When René Meulensteen became our coach after Carlos Queiroz left us for the second time, it was much easier, because he had worked for several years within our system. He’d been on the scene and had helped the players who were then youngsters–Danny Welbeck, Tom Cleverley and Cristiano Ronaldo–develop their technical skills. René inherited all of Carlos’s crossing and defending drills, but he also added features of his own. René was also a devotee of Wiel Coerver, the great Dutch coach, who was among the first to emphasise the importance of ankle mobility and its influence on ball control, so he also helped enhance our system. Mick Phelan is another example of the benefits of growing up within a system. He had played for me; I brought him in as a youth coach and he gradually worked his way up the organisation until he became assistant manager in 2008.
I never had a chance to experiment with helping some of United’s best players become coaches and–eventually–managers, but I always felt that would have been a great way to ensure the continuity of excellence at Old Trafford. Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes, Gary Neville and Nicky Butt all had those attributes, but I was never going to suggest to them, ‘Quit playing and become a coach.’ I had really wanted Neville to be involved with our academy, but he got a contract with Sky and went into the television world. I was disappointed, as Gary’s character and attitude would have enhanced the club and Paul is one of the best assessors of a footballer within the game. I feel they were a loss to Manchester United.
I’ve lost count of the times during my career that I was accused of having a lot of luck, or intimidating referees into providing a lavish amount of extra time, when United were losing at home. There were plenty of times when Lady Luck blew in our direction–it happens all the time in football. Yet preparation had a lot more to do with our success than a few fortunate breaks.
Part of the pursuit of excellence involves eliminating as many surprises as possible because life is full of the unexpected. That’s what our scouts, our youth system and the innumerable training sessions were all about. But there were also occasions where we did extra homework because we felt unprepared. For example, I always wanted to know as much as possible about what we were going to contend with before any game. After I joined United, I had no idea about all the players at the clubs in what was then the First Division. So I asked John Lyall to send me his files and reports on all the teams and players we were up against. He had an experienced eye and reading his material was a great help.
Relentless homework, all of it unglamorous, was a mainstay of United. Here’s one example. When we played Bayern Munich in the 1999 Champions League final, we had done our homework. In every game you wanted to have a sense for how the opposing manager might change his tactics during a game. Of course, that is something that is difficult to predict, but thorough preparation can sometimes suggest which players might get substituted. In the 1999 final, the Bayern winger, Mario Basler, who was deadly with free kicks, scored a few minutes into the game. Alexander Zickler, who was a mainstay of the Bayern side for many seasons, played wide left that night. We had predicted that Zickler and Basler would both be substituted. We hadn’t rubbed any crystal ball; we had just watched the tapes of Bayern and knew they would take these players off. Zickler came off in the 71st minute and Basler in the 87th. These substitutions deprived Bayern of a lot of their ability to penetrate our defences and, as a result, they were less of a threat and we could throw more bodies forward in search of a goal. Many years later, while we were preparing to meet Barcelona in the 2008 Champions League semi-final, Carlos Queiroz placed mats on the field to show the players exactly where he wanted them–a couple of the mats were almost placed atop one another to emphasise how tightly we wanted Scholes and Carrick to bottle the attacks through our midfield. Barcelona failed to score in either leg.
In the 36 hours before a game there was a rhythm to our preparation. We’d show a short, condensed video of the opponents to the players before we practised and then, at the hotel, on the evening of the game, we’d centre their attention on the things they needed to pay heed to. We kept these videos short because most players, especially the young ones, have limited attention spans. I always liked to dwell on an opponent’s weaknesses rather than its strengths. While it was good to look at video of some of the lethal players we would find ourselves up against, ultimately no battles are won by mounting a sterling defence. The way to win battles, wars and games is by attacking and overrunning the opposing side. So I would always dwell on our opponents’ weaknesses–partly to exploit them and partly to impart in my players a sense of what was possible. If you overemphasise opponents’ strengths, you just plant seeds of doubt in your players.
On the day of the game itself, I’d finalise the team and run through the precise tactics I wanted employed. I paid attention to a couple of other little items. I used to check out which of the players on the opposing team were making their Old Trafford debut. We used to purposefully exert more pressure on these individuals–it was one way we rolled out our red carpet. Another thing I was always mindful about were the talented players we would line up against who were not especially hard workers. These players would always have something left in the last 20 minutes because they had not been busting their guts during the earlier stages. Matthew Le Tissier, who appeared more than 500 times for Southampton, was one of these types. He could be loitering around for a good part of the game and, just when everyone was spent, could ruin our afternoon in the blink of an eye. The others in this category were the so-called ‘floaters’, the sort of players who would often wear the number 10 shirt in Spain or South America. They drifted around between the midfield and the strikers and you never knew if they would play on the left or right or in the middle of the park. David Silva was one of two or three players who filled this role at Valencia. These type of players are free to roam and would save their energy for when their team had the ball. The fact that they could appear in different parts of the pitch and not operate in restricted areas meant we could not afford a single lapse of concentration.
