Sir Alex Ferguson’s final victory was not the 2012-13 Premier League title, his 13th in nearly 27 years as Manchester United manager. The last triumph was against his own fear of retirement, idleness, isolation: an anxiety that stalked him throughout his later years as British football’s greatest autocrat.
The laughter coming down the corridor of a hotel in Cheshire as I wait to meet him has a familiar mischievous edge. The effervescent Govan boy is still detectable in Ferguson’s laugh, and in his eye, which at 71 still bears the glint of youthful energy. As he emerges with a hotel employee he h
Managing change is the theme of his new autobiography published later this month, which, to declare an interest, I helped him write. Even though Ferguson has stayed on as a United director, the change from touchline tyrant to semi-retired elder statesman is still hard to get used to for people in British football, where he was the dominant figure for two decades.
Towards the end of his time in charge his energies were channelled solely into regaining the Premier League title from Manchester City. Ferguson hated the thought of going out as a runner-up. But with that mission accomplished, he was able to turn to his other interests: horse racing, reading and wine collecting. He is also working with the Harvard Business School on a study of his management techniques.
as known for many years, he jokes, ‘We’re talking about hips.’ A painful hip replacement was one of his first engagements after handing the Manchester United team over to David Moyes, who shares Ferguson’s Glasgow working-class roots.
Managing change is the theme of his new autobiography published later this month, which, to declare an interest, I helped him write. Even though Ferguson has stayed on as a United director, the change from touchline tyrant to semi-retired elder statesman is still hard to get used to for people in British football, where he was the dominant figure for two decades.
Towards the end of his time in charge his energies were channelled solely into regaining the Premier League title from Manchester City. Ferguson hated the thought of going out as a runner-up. But with that mission accomplished, he was able to turn to his other interests: horse racing, reading and wine collecting. He is also working with the Harvard Business School on a study of his management techniques.
as known for many years, he jokes, ‘We’re talking about hips.’ A painful hip replacement was one of his first engagements after handing the Manchester United team over to David Moyes, who shares Ferguson’s Glasgow working-class roots.
The thought of vacating the great football stage had terrified Ferguson throughout the final years of his reign. But with the gift for timing and adaptation he displayed from 1986-2013 in charge of Britain’s biggest club, he devised a way to consign his career to history without submitting himself to torment.
The morning after his final match in charge, a dramatic 5-5 draw at West Bromwich Albion in May, he woke without regrets. ‘My reaction was that I knew it was the best thing for me. I knew I’d done my time,’ he says. ‘It was hard, the day I told people I was retiring. I went home and it was a wee bit hard, that. I got a bit emotional about it. My attitude was, the only way I could really enjoy my life was to forget it, because you can become withdrawn about what you’re going to do. Am I going to miss this? My attitude was, I’m not going to miss it. My time has come. I’d picked the right moment. The successes were mindboggling, to think what had happened to me in my career at United. Forget the past. It’s no use to me.’
Ferguson decided several years ago to revisit in print the upheavals of the past decade, and to examine how he maintained control in the face of changes in United’s ownership, the rise of player power and the new threats posed by Roman Abramovich’s Chelsea and the Middle-Eastern wealth of Manchester City, whom he characterised as ‘the noisy neighbours’.
In his memoirs he recalls the great players he has managed, with emphasis on the second half of his United reign, from Roy Keane to David Beckham and Cristiano Ronaldo, and shares his thoughts on Arsène Wenger, José Mourinho, Rafa Benítez and other managerial adversaries.
As a director Ferguson remains at the heart of the club he joined 27 years ago after turning Aberdeen into a force in European football and usurping the Scottish duopoly of Celtic and Rangers, for whom he was a pugnacious and sharp-elbowed centre- forward before learning his new trade on meagre budgets at East Stirlingshire and St Mirren. Reviving the spirit of Sir Matt Busby, Ferguson imposed his fierce personality on United, dismantling a dressing-room drinking culture and nurturing his own version of the ‘Busby Babes’ with Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes and Beckham, before steering a course into the superstar era of Ronaldo and Robin van Persie. In that time he won 13 English titles, five FA Cups and the Champions League twice.
