SIR Jim Ratcliffe is one of the UK 's richest men.
And with a personal fortune of around £30BILLION, his £1.25 billion investment Manchester United is just a drop in the ocean for the Mancunian.
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 4x4 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.
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.'
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.
