Assessing the INEOS era at Nice ahead of the company’s potential takeover of Manchester United – data analysis

Amid reports linking INEOS and CEO Jim Ratcliffe with a landmark takeover of EPL giants Manchester United — whose fans have been vocally protesting against current owners, the Glazer family since they initially bought the club in a highly leveraged deal back in 2005 — INEOS are in the process of winding down their fourth season as owners of Ligue 1 side Nice.

Since taking over Les Aiglons back in late-summer 2019, Nice have finished fifth (2019/20), ninth (2020/21), fifth (2021/22) and currently sit eighth in the 2022/23 table. All the while, Nice have got the third-biggest net transfer expenditure for the last three seasons (€77.27m), trailing only Marseille (€109.42m) and, of course, PSG (€229.8m).

Nice goalkeeper Kasper Schmeichel recently appeared on Sky Sports’ Monday Night Football to discuss life at Nice under INEOS. The 36-year-old was quizzed on what INEOS could bring to Manchester United as potential owners — he didn’t hesitate to wax lyrical about the Nice owners in what came across as a clear attempt to paint his employers in a very positive light, unsurprisingly.

That’s not to say Schmeichel was entirely disingenuous and we wouldn’t suggest as much. However, it’s hardly providing the public with the necessary information to form a just opinion about how INEOS could approach life at Manchester United by getting insight from one of their current employees, is it?

This article will attempt to provide a balanced view of INEOS’ period of ownership at Nice. With the help of data, we’ll share analysis of some key areas regarding the club’s development during the INEOS era to look into some notable strategies that Ratcliffe’s group has overseen. We hope this data analysis provides some valuable insight into this group’s approach to club ownership and helps others form a clearer opinion about their period in Provence-Alpes-Côte dAzur.

For the sake of comparing the pre-INEOS era to the INEOS era, we’ve decided to exclude the 2019/20 season from the statistics and data used in this analysis, as Ratcliffe took over Nice in August 2019, so it’s very much a transitional period between the two eras. We’ll look at the last three seasons, 2022/23 inclusive, under INEOS while using 2016/17-2018/19 for the pre-INEOS era.

Transfer spending

As mentioned in the introduction to this piece, Nice have had the third-highest net spend in Ligue 1 over the last three seasons with €77.27m.

As figure 1 shows, Nice’s transfer expenditure steadily increased from 2016/17 to 2018/19 but has skyrocketed over the past two seasons. Despite this, Nice haven’t really splashed massively on any one player, the largest signing of the last two seasons being €22m on Sofiane Diop, pending Terem Moffi’s €22.5m transfer this coming summer which we haven’t included in this graph.

The €22m spent on Diop is obviously a big sum but in the context of top-level football, it’s not a mindblowing amount in 2023. The last two seasons have also seen the likes of Gaëtan Laborde (€15m), Calvin Stengs (€15m) and Andy Delort (€10m) signed — a mixture of youth and experience. Generally, the money has tended to be spread out among multiple signings of similar stature as opposed to one or two big marquee transfers.