In the 12 months since Sir Jim Ratcliffe completed his initial investment in the club, Manchester United players and staff have got used to hearing Sir Dave Brailsford’s voice.
There have been a series of addresses from the man best known as the architect of British Cycling’s Olympic successes in 2004, 2008 and 2012.
The first of those speeches, delivered alongside Ratcliffe in one of Old Trafford’s suites early last year before the investment had even been finalised, drew applause from employees as Brailsford called time on the club’s decade of miserable underperformance since Sir Alex Ferguson retired.
He said it was time for a total reset and far-reaching change, designed to introduce a culture of sporting excellence and restore United to the summit of English football.
Brailsford conveyed the same messages in one-on-one meetings with United players towards the end of last season as well as seeking their views on how the club could improve in terms of support, training facilities, sports science, data analysis, nutrition and much more. That went down well too.
Another all-staff address last year, billed as an update on football operations, was less well received.
Some of those present felt it was more of the same, rather than an update. Speaking to The Athletic on the condition of anonymity to protect their position, like others in this article, one of those present said staff wanted to hear about progress and plans at United, rather than references to what Brailsford had achieved years earlier at British Cycling and Team Sky.
Some felt slighted by his talk of all that he had sacrificed — referencing his house on one of the most exclusive streets in the sun-kissed millionaire’s playground of Monaco — to move back to grey, rainy Manchester to try to sort out the mess at United.
Brailsford, Ratcliffe and Rasmus Hojlund on a Carrington visit in January 2024 (Manchester United/Manchester United via Getty Images)
Then there was the one last summer when he spelt out the need for anyone working for United under the regime to show resilience, courage, optimism and commitment, adding that anyone struggling to embrace the challenge should find a smaller club to work for. Against a backdrop of redundancies, where the threat to job security was very real, some felt that was insensitive.
Brailsford is not in Manchester to win friends — but he is there to influence people. That is what he has spent a quarter of a century doing since he was originally hired as a consultant by British Cycling in the late 1990s — driving change, pushing boundaries, raising standards, demanding more.
Last autumn, in another of those all-staff addresses, Brailsford announced the launch of both ‘Mission 21’, a programme designed to build towards United’s 21st league title, and ‘Mission 1’, aimed at securing a first Women’s Super League title. These two missions are part of the wider “Project 150” initiative to mark the club’s 150th anniversary in 2028.
“Mission 21” divided opinion among the assembled staff. Some felt it was a much-needed rallying call, a target to build towards after years of drift. Others believed it was misguided, pie-in-the-sky stuff after a poor start to the season, which saw manager Erik ten Hag replaced by Ruben Amorim and sporting director Dan Ashworth’s contract terminated after just five months in the job.
Brailsford is used to cynicism. He likes to tell people he was mocked when he “stupidly” declared upon Team Sky’s launch in January 2010 that they would win the Tour de France, with a British rider, within five years. (They did it, with Bradley Wiggins, in two and a half years.)
But that was then and this is now. That was cycling and this is football. That was Team Sky, a newly formed team with a huge budget, a blank canvas and the relentlessly positive attitude of an ambitious start-up… and this is Manchester United, weighed down by the burden of their history, where disillusionment and world-weariness abound after a series of false dawns and where the early positivity towards INEOS investment has evaporated during a period of turbulence, cost-cutting, job losses, ticket price hikes and further regression on the pitch.
If, at the age of 60, a cycling performance director fancied one last challenge before he retired — in football, an industry known for its suspicion towards those who come from outside the game — he could hardly have found a more difficult place to win hearts and minds than at Old Trafford.
Ratcliffe has a very small circle of people he trusts. When it comes to sport, he has faith in Brailsford, whom he retained as team principal after INEOS bought Team Sky in 2019 and went on to appoint as the company’s director of sport, overseeing the group’s interests in football as well as cycling, sailing, rugby union and Formula 1.
In late 2023, with Ratcliffe at an advanced stage in his acquisition of what is now a 28.9 per cent stake in United, Brailsford was asked about his football experience and acumen in an interview with the T2 Hubcast podcast.