There is a hard mystique about Ferguson that conceals his warmth of spirit. For the book, he talked a lot about the change that came over him on the way to work. The Ferguson who filled his home in Wilmslow, Cheshire, with old Glaswegian friends, and drove them mad with his singing of old dancehall classics while the house reverberated with laughter, was transformed on the Old Trafford touchline into a demonic presence. Above all, the cliché that falls away is that of a ranter, a bully who ruled by ‘hairdryer’ tirades. As one family member says, ‘Do people really think he managed all those great players for all those years just by shouting?’
Anger, Ferguson admits, was a tool he used in the early days to establish his authority. We discuss, for example, team talks and Ferguson’s trade-unionist soapbox skills, which sometimes featured surprisingly few words. He says, ‘I used to lie in bed thinking up new ideas. I said one day, “This is probably my thousandth team talk,” and Brian McClair [a former player] piped up, “Yeah, and I’ve slept through half of them.”
‘The problem when you’re at a club as long as I was is repetition. The final moments of my address were always about concentration. A mistake I made is that I should have taught them to play chess, because their concentration levels are really important. There was a photograph of Bryan Robson when I first came to United that I used a bit. There’s a free-kick against us and his eyes are glazed. He’s in a cocoon. He’s only in one area.
‘The most interesting team talk I ever gave was at Tottenham when we were 3-0 down at half-time [in 2001]. I just looked at them and said, “What we’re going to do is score the next goal and see where it takes us.” Teddy Sheringham, the Tottenham captain, came out of the door, looked at me and said to his team, “Don’t let them score early.” We scored in the first minute. We were three-nothing down but playing all right. It’s just that the defending was rubbish. Three-nothing down at half-time at Tottenham.’ United won the match 5-3.
‘There are two team talks,’ Ferguson continues. ‘One, if you’re losing, and two, if you’re doing OK. I used more detail when we were winning, to avoid complacency, stop them taking their foot off the gas. When you’re losing you have to get to the core of it right away. Why are we losing? Who’s letting themselves down? Once you do that, you move on to the building-them-up part, to motivate them. Some need a pat on the back. I would normally say, “Paul, that is not you I’m watching out there. That is not you. You’re better than that.” In other words, criticise them with a velvet glove, knowing they’ve let themselves down.
‘Sometimes I would be ferocious in my criticisms. But I would only be ferocious with the ones who could take it, the ones I expected more of. People tell me I never criticised Bryan Robson, which is probably true. He says I did criticise him, once. People said the same of Willie Miller at Aberdeen. One, I could see myself in them. Also, they very seldom let you down. They had a consistency about them, a level that was amazing. Every game meant something to those players. Not everyone has those
‘For me the evidence was always on the football field. It’s quite straightforward, that. There could be reasons why it’s gone wrong. For instance, some player’s kid might have been up during the night, or his mother or father is ill. He might have been out on the town. Generally, the footballers I’ve been associated with can put these things aside, because playing for Manchester United is a big deal.’
While those United players adjust to Moyes, Ferguson has mapped out a new life without the daily 7am drive to the club’s training ground at Carrington, the battles with the media, the tussles with agents, and the struggle to maintain United’s supremacy in a corporate age. Like all executives after a long stint with a company, he began the next stage by removing his belongings from Carrington.
‘I had to go in and clear my desk, of course, which was a nightmare. I had lots of stuff in storage and all over the place. A lot of it was sent up to the house,’ he recalls of the days after his final match in charge. ‘It’s a funny thing, clearing a desk after 27 years, because you pick something up and think, I didn’t know I had that book. Books and files. I looked at some and thought, had I better leave that for David Moyes? Would he be interested in that? I put some stuff aside for David. A lot of the medical stuff, for instance, that had piled up ‘I kept all my notepads. I have all my notepads from when I started at United. They’re all in boxes all over the place. A friend, Paul Doherty, wanted to do a book on my letters and so on. I don’t think looking back on that time would interest me, though it might interest other people. I wish I had kept a diary. I have a good memory for a lot of things but to keep a diary on a daily basis would be absolutely fantastic. You would have to have the discipline to spend half an hour in the afternoon putting down what had happened. Every day. It might become tedious, that.’