On our own team, the best players tended to be sticklers for preparation. That’s part of the reason why they were good or great. David Beckham, Ryan Giggs, Cristiano Ronaldo and Wayne Rooney would all stay after training to perfect their free kicks. They would not disappear for a long bath, or a massage, or be straight out the door because they had to run down to a car dealership. They would be religious about spending an extra 30 minutes trying to bend balls around a row of mannequins and past the goalkeeper. That’s why Beckham became a master of taking free kicks from between 25 and 30 yards from goal; and Giggs from between 18 and 23 yards; while Rooney was better closer to the penalty box. As for Ronaldo, he’d be able to score from free kicks if he took them from behind the moon.
The crowd looked at the goal Beckham scored from the halfway line against Wimbledon in 1996 as if it was some sort of miracle. It was nothing of the sort. He must have practised that same kick hundreds of times so, when opportunity struck in south London, he seized it. The same goes for lots of goals scored by the United players. They had been scored, or certainly practised, for hundreds of hours during training sessions.
I came to admire how some other managers prepared their teams because the majority of them had the challenge of extracting performance from players who had nowhere near the talent of the Manchester United squad. Sam Allardyce, who played for most of his career at Bolton and Preston before managing Bolton, Newcastle, Blackburn and West Ham in the Premier League, is a prime example. Kevin Davies was a striker who played for Sam at Bolton, but did not move like lightning and was quite cumbersome.
When Sam managed Bolton (between 1999 and 2007) he concentrated on squeezing every drop of advantage from players like Davies, and he did this through preparation and anything extra that technology might have to offer. He would know which sort of ball into the penalty box would be guaranteed to give opponents the most problems and he even went to the extreme of having exercise bikes set up in the dugouts so that
the substitutes could be properly warmed up before they took the field. It has rarely been acknowledged, but Sam’s belief in the benefits of preparation have paid dividends for him, even if several of the owners he worked for did not have the slightest inkling of how he transformed middling players into decent teams.
There were a couple of times when we suffered setbacks that were so severe, I was forced to re-examine our entire approach. After Chelsea won the 2004–05 Premier League title, I took a fresh look at our pre-season preparation. Chelsea had steam-rollered all the other clubs and wound up with 95 points compared to Arsenal with 83 and United with 77. It was humiliating. We spent an entire season chasing their tail, but there was just no way we could catch Chelsea. I did not want that to happen again.
After Chelsea’s first triumph, I paid much more attention to the intensity of our pre-season preparation. Chelsea had just been much fitter than United during the 2004–05 season. We redesigned the pre-season fixtures for 2006–07–as the schedule for 2005–06 was already in place–so that we played higher calibre and more competitive teams. While it was important for the club to wave the flag in countries where we had a big following, it did not make much sense to play fixtures where Fabien Barthez, who was our goalkeeper for three seasons, could play as a striker. So we made sizeable changes. It was much healthier to play more challenging exhibition games than win a walk in the park 10–0 in Thailand. It was a real lesson to me about the risks of clinging to past practices and not moving with the times.
Despite Chelsea’s triumph, I did not want to rush things during the following pre-season period. I wanted to ease the players back into the rhythm of the season in a gradual fashion. High-performance athletes have a tendency to push themselves too much or over-train. For some it is an obsession, while others worry about an erosion of fitness levels that could cause them to lose their place in the team. In pre-season, we would work on mobility, but we would steer clear of serious physical encounters or severe interval training. There would never be any serious, long lectures, detailed post-mortems of the previous season, or dozens of hours of video analysis. We would conduct medical tests on the players. We would set up a series of 15 medical stations in the gym that were manned with nurses and doctors and would run a battery of tests on each of the players. This allowed us to have accurate readings on the players’ medical and physical conditions. We ran specific cardiac tests and comprehensive blood assessments; scanned tendons with ultrasound machines and checked to make sure all vaccinations were current. We also scrutinised the players’ flexibility, mobility and balance; gave them eye examinations and cognitive assessments so that, throughout the season, we had a benchmark against which to test the severity of concussions. These tests were literally from head to toe, since the players had their teeth examined by dentists and their feet by podiatrists. All this allowed us to figure out how vulnerable each player was to injury and we categorised them in three different buckets: high, medium and low. We then designed gym programmes, customised for each player, for the first block of the season.
The change to our pre-season routine took a little time to bear fruit. In 2005–06 Chelsea won the Premier League title again, albeit by a greatly reduced margin of eight points. And by 2006–07 our fitness improved enough to turn the eight-point deficit into a Premier League title of our own–this time by six points from Chelsea.
In football, just like in other activities, the best-laid plans sometimes don’t work and improvisation is required. It actually happens on a fairly regular basis. I would often twiddle things during a game or at half-time. One example that comes to mind is a game against West Ham in the closing weeks of the season in April 2011. A few months earlier, West Ham had whipped us 4–0 in a Carling Cup tie where I had fielded a team of young players. Towards the end of that game, Wally Downes, West Ham’s first-team coach, asked Wes Brown, as he waited on the sidelines to replace Jonny Evans, ‘Are you going on to make a difference?’ That got right under my skin, as did the taunts from West Ham’s supporters after the game, who were very aggressive towards me in the car park. I told them, ‘We’re going to be back here in April and we’re going to relegate you.’ However, when we were 2–0 down at half-time in a match towards the end of the season, I was a long way from fulfilling my promise. So I tossed our game plan out of the window, pulled Patrice Evra, who had played for France in the middle of the week, out of the game, and moved Ryan Giggs to left-back. Eventually we won 4–2 with Rooney scoring a hat-trick. A few weeks later, at the end of the season, West Ham got relegated to the Championship.
