Why Sir Jim Ratcliffe can afford to name names analysing Manchester United's wretched recruitment

Mason Mount will have breathed a huge sigh of relief at six o'clock on Monday.

Sir Jim Ratcliffe namechecked five of Manchester United's expensive duds, four of them signed in the ruinous summers overseen by former chief executive Richard Arnold and then-football director John Murtough.

Antony? Check. Casemiro? Check. Andre Onana? Check. Rasmus Hojlund? Check. Jadon Sancho? Check. United negotiated transfer fees totalling £348.4million for that quintet.

Mount has appeared 33 times out of a possible 96 games. Bruno Fernandes, dubbed a "fabulous footballer" by Ratcliffe, has played for United 90 times during that period.

Mount’s name did crop up during Ratcliffe’s PR offensive. He has “hardly played in the last two seasons”. Ditto Luke Shaw. Ratcliffe confirmed both are among United’s eight highest earners.

Shaw and Mount share a hospitality box at Old Trafford, a cost-efficient measure Ratcliffe would approve of. Plenty of United fans would pay the cost for their joint-cab fare to Manchester Airport.

For someone who has been repeatedly called a “c**t” by matchgoers in recent months, Ratcliffe has at least stuck his neck above the parapet. Albeit he dodged the dedicated correspondents in Manchester again.

His round of media engagements on Monday were conducted at Ineos’s office in Knightsbridge. One interrogator was Gary Neville, a former footballer, a football club owner, a pundit, a businessman, a budding politician and not a journalist. Neville is also, conveniently, on the Old Trafford Regeneration Task Force.

Ratcliffe has a long-standing relationship with Dan Roan of the BBC. He made time for chief sports writers of two right-leaning broadsheets, as is the wont of a tax exile whose principal address is the