Interview of Jim Ratcliffe, new owner of OGC Nice for So Foot :
Jim Ratcliffe would be one of those guys who knows how to maintain the mystery. The Englishman should slam a hundred million euros out of his pocket soon for the takeover of the OGC Nice and that's about the only certainty that accompanies the operation. That, and the money that would fill the pockets of the man: at the head of Ineos, a global giant in the petrochemical industry, Ratcliffe alone would weigh more than ten billion euros. Enough to excite the local press, while Nice Matin ignites, already asserting that the OGCN "is about to change dimension". Really ?
First question that annoys: why is a British already sexagenarian (66 years) multibillionaire coming at the helm of a French football club? Very discreet with the media, Ratcliffe himself did not give many elements of answers. Still, in recent years, his investments in sport began to chatter in the United Kingdom. In 2017, he bought the Football Club Lausanne-Sport (D2 Switzerland), before approaching Roman Abramovich to take back the property of Chelsea, his offer of two billion pounds was finally found insufficient by the Russian oligarch. In 2018, he also teamed up with multiple British Olympic sailing champion Ben Ainslie to finance the 36th America's Cup campaign in 2021. Most importantly, he bought the Sky cycling team last March, renamed Ineos , the name of the society that Ratcliffe founded and which made his fortune.
A success story that began in 1998: with large loans, Ratcliffe decided to buy dozens of petrochemical plants, sold by major oil companies, which then believe that this activity is not profitable enough. All is under the umbrella of a company, Ineos (Inspec Ethylene Oxide Specialties), which grows from year to year, while Ratcliffe now has seventy-three factories around the world. Jackpot for English: Holder of 60% of the shares of his company, Ratcliffe sits on a nice jackpot and is known to manage his activity with total intransigence, which has earned him a reputation as a ruthless businessman. When his refinery in Grangemouth, Scotland, is paralyzed by the strike, he defies the unionists head on threatening to close the site if its employees do not fall into line: "I hear that I am ruthless when I plans to close a unit that loses money, he explained to the World in 2013, just after the standoff with the unions. But only in Europe is there such an attitude. In the United States or China, nobody thinks like that. A liberal at heart, notoriously partisan of Brexit, he is also considered to be an opponent of the environmental cause in the United Kingdom, while Ineos is currently testing shale gas in Yorkshire.
If it ticks all the boxes of the modern industrial billionaire, the Englishman is nevertheless famous due to the amount of its estimated wealth: 10.6 billion euros, according to Forbes, far ahead of other famous Ligue 1 billionaires like Rybolovlev (AS Monaco), which would weigh around six billion euros, or McCourt (about a billion euros, at Olympique de Marseille). The OGCN has caught in his nets a very big shark, although no one knows yet whether the latter wants to open his wallet to chew the hexagonal football. For now, the only goal that the Briton has specifically set for the club is to sanctuarise the Nice presence in C1: "I want significant investments, a clear and ambitious development plan in the long term. The Champions League is a goal, of course.
That should at least have the merit of relaxing Patrick Vieira, whose mercato could be punctuated by a few blows of the smoky kind. The fans of the Gym will be able to cherish the hope to see their team aim higher than their last seventh place in Ligue 1. And to perhaps wait one to two seasons, to possibly grab the second rank of a championship where no big team has lastingly stabilized since the advent of the Parisian ogre.