He chose an interesting metaphor. “When I watch cycling, I’ll be watching in colour and you’ll be watching in black and white,” he said. “But in football, I’m watching in black and white. I’ll get better. I’m working on it.”
Ratcliffe, Brailsford and Chris Froome on cycling duty in 2019 (Michael Steele/Getty Images)
That might sound like an alarming admission, given that he was about to take a leading role in the new regime at United — and had already been prominently involved for almost two years at Nice as part of his INEOS role.
Brailsford would say he leaves the technical stuff to the experts. His job was to help identify and recruit those experts and develop the best possible environment for them to do their job. He was to create an “elite sporting environment” (Ratcliffe’s phrase) for the players to do theirs.
He is one of several INEOS figures who have become actively involved at United over the past 12 months. These include United’s new chief financial officer Roger Bell and his fellow directors John Reece and Rob Nevin as well as INEOS project managers Gary Hemingway, who has been working with United’s data analysis department, and Josh Thompson.
Brailsford is the only one with an extensive track record in sport — albeit not football — but also the one who attracts the most intrigue.
That extends to some of the areas he gets involved in. He has been fascinated by the players’ kits, wondering whether more can be done to optimise comfort and performance. Some staff were baffled that someone so senior, without a specific role at the club, should involve himself in such intricacies.
That is the stuff Brailsford is famous for. He is synonymous with what he calls “the aggregation of marginal gains” — which he defined, in an interview with the BBC in 2012, as the principle that “if you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improved it by one per cent, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together”.
It was revolutionary. British Cycling invested more time, effort and — significantly — money into finding those “marginal gains” than any team in the sport had done previously. The extent to which those boundaries were later pushed at Team Sky was explored in depth by Matt Slater last year.
On a technical level, no stone was left unturned, whether it was the design of the bike, the helmet and the kit, the data analysis or the use of wind tunnels.
There was also an extreme focus on more holistic matters — not just the quirky stuff about bespoke, hypoallergenic mattresses and pillows and peeling the cyclists’ bananas for them so they didn’t have to waste precious energy on such matters, but a constant repetition of the mantra known as C.O.R.E. (commitment, ownership, responsibility, excellence).
Can that translate to football? It didn’t seem to have any great impact at Ligue 1 side Nice. But Brailsford believes it can — and that, while there are obvious differences between cycling and football, fundamental principles apply across all sports in the pursuit of excellence.
That has been the message all along where Brailsford’s involvement is concerned: that rather than running the show or getting involved in football decisions, he would lend his expertise in areas relating to his specialism as well as being Ratcliffe’s ‘eyes and ears’ — another pair of eyes and ears — on the ground in Manchester.
Some of the messaging at the time suggested Brailsford’s role would be brief: that he would be in Manchester for the initial post-takeover period, helping to put certain things and key personnel in place, with the intention of ‘sunsetting’ (ie, stepping back or phasing out his involvement) around now.
Instead, Brailsford has ended up more prominently involved at Manchester United than he or anyone else envisaged — and more involved, not less, since his most significant move, hiring Ashworth as sporting director, ended with an acrimonious parting of the ways.
Long before Ratcliffe’s investment was finalised, Ashworth was identified as the man to lead the club’s new, improved football operation.
That was down to Brailsford, who had worked closely with him at the Football Association, where Ashworth spent six and a half years, as director of elite development and then technical director, before moving on to Brighton & Hove Albion and Newcastle United as sporting director.
In July 2022, Brailsford was invited to Newcastle’s pre-season training camp to speak to the players, with Ashworth describing him as “the best in the world at creating a high-performance culture and turning that into winning”.
The respect was mutual, so it was no surprise when Brailsford recommended Ashworth as the ideal candidate to be United’s sporting director. When Ratcliffe told the BBC in February last year that Ashworth (then still at Newcastle) was “a 10 out of 10 sporting director, one of the best around”, it was an echo of Brailsford’s endorsement.
It remains a source of bewilderment among some at United — and many within the game — that Ashworth left within five months, officially by mutual consent. In short, he did not make a strong impression on Ratcliffe and quickly became marginalised under a regime in which he was competing for influence with new chief executive Omar Berrada, new technical director Jason Wilcox and, to a lesser extent, Brailsford himself.