The end of the Ferguson era – freakishly long by today’s hire-and-fire norms – made front-page news around the world, sent United fans into mourning and removed from our television screens the last of a great Scottish managerial line stretching from Busby through Jock Stein and Bill Shankly. Unlike Stein and Shankly, who were marginalised by their clubs (Celtic and Liverpool respectively), Ferguson remains close to the decision-making at United.
‘My life as a United person continues,’ he says. ‘And that means winning; enjoying watching them winning. I don’t need to worry about refereeing decisions, agents or the press any more. The best thing that’s happened to me, without doubt, is that I don’t see my name in the papers. What used to annoy me about the weekly [Friday] press conference in particular was that Sky used to run it for 24 hours. Every 20 minutes. I used to go crazy about that. It used to annoy me. I don’t need to worry about that now. It’s a relief not having to read about yourself all the time. It’s bloody boring.’
But surely the powerlessness of watching United as a mere spectator is disorientating?
over the years. Some scouting re ‘I’m a spectator with responsibility. I’m a director and I want to make a contribution as a director that will play a part. We’ve got a young chief executive now [Ed Woodward] who will need help, I think. And David Gill [his predecessor] is still there to help him. We’ve got a young manager and I’m there to help him. We’ve had a lot of dialogue, David [Moyes] and I, over the last few weeks, and he’s been very, very good. He’s been very open about what his plans have been. Any help he’s needed or wanted, he’s got it there.’
To avoid the traps of boredom and physical decline, into which he has seen elderly friends and colleagues fall, Ferguson set up an office in Wilmslow where his son Jason, also his agent, and a small team field commercial and other offers. Ferguson’s favourite current tie-up is with the Harvard Business School, where he was asked to take part in an academic project examining his success at United.
‘When Harvard first approached me about a case study I was quite cautious about it,’ he says. ‘I said to Jason, is it not a bit vain, standing in a classroom talking about your career? Jason said, how can you be vain at 70 years of age? Which is a fair point. I’ve really enjoyed it. I’ve enjoyed seeing the young people and the questions they ask. The next time I go there I’m going to be more involved in a class. That’s my challenge, you know? Having challenges of a different nature away from managing a football team will be good for me.
‘You talk about leadership. Leadership, as I’ve known it, from my time as manager, has come in different stages. If you look at Sir Terry Leahy, who had a short spell as leader at Tesco, as opposed to my 27 years, the gathering of all the things he learnt, and the qualities he has, is similar to myself, in the sense that he was in control of a big unit. There are things he can teach people. It doesn’t matter whether it’s football or banking, there are certain ingredients that are you and no one else.ports on young players. That kept me busy for two or three days powers.
I’ve had to think about what I can offer now. Say I go into the classroom at Harvard. How would I start off, with 27 years? What did I have at the beginning? What qualities was I born with? What do I think are the most important elements of my career? I think personality and I think energy. People underestimate energy. Your energy level is always there, because it’s an exacting industry. And personality-wise, you need a strong one, in the sense that you’re dealing with people with egos. Some are successful, some are not so successful and need the guidance.’
Before the hip replacement, Ferguson fulfilled a lifetime’s dream and hired a boat to tour the Hebrides, in pristine summer weather. ‘That was one of the best things I’ve ever done,’ he says. ‘I’d always wanted to do it. Brought up in Glasgow, you’re 20 minutes from Loch Lomond, which is really the start of the Highlands, on the west side. The nearest I’d ever got to the islands was summer camp, at the southern end of the Highlands. But you’d only ever see documentaries of the islands, the Inner Hebrides, and they’re fantastic.
‘We had the boat to ourselves, with a great chef, a skipper, two engineers, my three sons, my brother, brother-in-law and five pals. We saw a sea eagle, we saw seals, we saw a whale dipping, we saw sharks, puffins. After the trip the girl [from the boat company] phoned me up and said she’d found a small case with six bottles of wine in it. She said, “What do you want me to do with it?” I said, “Drink it.” It must have been under a bed.’ As a boy, he says, there was ‘no chance’ of a lad from the Govan shipyards undertaking such a voyage. ‘Our holiday was always at Saltcoats, 25 miles away on the west coast.’
