When Sir Jim Ratcliffe and Ineos began to accumulate sports clubs, comparisons were made to Red Bull. The Austrian company had branched out with varying degrees of success into Formula One, football and skydiving, among others. Nine years into Ratcliffe’s diversification, the main comparison to the energy drink is that neither he nor Red Bull is to everybody’s taste.

The idea was that world-leading expertise could be shared across a network of teams in different disciplines, but since the purchase of a Swiss football club in 2017 there has been limited success for the Ineos portfolio. This is often the case when rich business owners dip their toe into the world of sport.

Fans are usually keen to swallow the lie that “these people don’t do failure”, that financial acumen automatically leads to sporting success. More frequent outcomes are hubris, wasted money and relegation. At least Ratcliffe’s marathon times are still impressive.

In Grit, Rigour & Humour – The Ineos Story, Ratcliffe remembers seeing a sign at a refuelling station for helicopters on a trip to a remote part of Australia. It reminded him of the philosophy which had driven his company’s extraordinary success. It read: “Don’t do dumb s---”.

The phrase was later added to the “Ineos Compass”, “an attempt to encapsulate the Ineos DNA or culture”, wrote Ratcliffe. “Sitting at the centre of the compass are the three words that I believe most closely express our tenor, our way. Grit, Rigour, Humour. It applies equally to our sports ventures.”

Humour has certainly been required at Manchester United, where there has been rather a lot of the forbidden “dumb s---”. The overall picture is of a burgeoning sporting empire beginning to crumble.

Of course we know in some detail how things are going at Manchester United, but what of Ratcliffe’s other sporting interests?

French football

Ratcliffe promised Ineos “would not be dumb money” when it arrived on the French Riviera in 2019. “We want to establish Nice as a team that competes in European club competition on a regular basis, and importantly, sustain it.”

Partial success here, but it has not been glorious or a story of sustained improvement. Nice achieved a fourth-placed Ligue 1 finish in 2024-25 after four years of oscillating between ninth and fifth. They have managed three group-stage exits in the Europa League, but did make the Conference League quarter-final in 2023. 2025-26 was particularly poor, though, the club narrowly escaping relegation by finishing 16th.

Fans are disappointed that the challenge to Paris St-Germain suggested by Ineos’s early rhetoric has not materialised. Their mood was not helped when Ratcliffe said last year “I don’t particularly enjoy going to watch Nice because there are some good players, but the level of football is not high enough for me to get excited.” It was a curious comment in a season that featured 8-0 and 6-0 home wins. This comment went down predictably poorly with the club’s supporters.

Nice have stabilised this year under Olivier Pantaloni, but are up for sale at a reduced asking price, with a rumoured buyout by American investors falling through this summer.

Swiss football

Ratcliffe’s first dalliance with club ownership in 2017, taking over a team from the city of Ineos’s global HQ. Lausanne had won the league seven times, albeit not since 1965, becoming a yo-yo club in the years since. They were duly relegated in the first full season of Ineos control.

“Our target is in four years’ time to have a team that can qualify for European football,” said David Thompson, then chief executive of Ineos Football, shortly after the takeover. This dream has been achieved twice, both thanks to the Conference League, but stalled before the competition’s group stage.

Domestically, Lausanne have finished as high as third in the Swiss Super League (2025-26) but were also relegated for a second time under Ineos ownership in 2021-22. They were promoted back to the top flight again the following season but now sit bottom and have also been put up for sale.

Cycling

The former Team Sky had enjoyed a glorious spell from 2012 onwards in lockstep with British Cycling, which included seven Tour de France victories with four different riders. The last of those was Egan Bernal in 2019, in the months following Ineos’s purchase of the team. Since then it is a tale of under-performance despite generous funding.

Sir Dave Brailsford, no longer affiliated with Manchester United as of May, is back as the brains of the operation along with Geraint Thomas, whose cycling pedigree is unmatched but is still finding his feet as the team’s head of racing. 

Thomas witnessed then-Sky’s most successful era first-hand but has said the team is now “starting at 20 per cent of where we used to be”, calling the 2026 Tour de France “probably the worst Tour we’ve had”.

The team was costing Ineos about £50m per season, but new sponsorship has been sought, hence the change of name to Netcompany-Ineos. Ratcliffe is understood to be desperate to win the Tour again, but that appears a very distant prospect for now.

Sailing

Fun while it lasted. Ratcliffe joined forces with his fellow knight Sir Ben Ainslie in 2018, midway through an America’s Cup cycle. Their team were beaten 7-1 in the 2021 qualifying final by Italian team Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli, but the America’s Cup requires time as well as money, although Ineos spent a reported £200m to back the British team.

They pulled off one of the greatest days in British sailing history three years later by winning the Louis Vuitton Cup to clinch a place in the Cup match, but they were beaten 7-2 by New Zealand. The relationship between Ratcliffe and Ainslie broke down shortly afterwards, because of differences of opinion about the ownership of the team.

A legal dispute about their yacht is ongoing although, as my colleague Tom Cary noted earlier this year: “It is unclear what Sir Jim would do with a 75ft foiling monohull if he did manage to recover it.”

Relations are now so frosty between the pair that in June Ainslie claimed he was told Ratcliffe would “burn your house down” unless he handed over the team’s assets and intellectual property.

Formula One

Ineos now owns a third of the F1 team, along with Toto Wolff and Mercedes-Benz. Profitable, growing in value and as successful now as when Ineos became involved. A rare unqualified success.

Perhaps not coincidentally, team is run by Wolff, a genius of his sport. Wolff called Ratcliffe “a great sponsor” last year, but he has little input into the day-to-day operations of the team.