Sir Jim Ratcliffe has invested £1.25billion into Man Utd

Jim with wife Alicia at French footie club NiceCredit: Getty

Ratcliffe was honoured with a knighthood by Prince William in 2018Credit: PA:Press Association

Jim has two sons, Sam and GeorgeCredit: Getty

The Old Trafford club was put up for sale by the Glazers back in November 2022.

Finally, after beating Sheikh Jassim in a bidding war, Ratcliffe saw his deal for a 25 per cent stake go through on Christmas Eve.

Now at the age of 71, the joiner’s son who grew up on a Manchester council estate, has landed himself a present he could only have dreamed of growing up.

But before his lavish purchase of buying into a Premier League club, Sir Jim has enjoyed a luxury lifestyle.

He divides his time between homes in Lake Geneva and Monaco, while he has a stunning plot in Hampshire that’s being rebuilt.

Sport mad billionaire

Sport-mad Sir Jim has come a long way from Dunkerly Avenue, Failsworth, where he lived until he was ten and went almost every other week to watch Sir Matt Busby’s team in action.

In 1999 he was in Barcelona at the Nou Camp stadium when United came back at the death to beat Bayern Munich 2-1 to win the Champions League.

Sir Jim described it as “three minutes you never forget in your lifetime”.

So some things are priceless, even for a man whose mega-fortune comes from a 60 per cent stake in a privately owned chemical giant he always claims is “the world’s biggest company you have never heard of”.

In total 26,000 people work for Ineos at more than 194 sites in 29 countries.

The 60million tons of chemicals it makes each year go into almost everything we use, from antibiotics, toothpaste and clean water to insulation and food packaging.

All this means Sir Jim can afford a luxury home in Monaco, a £6million waterside mansion in Hampshire and a house in Chelsea, West London, near the Grenadier pub, where he came up with the idea for building a 4×4 to replace the Land Rover Defender.

He also owns a mega-house on Lake Geneva, Switzerland, near F1 star Michael Schumacher’s home, and a 260ft super-yacht, Hampshire II.

If Sir Jim does eventually buy Man United from the American Glazer family he won’t be step-ping into the unknown because he already owns two football clubs.

In 2017 he bought Swiss side FC Lausanne-Sport — they were relegated last season into Switzerland’s second tier.

Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s stunning Hampshire HomeCredit: PWP Architects

The stunning Hampshire II yacht is worth a staggering £130mCredit: Raphaël Belly Photography

The living room is fitted with a huge plasma TV screen on board the Hampshire IICredit: Feadship

The bedrooms look incredibly decked outCredit: Feadship

And in 2019 Sir Jim snapped up Nice, who play in France’s Ligue 1 for just under £100million.

He also spent £40million buying Sky’s Tour de France-winning cycling team and he regularly goes on training rides with stars of the Ineos Grenadiers.

He has shares in Mercedes’ Formula 1 operation and backs Sir Ben Ainslie’s bid for sailing’s America’s Cup, which Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge is part of.

I was fired for having mild eczema. I was told ‘You can’t work here, not with eczema. We can’t spend the money on training you for five years and then find you’ve got an allergy, so you’re on your bike.’

Jim Ratcliffe

Amazingly, Sir Jim only made his eye-watering fortune in the past 25 years.

Until then his life had been unremarkable.

He struggled at school because of his obsession with football, got into university with some of the worst A-level results of his college peers and got sacked from his first job.

His success came as a complete surprise to him too.

Sir Jim says: “You should see a picture of the council house where I started out. I just played football, really. That’s all I was interested in.”

His dad, who started out as a carpenter, worked his way up to run a factory making furniture for science labs.

His mum worked as a secretary.

The family moved to Beverly, East Yorks, when his dad landed a new job and Jim got into the local grammar school. In the sixth form he organised tours of local factories.

He says: “I suppose I did have this inkling that I wanted to be successful — that I wanted to be a millionaire one day. So those things were in my head at 18. But I was just dreaming, really.”

He chose to study chemical engineering at the University of Birmingham.

But he arrived at the chemistry department to find a group of students clustered around a noticeboard, reading a list of the 99 students on his course, ranked according to their A-level results.

Ratcliffe was embarrassed to find himself near the bottom.

Northern soul Jim as a youngster in Manchester

Jim came up with the idea for building a 4×4 to replace the Land Rover DefenderCredit: Jon Bond – The Sun

Ratcliffe with Chris Froome and Team INEOS Principal Sir Dave BrailsfordCredit: PA:Press Association

He says: “It lacked a bit of sensitivity. But you could say it was fair. There were a lot of guys who had worked very hard at school while I was out playing football.”

Working for BP during the summer holiday he was offered a permanent job only to be sacked within three days.

He says: “I was called in by my boss who had been reading my medical report — they’d not bothered until then. I was fired for having mild eczema. I was told ‘You can’t work here, not with eczema. We can’t spend the money on training you for five years and then find you’ve got an allergy, so you’re on your bike.’”

Jim failed to persuade BP to take him on as a trainee accountant so he moved to fabric and chemicals firm Courtaulds, where he stayed until he was in his thirties.

Lured by the perk of a much better car, a white BMW 535i, he switched to becoming a dealmaker with the venture capital company Advent International.

He says: “They tripled my salary and offered me a fancy car. I did like that car — it was better than the one the chairman of Courtaulds had.

“The venture capital world is very simple. If you do bad deals, you get fired. If you don’t do any deals, you get fired. I took that job because it would present a lot of opportunities. I always had a feeling that a really good one would come along.”

In 1992, he bought BP’s specialist chemicals operation for about £40million, floating it on the stock market two years later.

But Jim quit the company in 1998.

By then his ten-year marriage to first wife Amanda Townson, with whom he has two sons, George and Samuel, had ended in divorce.

He has a daughter with second wife, Alicia. He is now believed to be with current partner Catherine Polli.

His fortunes changed for the better when he bought an Antwerp-based chemicals business which became the start of Ineos.

I suppose I did have this inkling that I wanted to be successful — that I wanted to be a millionaire one day. So those things were in my head at 18. But I was just dreaming, really.

Jim Ratcliffe

Jim and his new business partners, Andy Currie and John Reece, became masters at spotting untapped potential in flagging plants and factories.

Sir Jim says: “We’d look at businesses that were unfashionable or un𝑠e𝑥y, facilities owned by large corporations. We’d run them a bit better, make them busy and very profitable.”

The deals got bigger and bigger and by 2018 Jim’s share of the business made him Britain’s richest man with a fortune of £21billion.

A supporter of Brexit and fracking, he wants Britain to manufacture more.

He says: “You can’t have an economy of 70million people where you don’t make any products. If you do, every time you want to buy a product you first have to buy some foreign exchange and find a country to sell it to you. That’s dumb — you end up with a fragile economy.”

Who knows what the future holds for Man Utd. But, with Sir Jim at the helm and his billions, it could certainly be rosy.

F1 drivers Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas celebrate with JimCredit: AFP

Ratcliffe with the Mercedes F1 TeamCredit: Getty

Ratcliffe meets staff at the Grangemouth plant as the first ship carrying shale gas from the US arrives in the Firth of ForthCredit: Getty

Ratcliffe’s childhood home on Dunkerly Avenue, Failsworth, Lancs

Aerial view of Lake Geneva where Ratcliffe owns a mega-houseCredit: Getty