Brailsford, Berrada, Ashworth, and Wilcox (Chris Brunskill/Fantasista/Getty Images)
The Ashworth debacle seemed less a reflection on a highly regarded sporting director than on a dysfunctional setup. The fact it was unworkable almost immediately seemed also to raise questions about Brailsford and his role moving forward.
As it has transpired, Ashworth’s departure has meant more responsibility for Brailsford, as well as Berrada and Wilcox. All three have had to step forward to fill the void, as has chief operating officer Collette Roche, who has also become more involved in football operations.
Whatever Brailsford’s initial plans were, he is “all in” now, with his family moving back from Monaco to Manchester and Brailsford a near-permanent presence at United’s Carrington training ground. The challenge of trying to “fix” United is as irresistible as it is daunting.
More on United’s future under INEOS…
In those first couple months of last year, before Ratcliffe’s investment had been finalised, Brailsford sought to familiarise himself with how things worked at United. He was alarmed by much of what he found. In comparison with leading teams he had worked with or visited in other sports, he felt there was no overarching vision or strategy, no clear structure and no established processes to put plans in place.
Other things baffled him, such as when he learned about the extent to which commercial interests were to be prioritised on the club’s pre-season tour of the United States. Brailsford suggested that, if achieving sporting excellence was the prime objective, the team would not be jetting across the Atlantic, from city to city, playing exhibition matches in extreme heat. Successive United managers would agree with that view.
Given that United have since made plans for a post-season tour to Asia (playing matches in Hong Kong and Malaysia), the Premier League’s Summer Series tournament in July (in which games will be held in Atlanta, New Jersey and Chicago) and could also play a match in San Diego as part of a commercial tie-in with their sponsor Snapdragon, it would appear he lost that battle.
On a deeper level, Brailsford felt there was a staleness about United, an acceptance of mediocrity. There was talent in all areas — in the offices, backrooms and various suites at Carrington, even in the dressing rooms — but he felt it was being stifled, whether by a lack of structure, a lack of clarity or the perpetual state of gloom at the club.
As such, Mission 21 and Mission 1 were about setting clear targets and focusing minds and strategies, something to rally around.
Such talk tends to grate with people in football — because of course United want to win the Premier League and it is hardly a new objective for a club that has not done so since Ferguson’s retirement in 2013. But in that first speech, Brailsford told staff that having a clear mission statement, within a specific timeframe, would focus minds and plans in a way that a vague ‘ambition’ to be champions again would not.
Brailsford and Ratcliffe celebrate while watching Nice in 2023 (Jean Catuffe/Getty Images)
Internally, Brailsford has likened it to the targets he set at British Cycling and Team Sky — of course — but also to NASA’s Apollo mission of landing a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s.
There is a story, possibly apocryphal, of President John F Kennedy visiting the NASA Space Center in 1962 and meeting a janitor, who, when asked his role, explained that he was “helping to put a man on the moon”.
That is the mindset Brailsford wants people at United to adopt: that every employee at Carrington, not just the first-team players, is working towards the mission to win that 21st men’s top-flight title and that first WSL title. There have even been ideas floated about how best to incorporate Mission 21 and Mission 1 into everyday life at Carrington, whether with banners, T-shirts or anything else.
Brailsford, Berrarda and Wilcox (and previously Ashworth) have held meetings where they have talked about Mission 21 and tried to work out — at first broadly and then precisely — how they might hope to bridge an enormous gap to the top of the Premier League.
An obvious area for improvement is their use of data for performance analysis, scouting and recruitment. In an interview with the United We Stand fanzine in December, Ratcliffe said the club was “still in the last century on data analysis.”
Arsenal’s resurgence over the past five years has been a point of internal reference in terms of the way the club rebuilt, made key appointments across numerous departments and gave Mikel Arteta the time to strip back the squad, offload disillusioned players and rebuild. In time, a stale, underperforming team was transformed into one that is, for a third consecutive season, challenging for the Premier League title.