Something similar happened at Old Trafford in 2009 when we trailed Tottenham Hotspur 2–0. At half-time I brought on Carlos Tévez, the Argentinian striker, for Nani, and the effect was dramatic. Tévez was like a clockwork mouse, except you never had to wind him up–he was just tireless. He came on to the field, started hurling himself at every Tottenham player, completely changed the pace of the game and stirred up the fans. We won that game 5–2 and went on to win the League by four points. It’s odd to think of the effect of that one change to a plan.
Sometimes we were outwitted by opponents who approached a particular game with more finely tuned tactics and were better prepared. In 1996, Newcastle United thrashed us 5–0 at St James’ Park. Kevin Keegan, who was Newcastle’s manager, fielded a team full of threatening attackers, including Alan Shearer, Les Ferdinand, Peter Beardsley and David Ginola. The savagery of that defeat was apparent in the last goal, which was scored by the Belgian centre-back, Philippe Albert, who managed to chip a ball over the head of our goalkeeper, Peter Schmeichel, from 20 yards. We were humiliated.
We could be outdone by our own ill-discipline too. You can get into real trouble if players ignore plans or don’t stick to them. That happened to United in both our Champions League final games against Barcelona. We lost both because two or three players ignored our plans and played their own game. You cannot do that when you play Barcelona, particularly when the club was managed by Pep Guardiola, because of their ability to keep control of the ball. United were used to having the ball for three-quarters of a game, so as we prepared to play Barcelona we knew, because of their ability to retain possession, that they would throw us off our normal game.
Every now and again we were also undone by the atmosphere we encountered. There were two grounds that always caused us trouble–when we played Liverpool at Anfield, and Leeds at Elland Road (when they used to be regular opponents). We’ve been to Anfield with some of our very best teams, but the crowd–who are merciless towards visiting teams and refereeing decisions of which they don’t approve–whips up such an atmosphere that it erodes the players’ confidence and makes them lose their concentration. It only takes a momentary lapse to upset hours of dedicated preparation, and there’s very little you can do to help players with that. While there are elements of chess to a game of football, wingers, goalkeepers and centre-backs–unlike rooks, bishops and knights–are made of flesh and blood and emotions.
One other element of preparation worth mentioning is the way I approached the idea of risk. It would not surprise me if some observers feel that much of United’s success was due to our willingness to take unnecessary chances. When the crowd at Old Trafford are chanting, ‘Attack! Attack! Attack!’, it is easy to think that we automatically threw caution to the wind. I never thought about it like this because part of a leader’s job is to eliminate as many risks as possible. Some might think that my fondness for horses or cards means that I am a gambler at heart, but that isn’t really true. In my private life I have always been very careful about the amount of money I am prepared to spend on a horse or bet at a race-track, and the same caution applied at Old Trafford. We tried to leave nothing to chance. I cannot tell you how many half-time talks centred on the need to be patient and wait for the right opportunity to occur, rather than to be daredevils. I would only want to take a risk during the last 15 minutes of a game if we were trailing by a goal. At that point, it doesn’t matter whe
ther you lose by one or two goals, and it was only then that I was prepared to throw the kitchen sink at things.
Frequently when this happened, the opposition played right into our hands by trying to defend their lead. They would substitute a defensive player for an attacker and it could change the entire balance of the game. Suddenly we could surge around their box without worrying as much about their ability to counter-attack. Our opponents probably thought they were eliminating a risk by falling back into a defensive posture, but it gave us an advantage without us having to, in the grand scheme of things, unduly increase the amount of risk we took. And more often than not, the goal would come. The value of last minute goals was the impact on the dressing room, with everyone celebrating, and for the fans, who couldn’t wait to get home or to the pub to talk about it.
Our critics would say this was lucky, or down to the pressure to extend the game into ‘Fergie Time’, but in truth it came down to careful preparation and having a deliberate and thoughtful approach to risk.
Pipeline
When you run any organisation, you have to look as far down the road as you can. But if your organisation is anything like Manchester United, then your perspective is constantly changing. Sometimes it was possible to look several years ahead, and sometimes it was impossible to see beyond the next challenge; or, in our case, the next game. But prioritising a long-term strategy for the club was crucial, and at United we always had to be thinking about the composition of the team a few seasons ahead. So we had to have a conveyor belt of talent.
Every game requires 11 starting players and seven substitutes, and our whole organisation was designed to produce them. I always wanted to know about what the pipeline of players looked like for the team we would select three years in the future. It is so much easier to produce a consistent level of high performance when you nourish youngsters, help them develop and provide a pathway to success.
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