Manchester United bidder Sir Jim Ratcliffe could be forced to sell his stake in French club Nice to avoid the prospect of one of his teams being excluded from the Champions League if he wins the race to buy out the Glazer family and take ownership of the Premier League side, a source has told ESPN.
Ratcliffe, a boyhood United fan and Britain’s richest man with a reported fortune of £6.1 billion, has lodged a bid with the New York bank Raine Group to buy the Glazers’ 69% stake in United. If Ratcliffe is successful, he and his chemicals company INEOS would be the owners of three clubs — United, Nice and Swiss second tier side FC Lausanne-Sport.
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And although UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin said earlier this month that European football’s governing body was ready to review regulations around multi-club ownership, Ratcliffe would contravene existing rules if both United and Nice qualified for the same UEFA competition under his ownership.
Article 5 of UEFA’s club competition regulations relates to integrity of the competition and multi-club ownership, with the rules forbidding two teams controlled by the same person or group from competing in the same competition.
In 2017, a UEFA panel of financial experts accepted that the Red Bull group had sufficiently restructured and separated the management structure of RB Leipzig and Red Bull Salzburg — known as FC Salzburg in UEFA competition — to enable both the German and Austrian teams to participate in the Champions League together.