Ferguson extended his non-footballing interests a decade or so ago as an antidote to obsession, at a time when he was ‘never off the phone’ and thinking only about the game. American history – he has an extensive archive of documents and research on the JFK assassination, which haunted him as a young man in Glasgow – wine and racing took the pressure off. His reading material for some months now has been Robert Caro’s five-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson. ‘I’ve finished them. The fourth book is the one everyone wanted to read, about the Kennedy era and his relationship with them, as vice president, the assassination, him becoming president and the decisions he took right away,’ Ferguson says.
With retirement comes an altered perspective on the madness and intensity of English football. ‘What I find quite interesting – and I probably knew this – is that football is a media industry too,’ he says. ‘For instance, I probably never bothered about seeing how the press portrayed England for international games. I knew the manager’s job was a nightmare. Now, I scan papers more than I did in 20-odd years. I was interested in reading all the things about Roy Hodgson and the [recent] game in Ukraine, the angles they take.
The morning after his final match in charge, a dramatic 5-5 draw at West Bromwich Albion in May, he woke without regrets. ‘My reaction was that I knew it was the best thing for me. I knew I’d done my time,’ he says. ‘It was hard, the day I told people I was retiring. I went home and it was a wee bit hard, that. I got a bit emotional about it. My attitude was, the only way I could really enjoy my life was to forget it, because you can become withdrawn about what you’re going to do. Am I going to miss this? My attitude was, I’m not going to miss it. My time has come. I’d picked the right moment. The successes were mindboggling, to think what had happened to me in my career at United. Forget the past. It’s no use to me.’
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Ferguson decided several years ago to revisit in print the upheavals of the past decade, and to examine how he maintained control in the face of changes in United’s ownership, the rise of player power and the new threats posed by Roman Abramovich’s Chelsea and the Middle-Eastern wealth of Manchester City, whom he characterised as ‘the noisy neighbours’.
In his memoirs he recalls the great players he has managed, with emphasis on the second half of his United reign, from Roy Keane to David Beckham and Cristiano Ronaldo, and shares his thoughts on Arsène Wenger, José Mourinho, Rafa Benítez and other managerial adversaries.
As a director Ferguson remains at the heart of the club he joined 27 years ago after turning Aberdeen into a force in European football and usurping the Scottish duopoly of Celtic and Rangers, for whom he was a pugnacious and sharp-elbowed centre- forward before learning his new trade on meagre budgets at East Stirlingshire and St Mirren. Reviving the spirit of Sir Matt Busby, Ferguson imposed his fierce personality on United, dismantling a dressing-room drinking culture and nurturing his own version of the ‘Busby Babes’ with Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes and Beckham, before steering a course into the superstar era of Ronaldo and Robin van Persie. In that time he won 13 English titles, five FA Cups and the Champions League twice.
There is a hard mystique about Ferguson that conceals his warmth of spirit. For the book, he talked a lot about the change that came over him on the way to work. The Ferguson who filled his home in Wilmslow, Cheshire, with old Glaswegian friends, and drove them mad with his singing of old dancehall classics while the house reverberated with laughter, was transformed on the Old Trafford touchline into a demonic presence. Above all, the cliché that falls away is that of a ranter, a bully who ruled by ‘hairdryer’ tirades. As one family member says, ‘Do people really think he managed all those great players for all those years just by shouting?’
Anger, Ferguson admits, was a tool he used in the early days to establish his authority. We discuss, for example, team talks and Ferguson’s trade-unionist soapbox skills, which sometimes featured surprisingly few words. He says, ‘I used to lie in bed thinking up new ideas. I said one day, “This is probably my thousandth team talk,” and Brian McClair [a former player] piped up, “Yeah, and I’ve slept through half of them.”
‘The problem when you’re at a club as long as I was is repetition. The final moments of my address were always about concentration. A mistake I made is that I should have taught them to play chess, because their concentration levels are really important. There was a photograph of Bryan Robson when I first came to United that I used a bit. There’s a free-kick against us and his eyes are glazed. He’s in a cocoon. He’s only in one area.
