Divide and conquer. The term famously attributed to Julius Caesar’s campaigns in the Gaul. This was the first term I thought of when Jim Ratcliffe’s comment that the ‘UK has been colonised by immigrants’ hit the headlines.
The Premier League is, for the most part, an inclusive and progressive sporting campaign, bringing together players of all nationalities and backgrounds to compete at the highest level. Over the past two decades, it has consistently been described as the best and most competitive football league in the world. And Manchester United – widely regarded as the biggest club in the Premier League, if not the world – remains one of its most iconic and influential teams.
So when Jim Ratcliffe, INEOS founder and Manchester United co-owner, made this repugnant remark about immigrants, it resulted in uproar throughout the footballing community. And rightfully so. RATcliffe went on to use incorrect statistics to back up his comment – ‘The population of the UK was 58 million in 2020. Now it’s 70 million. That’s 12 million people,” – implying that this population increase is due to an influx of immigrants, not that this would necessarily be a bad thing.
Firstly, this is factually incorrect. UK population figures compiled by the Office for National Statistics estimate that the UK population had only grown by 2.7 million since 2020, not 12 million. ‘Sir’ Jim, though his character is perhaps not befitting of a ‘Sir’, also claimed that immigrants cost “too much money” and “you can’t have an economy with 9 million people on benefits.” Using incorrect statistics to back up an already hateful set of comments is both distasteful and misleading at best. Instead, I would go as far as to say it is incredibly hypocritical and, quite frankly, abhorrent.
Yet ‘Sir’ Jim sits on an overwhelming accumulation of wealth. With an estimated net-worth of £29.6 billion, making him one of the country’s richest men, he is not exactly strapped for cash, is he? Not only is he an ‘elite’, but he is an ‘economic migrant’, having changed his tax residence from Hampshire to Monaco. Yes, you guessed it, to avoid paying an estimated £4 billion on tax annually.
By contrast, the Premier League’s roots are embedded in 19th-century British working-class culture, originating from teams formed by factory workers, coal miners, and churches in industrial, northern towns. Initially, these clubs served as a social, “people’s game” for local communities. Completely relatable to our ‘Sir’ Jim, eh?
That being said, as I mentioned in a previous article, football is shifting away from the working class and into a lucrative, multibillion-pound industry. It has become unaffordable for working-class people and this is a direct result of contributions from people like ‘Sir’ Jim.
Football is emblematic of the very community that it was built on. People of all races and ethnicities included.
Furthermore, these comments come at a time of political instability alongside the rise of Reform. The likes of Farage and Tommy-ten-names, undeniably embracing and encouraging populism, have appealed to much of the working-class, as epitomised by opinion poll statistics, with a rhetoric that is integrally racist and extremely anti-immigration.
Brilliantly, high-profile figures in the footballing world have condemned ‘Sir’ Jim’s comments. Most notably Gary Lineker, who said that Ratcliffe aimed to ‘divide us’ and underpinned the sheer hypocrisy in ‘Sir’ Jim’s sentiment. Moreover, Pep Guardiola passionately said ‘blaming immigration is wrong’ and that ‘we will have a better society’ by embracing other cultures. In many ways, such outspoken defence of inclusion and unity serves as a form of redemption for football – a reminder that beyond the money and the politics, the sport still has the power to stand for diversity, solidarity and shared humanity.
Much of immigration to the UK can be traced back to the British Empire. This influence is reflected in the composition of the English national football team. In recent years, the team has been a prominent force on the global stage, and a significant portion of its players are of Afro-Caribbean descent. In fact, it’s fair to say that many – if not the majority – are not ‘Anglo-Saxon’ as the right likes to put it. Additionally, the vast majority of the Manchester United team is composed of ‘immigrants’ – people who weren’t born in the UK.
However, the backlash faced by several Black England players after the UEFA Euro 2020 Final starkly illustrates that racism in football remains deeply entrenched. Following England’s penalty shootout defeat to Italy at Wembley, players including Marcus Rashford and Jadon Sancho – heavily associated with Manchester United – were subjected to a torrent of racist abuse online after missing their spot-kicks. This episode exposes how quickly sections of the fanbase turned on young Black players who had carried a nation’s hopes throughout the tournament. In that context, comments such as those made by ‘Sir’ Jim add fuel to an already blazing fire.
When it comes to class, the Thatcher era introduced neoliberal economics, a system that, in its most blunt terms, has brought ‘huge disparities between the rich and poor’. Successive British governments have continued this trend, siphoning assets and opportunities from the average citizens into the pockets of billionaires. As ordinary people struggle with dwindling resources, many look for someone to blame – and the very billionaires who control major media outlets and crucial parts of UK infrastructure often redirect that frustration towards immigration. Scapegoating is a tale as old as time, or as old as the words of Caesar.
So when I said ‘Divide and Conquer’, this applies to the billionaires of the world – including ‘Sir’ Jim – who exploit hatred and division to manipulate people struggling to get by. Many football fans fall into this category: they see themselves as worse off than the previous generation and are searching for answers. The message is clear: you have more in common with your migrant neighbour than with a billionaire.
‘Sir’ Jim has since come out and apologised for his ‘choice of language’, in what seems a half-arsed effort at regaining public support and avoiding further retaliation from the footballing community. By no means should we grant him an ounce of forgiveness.
As I see it, who’s to say people who are fleeing conflict or merely want a better life – irrespective of race and ethnicity – do not have a right to emigrate into the UK? Especially since we colonised so much of the world?
But our world is one rife with hypocrisy. Is it human nature? I have no idea.