Even if it takes much longer to build a squad capable of challenging like that — with head coach Amorim admitting recently that the club’s financial situation means they “need to sell players” if they are to have any hope of making a significant investment in his squad — Brailsford wants the club to establish that “high-performance culture” as a first step. He has told players he wants them to enjoy the pressure of playing for United rather than feel stifled by it.
Brailsford has been heavily involved in the £50million ($63m) redevelopment of the training ground, which began last summer and is expected to be finished this summer. The new building will include an expanded data analysis hub, an expanded gym, improved medical facilities and enhanced nutrition provision as well as more communal areas to encourage collaboration between departments.
United are making changes to Carrington (Getty Images)
There have been discussions about making ‘best-in-class’ appointments in every department at Carrington: recruitment, data analysis, medical, physiotherapy, strength and conditioning, player care and so on. Interim head of performance Sam Erith, previously of Manchester City, is among those identified as potential leaders of the new regime.
Questions persist about how United intend to do any of that on a reduced budget while pleading poverty, cutting jobs and stripping back elsewhere. The financial excesses of the past decade — which have continued since INEOS took over — have left the club facing a challenge to comply with the Premier League’s profit and sustainability regulations (PSR).
Even more than that, questions persist about whether United have the know-how and the vision to achieve this rebuild. Looking at decisions made over the first year of the INEOS involvement, has it really been any better than what went before? Might it — shudder — be even worse?
Nobody, least of all Brailsford, was expecting overnight success at United. When Ratcliffe bought his stake in the club, he spoke of the “challenge to get the organisation and environment right” rather than imagining the club’s fortunes would be transformed overnight by a change of manager.
It is worth going back to something Brailsford said about his period at Team Sky, when progress in the first year was far slower than he expected.
In an interview with the Harvard Business Review in 2015, he said that initially, “We didn’t get it right at all; our first few races were well below expectation. We took an honest look and realised we had focused on the peas, not the steak. We tried so hard with all the bells and whistles of marginal gains that our focus was too much on the periphery and not on the core.”
But are United getting the big stuff right? Ratcliffe swiftly concluded that their two big decisions last summer — sticking with Ten Hag at the end of last season and hiring Ashworth — were wrong. Last summer’s near-£200million transfer outlay on five players (Noussair Mazraoui, Matthijs de Ligt, Leny Yoro, Manuel Ugarte and Joshua Zirkzee) has not looked inspired either.
Their sudden faith in Ten Hag last summer, triggering an extension in his contract and then backing his judgment in the transfer market, looks ill-advised given that they soon replaced him with a coach (Amorim) who holds a markedly different tactical approach, which he has struggled to impose on the squad he inherited.
Ten Hag was backed in the summer, then sacked in the autumn (Manchester United via Getty Images)
In the absence of visible progress on the pitch, it would be more encouraging if there were signs of a much-needed improvement in the culture and environment surrounding the first team.
Improvements have been slow to materialise. Although United’s priority in the January transfer window was to move out unwanted players, it is stark that Brazilian winger Antony, the butt of derision at Old Trafford, appears liberated in a new environment on loan at Real Betis, just as Scott McTominay is thriving at Napoli. Marcus Rashford’s first two appearances on loan at Aston Villa have suggested that he could also benefit from a change of scenery.
By no stretch of the imagination can United claim to have developed the “elite sporting environment” that Ratcliffe talked about. Early days, but the clock is ticking towards 2028. They still look like a model of underperformance, not high performance.
Marginal gains? United are suffering alarmingly frequent losses, some of them far from marginal. Most supporters would argue that the club’s biggest failings of the past decade are in vision and recruitment — and that it hardly bodes well if the man hired to lead the club’s football department last summer was jettisoned after five months, leaving them so light in experience in that area.
Meanwhile, Brailsford continues searching for marginal gains and a cultural transformation, during a period of financial austerity at a huge, dysfunctional club in an illogical, chaotic, unpredictable sport in which he has little experience.
Trying to find a cure for the Carrington training complex — if this is to be his last sporting challenge before retirement, it could hardly be a more daunting one.
Additional reporting: Laurie Whitwell
(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Dan Goldfarb for The Athletic)