‘The most interesting team talk I ever gave was at Tottenham when we were 3-0 down at half-time [in 2001]. I just looked at them and said, “What we’re going to do is score the next goal and see where it takes us.” Teddy Sheringham, the Tottenham captain, came out of the door, looked at me and said to his team, “Don’t let them score early.” We scored in the first minute. We were three-nothing down but playing all right. It’s just that the defending was rubbish. Three-nothing down at half-time at Tottenham.’ United won the match 5-3.
‘Sometimes I would be ferocious in my criticisms. But I would only be ferocious with the ones who could take it, the ones I expected more of. People tell me I never criticised Bryan Robson, which is probably true. He says I did criticise him, once. People said the same of Willie Miller at Aberdeen. One, I could see myself in them. Also, they very seldom let you down. They had a consistency about them, a level that was amazing. Every game meant something to those players. Not everyone has those
‘For me the evidence was always on the football field. It’s quite straightforward, that. There could be reasons why it’s gone wrong. For instance, some player’s kid might have been up during the night, or his mother or father is ill. He might have been out on the town. Generally, the footballers I’ve been associated with can put these things aside, because playing for Manchester United is a big deal.’
While those United players adjust to Moyes, Ferguson has mapped out a new life without the daily 7am drive to the club’s training ground at Carrington, the battles with the media, the tussles with agents, and the struggle to maintain United’s supremacy in a corporate age. Like all executives after a long stint with a company, he began the next stage by removing his belongings from Carrington.
‘I had to go in and clear my desk, of course, which was a nightmare. I had lots of stuff in storage and all over the place. A lot of it was sent up to the house,’ he recalls of the days after his final match in charge. ‘It’s a funny thing, clearing a desk after 27 years, because you pick something up and think, I didn’t know I had that book. Books and files. I looked at some and thought, had I better leave that for David Moyes? Would he be interested in that? I put some stuff aside for David. A lot of the medical stuff, for instance, that had piled up ‘I kept all my notepads. I have all my notepads from when I started at United. They’re all in boxes all over the place. A friend, Paul Doherty, wanted to do a book on my letters and so on. I don’t think looking back on that time would interest me, though it might interest other people. I wish I had kept a diary. I have a good memory for a lot of things but to keep a diary on a daily basis would be absolutely fantastic. You would have to have the discipline to spend half an hour in the afternoon putting down what had happened. Every day. It might become tedious, that.’
The end of the Ferguson era – freakishly long by today’s hire-and-fire norms – made front-page news around the world, sent United fans into mourning and removed from our television screens the last of a great Scottish managerial line stretching from Busby through Jock Stein and Bill Shankly. Unlike Stein and Shankly, who were marginalised by their clubs (Celtic and Liverpool respectively), Ferguson remains close to the decision-making at United.
‘My life as a United person continues,’ he says. ‘And that means winning; enjoying watching them winning. I don’t need to worry about refereeing decisions, agents or the press any more. The best thing that’s happened to me, without doubt, is that I don’t see my name in the papers. What used to annoy me about the weekly [Friday] press conference in particular was that Sky used to run it for 24 hours. Every 20 minutes. I used to go crazy about that. It used to annoy me. I don’t need to worry about that now. It’s a relief not having to read about yourself all the time. It’s bloody boring.’
But surely the powerlessness of watching United as a mere spectator is disorientating?
over the years. Some scouting re ‘I’m a spectator with responsibility. I’m a director and I want to make a contribution as a director that will play a part. We’ve got a young chief executive now [Ed Woodward] who will need help, I think. And David Gill [his predecessor] is still there to help him. We’ve got a young manager and I’m there to help him. We’ve had a lot of dialogue, David [Moyes] and I, over the last few weeks, and he’s been very, very good. He’s been very open about what his plans have been. Any help he’s needed or wanted, he’s got it there.’
