What’s this? A second article about the Ineos Compass in a week – it’s this kind of inefficiency that would never happen at Manchester United. But I have been staring at the Ineos Compass for the past 48 hours. For those of you fortunate enough not to have encountered it, according to Ineos’s website “the Ineos Compass was devised by chairman Sir Jim Ratcliffe as a fun way of attempting to capture how Ineos works, and why”.
To the untrained (and perhaps also to the trained) eye, it is just a circle with words in it. “Words we like” are in the top portion and “words we don’t like” in the bottom. We like “no human is limited” – despite Sir Jim highlighting the limitations of a number of first-team players on Monday.
We like “walk the talk”, we like “banter”, we like “social skills”, we like “hydrogen”, we like “a beer”. Hey, I like a beer. We don’t like “boring”, we don’t like “hiding”, we don’t like “quitters”. We don’t like “losing money” – certainly the Glazers don’t like losing money. We don’t like “making the same mistake twice”. Is anyone else yelling: “Playing Eriksen and Casemiro as a two in midfield?”
We like “scepticism”. Now that is lucky. And it is easy to be sceptical. Because for those of us not in the corporate world, this looks remarkably like absolute BS or perhaps HS (horse) or TS (total). Just another version of those disingenuous people on the internet grifting about how you too can have an Aga if you just get up early, drink a protein shake and believe in yourself a bit more.
We all have a compass. Words Max likes: sausages, lager, sleep, Mrs Rushden, nice people, two weeks in Tuscany, Puma Kings, flick-ons, onion bhajis, Death in Paradise, the 90s. Words Max doesn’t like: truffle, stilton, jogging, ageing, software update.
For Manchester United fans, this week has been another faintly ridiculous episode in a pretty long-running saga of underperformance on the pitch and odd decisions off it. We’re about to run out of money, we’re going to be the most profitable club in three years, look at this massive new stadium – all without drawing breath. The as yet unsubstantiated claims of running out of cash to justify job cuts and ticket-price rises feel pretty low. Where’s a moral compass when you need one?
This is all easy stuff to take aim at. Those of us who write about football have actively chosen, and somehow managed, to forge a life as far away from corporate land as possible. Perhaps if I had 25,000 employees, a handy chart to tell people what’s good and what isn’t might be sensible. Perhaps some streamlining (words I don’t like) was necessary at Carrington and Old Trafford. From the outside it does feel rather like the soul of the club is being ripped out – morale can’t be high if you think you’re next for the chop.
Any child of the 90s who isn’t a Manchester United fan can’t help but revel in it all going wrong for them on the pitch. But Manchester United fans are people too. They deserve a well-run football team and somewhere affordable that isn’t falling apart to go and watch them.
Football changes very quickly. A quick glance back at this season’s predictions shows that very few people had Marco Asensio and Marcus Rashford spearheading Aston Villa’s march to the latter stages of the Champions League. Some particularly idiotic pundits (hides notes) suggested Nottingham Forest would be relegated. So this time next year, Manchester United could be top of the Premier League. It feels very unlikely. Nothing from anyone in the new structure suggests it’ll happen, but that doesn’t mean it won’t.
But beyond the £2bn circus that is Old-maybe-one-day-New Trafford, the Ineos Compass is symptomatic of what the game has become – and certainly what covering it has become. It is always dangerous for anyone to argue that football was better in their day, in reality you were just young. Likewise, “it was a simpler time” is generally a way of excusing behaviour now rightly frowned upon.
And yet, staring at a page on a multibillion-dollar company website laying out its “unique culture” through the medium of compass is not why anyone fell in love with football.
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I recently watched a wonderful film called Ange and the Boss (beautifully reviewed by Geoff Lemon). It charts the ludicrously unlikely story of how Ferenc Puskas ended up coaching South Melbourne Hellas to the title in the National Soccer League in Australia in 1991. Here was the original Goat, now full pot belly and flat cap in his 60s, living in a tiny house out the back of a garden centre and playing park matches – a stationary heat map and a beautiful left foot.
South Melbourne were the Greek club in Melbourne – the absolute essence of a community club – and they adopted this Hungarian great. Ange Postecoglou was the captain. He had to drive Puskas everywhere. On hot days, Postecoglou would wind down the window with the one working handle, then pass it over to Puskas to do the same. Postecoglou recalls getting a flat tyre and having to jack up his old Datsun, with Puskas just sitting inside waiting to get going again.
It’s impossible to think of a modern comparison. Lionel Messi living out the back of a shop in Cork in 2050 and coaching in the League of Ireland while hacking about in park games on a Sunday afternoon?
Puskas just loved football and loved what it represented. You don’t have to be the greatest footballer of your generation to feel that. Perhaps it’s wishful thinking to suggest it is possible to keep the idea of community and soul at the centre of a global brand in an industry dominated by self-interest, but they are the two words that should be typed in 48pt bold in the middle of any football club’s compass.