there, figure out the issues,’ he says. ‘I mean, the speed of some of the key personnel coming in, that’s the sort of action Jim takes. I’ve got no doubt they’ll have a massive impact. They’re determined to get Man United back up to the top and it will happen.’

Maybe. If Ratcliffe has learnt anything in his sporting ventures from the America’s Cup and cycling to Formula 1 and football, it is that success and the biggest budgets do not always share a linear relationship. But Ainslie has a far better idea than most about what is like to work with Britain’s richest man and paints a fascinating picture of a ‘no bull****’ partner who is anything but silent.

He starts with a story about the last edition of the Cup, in 2021, when Ainslie’s crew was crushed 7-1 by the Italians in the final of the challenger series.

‘Jim just seems to have this way of cutting through bull****. He has this innate ability to know where the issues are and if you are not on your game he will see through that and then you are in trouble. I think like anyone else, you don’t want any bull****, but Jim Ratcliffe has zero tolerance for it.

‘We had a moment (at the Cup in 2021, in New Zealand) where it was obvious we were going into the event on the backfoot,’ he says. ‘I remember there was a meeting and an impression had been given that things were okay. At that stage, Jim had to make a massive commitment to come down to Auckland to be with us and this was during Covid, so he was making this big effort with quarantine and everything else.

‘I called him after the meeting and said, “Look, if you’re going to come down here you need to know our backs are really against the wall”. And he was great with that. He was like, “I’m coming down and I want to try and help you guys sort this out”. You couldn’t ask for a better response.

Ratcliffe completed a £1.3bn deal to become Manchester United co-owner in December 2023

‘Getting there and figuring it out’ is right out of Ratcliffe’s playbook’, Ainslie explained

Mail Sport chatted with Ainslie at the INEOS America’s Cup team headquarters in Barcelona

‘When you’re straight with him, things just happen and they move fast. He gets involved and when he does, he doesn’t half-arse anything. I think he has just been drawn into the intensity of sport, any sport, and he is driven by it. He loves it.

‘I’ll get a WhatsApp message each week, maybe more, and he wants to know details or share an idea. When you consider everything else that he’s running in his life, it is really impressive.’

As we speak, the scale of Ratcliffe’s sporting network beyond Manchester United is on clear view – a number of Ainslie’s crew are out on a training ride on bikes loaned out by the INEOS Grenadiers Tour de France operation. Ditto, their 75ft race yacht has been designed in collaboration with the Mercedes Formula 1 team.

The approach has been meticulous, the investment immense, and the results remain to be seen, though that is a topic which returns us closer to the subject of skipper rather than his financial backer. To the subject of Ainslie, one of Britain’s greatest sportsmen, and the biggest challenge of his career.

It has been 12 years since he left the Olympic sector as the most decorated sailor in its history, but the America’s Cup is a different beast. Ratcliffe himself is fond of an old anecdote, calling back to the inaugural race around the Isle of Wight and an exchange involving Queen Victoria, who had enquired from shore which of the boats was second behind the Americans. The response: ‘Your Majesty, there is no second.’

For British teams, there has never been a first, and for Ainslie, now 47, this will be his third attempt as skipper. Memorably, he was brought onboard as tactician for the Americans at 8-1 down against New Zealand in 2013, with his mystique polished by a 9-8 comeback win for the ages, but his own campaigns are yet to progress beyond the challenger series to the Cup match.

It has morphed into an obsession. ‘We’re all here to win it,’ he says. ‘The America’s Cup for us started in 1851. I mean, it’s the longest losing streak in sport and that’s what motivates us – we want to break the duck. It is the only thing in international sport that Britain has never won, which is crazy given our maritime heritage.

‘It’s really hard to explain to people just how tough the Cup is. The Kiwis have been at every Cup since the Eighties and this is a sport where the knowledge you pass down is invaluable. I always say beating New Zealand in the America’s Cup is like taking on the All Blacks in rugby – it’s one of the toughest things you can do in sport.

He urged that Manchester United’s new part owner has a ‘way of cutting through the bull****’

Ratcliffe has a huge task on his hands at Old Trafford and will be weighing up whether or not to stick by manager Erik ten Hag (right) after an underwhelming Premier League campaign

European qualification is far from guaranteed, with the Red Devils currently sixth in the league

‘The intensity of trying to achieve that has been insane.’

That much is illustrated by Ainslie seeing his family (he has two children with wife Georgie Thompson, the television presenter) every other weekend for the past couple of years.

While this conversation progresses to technology, an operation of 200 people is working on reducing the distance to Team New Zealand, who as holders had the advantage of determining the rules of engagement in a sport where equipment is every bit as refined and pivotal as it is in Formula 1.

To that end, the 75ft yachts will look spectacular in battle when they are unveiled in the near future – they are designed to travel in excess of 50 knots on protruding foils at four times the speed of the wind. In a domain that is already baffling to outsiders, their sails will be manipulated by cycle power, and those peddles will be turned by former Team GB Olympic rowers. They include Harry Leask, who at the Tokyo Games took silver in the quadruple skulls.

‘That takes some getting your head around,’ Ainslie says. ‘The power output required is beyond what a cyclist would manage with their lighter body frames, so we think rowers are the right fit. The numbers they produce are unbelievable.’

In this game, that matters but not as much as results. So far Ainslie’s crew has struggled, finishing in the bottom two out of six teams in each of the two warm-up regattas, albeit contested in their 40ft training yachts. As the programme with what is understood to be the biggest budget in the fleet, it has been jarring.

‘I would imagine we’re probably not that many people’s favourites,’ says Ainslie. ‘Jim has been right behind us throughout and I know what we can achieve.

‘But in many ways I’m happy if people want to see us underdogs. I don’t mind a fight.’

He never did and the years have not mellowed a man who famously declared prior to winning at London 2012: ‘They have made me angry and they don’t want to make me angry.’ It’s a trait that comes out in a story he tells about his seven-year-old daughter Bellatrix.

Ainslie is hoping to lead his team to America’s Cup glory in October, with Britain having never won the tournament since its induction in 1851, but has so far endured a turbulent campaign

The 2024 tournament will mark Ainslie’s third attempt as skipper at the historic America’s Cup

‘I’m starting to see that same mindset in her,’ he says. ‘She gets this little look in her eye when we’re doing running races against each other. I sometimes chuckle to myself when this switch goes in her. I probably blame myself a bit for that.

‘But, yeah, I’m pretty conflicted about letting her win.’

He can laugh about that – apples don’t fall far from the tree and old habits die hard. Winning the America’s Cup is harder still, considering it has long been equated to standing under a shower and tearing up £50 notes.

Time will soon tell if Ainslie can pay Ratcliffe back for the most expensive gin and tonic in history.