To avoid the traps of boredom and physical decline, into which he has seen elderly friends and colleagues fall, Ferguson set up an office in Wilmslow where his son Jason, also his agent, and a small team field commercial and other offers. Ferguson’s favourite current tie-up is with the Harvard Business School, where he was asked to take part in an academic project examining his success at United.
‘When Harvard first approached me about a case study I was quite cautious about it,’ he says. ‘I said to Jason, is it not a bit vain, standing in a classroom talking about your career? Jason said, how can you be vain at 70 years of age? Which is a fair point. I’ve really enjoyed it. I’ve enjoyed seeing the young people and the questions they ask. The next time I go there I’m going to be more involved in a class. That’s my challenge, you know? Having challenges of a different nature away from managing a football team will be good for me.
‘You talk about leadership. Leadership, as I’ve known it, from my time as manager, has come in different stages. If you look at Sir Terry Leahy, who had a short spell as leader at Tesco, as opposed to my 27 years, the gathering of all the things he learnt, and the qualities he has, is similar to myself, in the sense that he was in control of a big unit. There are things he can teach people. It doesn’t matter whether it’s football or banking, there are certain ingredients that are you and no one else.ports on young players. That kept me busy for two or three days powers.
I’ve had to think about what I can offer now. Say I go into the classroom at Harvard. How would I start off, with 27 years? What did I have at the beginning? What qualities was I born with? What do I think are the most important elements of my career? I think personality and I think energy. People underestimate energy. Your energy level is always there, because it’s an exacting industry. And personality-wise, you need a strong one, in the sense that you’re dealing with people with egos. Some are successful, some are not so successful and need the guidance.’
Before the hip replacement, Ferguson fulfilled a lifetime’s dream and hired a boat to tour the Hebrides, in pristine summer weather. ‘That was one of the best things I’ve ever done,’ he says. ‘I’d always wanted to do it. Brought up in Glasgow, you’re 20 minutes from Loch Lomond, which is really the start of the Highlands, on the west side. The nearest I’d ever got to the islands was summer camp, at the southern end of the Highlands. But you’d only ever see documentaries of the islands, the Inner Hebrides, and they’re fantastic.
‘We had the boat to ourselves, with a great chef, a skipper, two engineers, my three sons, my brother, brother-in-law and five pals. We saw a sea eagle, we saw seals, we saw a whale dipping, we saw sharks, puffins. After the trip the girl [from the boat company] phoned me up and said she’d found a small case with six bottles of wine in it. She said, “What do you want me to do with it?” I said, “Drink it.” It must have been under a bed.’ As a boy, he says, there was ‘no chance’ of a lad from the Govan shipyards undertaking such a voyage. ‘Our holiday was always at Saltcoats, 25 miles away on the west coast.’
Ferguson extended his non-footballing interests a decade or so ago as an antidote to obsession, at a time when he was ‘never off the phone’ and thinking only about the game. American history – he has an extensive archive of documents and research on the JFK assassination, which haunted him as a young man in Glasgow – wine and racing took the pressure off. His reading material for some months now has been Robert Caro’s five-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson. ‘I’ve finished them. The fourth book is the one everyone wanted to read, about the Kennedy era and his relationship with them, as vice president, the assassination, him becoming president and the decisions he took right away,’ Ferguson says.
With retirement comes an altered perspective on the madness and intensity of English football. ‘What I find quite interesting – and I probably knew this – is that football is a media industry too,’ he says. ‘For instance, I probably never bothered about seeing how the press portrayed England for international games. I knew the manager’s job was a nightmare. Now, I scan papers more than I did in 20-odd years. I was interested in reading all the things about Roy Hodgson and the [recent] game in Ukraine, the angles they take.
‘Some are pro, some are against, some are middle-of-the-road. Roy’s reaction was interesting. Roy’s a manager of great experience. I was surprised he got annoyed by Gary Lineker [who tweeted that England were ‘awful’]. Gary always comes across with wee throwaway lines. I was surprised Roy got himself annoyed with that.
‘I don’t think the manager’s job with England is a good one. I think it’s a horrible job. For instance, Greg Dyke [the new Football Association chairman] comes out and says they’re going to win the World Cup in 2022. He may know something about football – and I’m sure he’s trying to learn what’s going on – but from grassroots levels right up to the national team, that is a massive job. Managers have tried different ways of managing the press. Some have tried to curry favour with some and not others. But because England haven’t won the World Cup since 1966 they’re all going up the same alley. Unless you win, it’s a hard job.’
