Manchester United hire cycling boss Dave Brailsford to turn around fortunes

Now, following last month’s acquisition of a 25% stake in United by the Ineos sports group, United is trying a more extreme approach. One of the most famous soccer teams on Earth is turning to a professional cycling guru.

Dave Brailsford, the 59-year-old architect of British Cycling’s golden age and Team Sky’s Tour de France bike racing dynasty of the 2010s, is the new man charged with overseeing United’s sporting operations. Until the past five years, Brailsford had never worked in soccer at all. But now installed by the petrochemical giant Ineos, which paid $1.6 billion for its stake in United, it’s his job to nurse this ailing giant of the sport back to health

“They are just coming in and introducing themselves,” United coach Erik ten Hag said of Brailsford and the Ineos team. “They have good ideas, so we have to see what we can integrate.”

Whether Ten Hag should be kept around to do that work is one of the first questions on the docket for Brailsford. Which is a strange new responsibility for a man who normally would have spent this time of year at a sun-drenched training camp in southern Europe, plotting how to win the Tour’s yellow jersey in the Alps. (While running the outfit formerly known as Team Sky, he managed it seven times with four different riders.) Instead, in his new gig, Brailsford spent a recent weekend sitting in the cold and damp of Nottingham, helping Manchester United plot how to win anything at all.

On the field in front of him, the team made it clear just how daunting that task will be. United lost 2-1 to Nottingham Forest, slumping into eighth place in the standings.

Brailsford, who will work alongside former Paris Saint-Germain and Juventus executive Jean-Claude Blanc, knows what he’s up against. Plenty of soccer luminaries have come and gone without managing to restore United’s former glory. This is a club that has spent more than $1 billion on acquiring talent since the summer of 2019 without ever mounting a legitimate challenge for the title. Even when United finished in second place in the 2020-21 season, it still trailed its cross-town rival Manchester City by 12 points.

So there was little doubt in anyone’s mind at United that the club needed fresh ideas. Those seem to have arrived in the form of Ineos, the petrochemical giant built by Jim Ratcliffe that has spent recent years ramping up its investments across the sports world, from sailing to cycling to soccer. Each time, Ratcliffe has placed his trust squarely on Brailsford’s shoulders.

Under Brailsford, Team Sky became an outgrowth of the hugely innovative Great Britain Olympic cycling program that delivered more than a dozen gold medals across the 2008 and 2012 Games. He oversaw a research and development department known as “The Secret Squirrel Club” that holed up at a velodrome in Manchester and reimagined every aspect of competitive cycling on the road and on the track, right down to the geometry of the team’s $23,000 bike. The program produced stars such as Jason Kenny, Laura Trott, Geraint Thomas, and Bradley Wiggins — and even sparked a boom of Lycra-clad bike-lane warriors around the U.K.

For his services to British sporting glory, Brailsford received a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II in 2013.

At the heart of all of it was the Brailsford gospel of “marginal gains.” The philosophy meant targeting every possible advantage, however minute, if it improved the team’s performance by even a fraction. If that meant travelling to the Tour de France with their own custom mattresses and hypo-allergenic sheets, then Brailsford was prepared to do it.

“We had a little team that went into hotels and sanitised all the TV controllers, and the handles and the shower taps, changed all the bedding, hoovered under the beds,” he said in a 2020 interview with The Wall Street Journal. “Many people used to … rib us a little bit, because they thought it was over the top.”

Sky’s methods came under closer scrutiny in 2018 when a British Parliamentary committee investigated the team’s alleged use of corticosteroids in the early 2010s, but the team denied any wrongdoing.

Since linking up with Ineos, Brailsford has applied his meticulous approach to preparing plenty of Ratcliffe’s other sporting projects. He has given advice to the British America’s Cup team and played a key role in Eliud Kipchoge’s successful bid to run a marathon in under 2 hours in 2019. But his only experience in soccer came at OGC Nice, the club on the French Riviera acquired by Ratcliffe five years ago.

There, Brailsford steeped himself in a new world of data, tactics, and the general chaos of soccer’s transfer market. He applied what he could from a lifetime spent studying sports science. He camped out at the practice facility after long nights. Occasionally, Brailsford would even ring more seasoned soccer experts for advice, such as former Arsenal manager Arsène Wenger.

During that time, the club has largely overperformed. It’s currently second in France’s Ligue1 behind only Qatar-backed PSG.

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United, however, brings a different set of issues — and far more pressure. This isn’t a sleepy club where streamlining a few processes and a couple of improvements in professionalism can spark a turnaround. United, in theory, already knows how to do the things that win championships. The club won 13 league titles in the space of 20 years under legendary manager Sir Alex Ferguson, the last coming in the 2012-13 season.

But with Brailsford, Ratcliffe is convinced that a culture of success on the pine boards of Olympic velodromes and the mountain passes of France can translate to the pitch at Old Trafford. It’s an audacious bet that few globally successful sports teams would be prepared to make. Ineos, though, is ready to put over a billion dollars on it.

“You are ambitious for Manchester United and so are we,” Ratcliffe wrote in an open letter to the Manchester United Supporters’ Trust. “There are no guarantees in sport, and change can inevitably take time but we are in it for the long term … I take that responsibility very seriously.”