Ferguson’s preoccupation with the press affirms that a mutating media industry was about the only aspect of life at Old Trafford where he was unable to exercise total authority. The media defied and occasionally goaded him. In Scotland, where he learnt how to win power struggles with players and directors, he had been able to manage journalistic output in a way that was more to his liking.
A strong personal belief is that Ferguson had already honed his talent for psychology and man management by the time he crossed the border to head to Manchester. He agrees. ‘Definitely. By that time with nine years’ experience at Aberdeen I had matured, I was successful, I was confident. We won a European final against Real Madrid and I thought we were a certainty. I was at the stage where I couldn’t see us losing a game.
‘And I had a great chairman [Dick Donald]. He gave you the confidence. One day when I was having a hard time at Aberdeen I was asked by Dick how things were going. I grumbled an answer. “Why did I bring you here?” Dick asked. I said, “I don’t know, er, because you thought I’m OK?” And he walked away, more or less saying, you’re wasting my time, son. Short, brief.
‘There was a lot of trepidation, a lot of apprehension when I went to United. I remember Martin Edwards [the former chairman] telling me there were seven players injured. I sat on the plane from Aberdeen to Manchester thinking, what kind of team do I have? Your head is full of doubts. Then Martin gave me a list of the players that were there. I thought, we haven’t got anyone to play in midfield. Nightmare.
‘But there’s one thing you should always have as a manager. By the time you pick the team you should never think you’re not going to win. I always thought my teams would win, no matter how many injuries I had. I dismissed them. They were no use to me. I think that’s a quality. Once they put that red jersey on, we were all right.’
That statement, which defines Ferguson the football manager, could be pinned to United’s dressing-room door for ever.
‘I don’t think the manager’s job with England is a good one. I think it’s a horrible job. For instance, Greg Dyke [the new Football Association chairman] comes out and says they’re going to win the World Cup in 2022. He may know something about football – and I’m sure he’s trying to learn what’s going on – but from grassroots levels right up to the national team, that is a massive job. Managers have tried different ways of managing the press. Some have tried to curry favour with some and not others. But because England haven’t won the World Cup since 1966 they’re all going up the same alley. Unless you win, it’s a hard job.’
Ferguson’s preoccupation with the press affirms that a mutating media industry was about the only aspect of life at Old Trafford where he was unable to exercise total authority. The media defied and occasionally goaded him. In Scotland, where he learnt how to win power struggles with players and directors, he had been able to manage journalistic output in a way that was more to his liking.
A strong personal belief is that Ferguson had already honed his talent for psychology and man management by the time he crossed the border to head to Manchester. He agrees. ‘Definitely. By that time with nine years’ experience at Aberdeen I had matured, I was successful, I was confident. We won a European final against Real Madrid and I thought we were a certainty. I was at the stage where I couldn’t see us losing a game.
‘And I had a great chairman [Dick Donald]. He gave you the confidence. One day when I was having a hard time at Aberdeen I was asked by Dick how things were going. I grumbled an answer. “Why did I bring you here?” Dick asked. I said, “I don’t know, er, because you thought I’m OK?” And he walked away, more or less saying, you’re wasting my time, son. Short, brief.
‘There was a lot of trepidation, a lot of apprehension when I went to United. I remember Martin Edwards [the former chairman] telling me there were seven players injured. I sat on the plane from Aberdeen to Manchester thinking, what kind of team do I have? Your head is full of doubts. Then Martin gave me a list of the players that were there. I thought, we haven’t got anyone to play in midfield. Nightmare.
‘But there’s one thing you should always have as a manager. By the time you pick the team you should never think you’re not going to win. I always thought my teams would win, no matter how many injuries I had. I dismissed them. They were no use to me. I think that’s a quality. Once they put that red jersey on, we were all right.’
That statement, which defines Ferguson the football manager, could be pinned to United’s dressing-room door for ever.
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