If these boys progressed through various levels and eventually got into the youth team or, better still, the reserve team, we had a variety of options. The best players, like Danny Welbeck and Adnan Januzaj, had the talent to make the leap from the youth team to the first-team squad, but the jury usually remained out on the rest of them. It takes until the age of 20 or 21 before you know for certain whether some players will make the grade. If we were still uncertain, we put them out on loan to another club so that they could get blooded in a first team. We did that with Tom Cleverley, lending him to Watford, Wigan, and Leicester City. We lent Jonny Evans to Royal Antwerp and Sunderland twice and Welbeck to Preston and Sunderland. Sometimes it didn’t produce the results we hoped for, such as when we lent Giuseppe Rossi to Newcastle and Parma or Federico Macheda to Sampdoria and Queens Park Rangers. They played so few games, their development was halted.
On occasion we might have waited too long before we sold a player who was not going to make the grade yet, or whose value tumbled due to injury. There were only a couple, such as James Chester, on whom we might have lost money. James had a number of knee injuries over a long period, and we ended up selling him to Hull City for £300,000 in 2011. He went on to play over 170 games in the next four and a half seasons and turned out to be an absolute steal.
We were always on the lookout for bargains but, in football, as in life, you get what you pay for. Unless there is an element of luck as there was with Eric Cantona, who we signed after Leeds United had approached us to buy Denis Irwin. The same was true of Peter Schmeichel who was somehow still playing for Brøndby at 28. I still can’t believe a big club hadn’t bought him. In 2008, a friend of Carlos Queiroz was scouting for us (for free) in Angola and happened upon Manucho. We gave him a try-out and he had a good left foot. We signed him for £250,000, because it was such a small sum, and when it became clear he did not possess the necessary talent, we sold him to Real Valladolid for £2.5 million.
Some clubs–Real Madrid and Manchester City come to mind–have used the chequebook to build a winning team. Real Madrid have long paid big sums to buy wonderfully talented players, the ‘Galacticos’, at the peak of their careers–Zinedine Zidane, Luís Figo, Kaká, Cristiano Ronaldo, Gareth Bale and James Rodríguez. It has worked for them, which just shows that there is more than one way to go about things. However, my upbringing always inclined me towards building rather than buying. I suppose I was more of what my son Mark, in his line of work, would call a ‘value investor’.
I always liked the idea of signing talented players who were in the twilight of their careers. We didn’t expect to keep them on the books for a long time, but we knew that, from time to time, we could land a player for a negligible amount of money who could help us fill a need. We signed Laurent Blanc from Inter Milan in 2001 as a free transfer. Blanc was 35 years old, but he was an accomplished and experienced player and we needed a backup in the defensive part of the squad. We used a similar tactic when we signed Michael Owen, the former England striker, in 2009, to add occasional spark to our attack. He had trained as a boy in the United system and was available on a free transfer. So I invited him to my house, made a proposal where he would be paid on a performance basis, and he was over the moon. Even though he was dogged by injuries, it worked out well for Michael because he scored the equalising goal during the first time he appeared at Wembley as a player in a Cup final, when we beat Aston Villa for the League Cup in 2010, and the following year he got a Premier League title medal, his first in 13 years of playing in the top ranks.
We made one exception to our rule about keeping an eye on the bottom line, and that was when it came time to sell players who had done sterling duty for the club. They might have played for ten or more years and reached the point where they were getting injured, unable to maintain a regular place in the first team and could count the seasons that they might still hope to play football on the fingers of one hand. In these cases we leaned over backwards to try and help them on their way by either offering free transfers (so that the acquiring club could justify giving them a larger wage packet), or a testimonial game, or both. The only one that did really well after he left us was Phil Neville, whom we sold to Everton for just over £3 million. In retrospect it was a great deal for Everton because we could clearly have got more for Phil; we also did not anticipate that he would continue to play for another eight years. Players like Denis Irwin, Steve Bruce, Mick Phelan and Brian McClair were all given free transfers. When Peter Schmeichel wanted to quit we allowed him to go on a free transfer with the one condition that he should not play for an English club. He went off to Sporting Lisbon, but within a couple of years he returned to England to play for Aston Villa and then went to Manchester City. We did not question either move, although we would have been perfectly within our rights to do so. Treating players like this was just the right thing to do.
Compensation
I’m sure nobody thinks of football managers as pricing experts. Pricing is usually considered the realm of brand managers, who decide how much a tube of toothpaste or bottle of vodka should sell for. It’s true that, unless I got complaints from fans, I didn’t worry about the price of season tickets or merchandise, but I did spend a lot of time dealing with the pricing of players–how much we would be prepared to buy them for and what salaries we’d be prepared to offer.
When you see the large sums paid for players headlined in the newspapers, it’s tempting to assume that football clubs spend money willy-nilly. That’s only true for a handful–those controlled by owners or ownership groups for whom money is no object. In Europe, that list has been limited to Chelsea, Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain (PSG). For almost every other club, even in the top leagues, money and budgets matter, and for clubs like Peterborough United, a League One club in the east of England who were managed by my son, Darren, every penny counts. I just don’t think you can buy success. You have to earn it.
There’s never been as much money in Scottish football as in English; early on in my career I got used to making the most from a little. I happen to think that’s a useful discipline for any business or organisation, because it’s so easy to waste money. Also, I have always had to answer to owners who wanted to know how their money was going to be spent.
At Aberdeen, I had a cavalcade of players, starting with the captain, Willie Miller, coming into my office demanding pay hikes. The best wages were between £250–£300 a week and Miller wanted £350. Dick Donald, the chairman, wanted to sell him, but I persuaded him that this would only start an exodus. Then his team-mate Alex McLeish showed up with his wife and eventually I got him to accept a £50 rise. Finally, Doug Rougvie appeared, and I told him, ‘Doug, I’ve got this big cake and there’s a cherry on the top. Willie Miller is taking three-quarters of it and the cherry. I have a quarter of the cake left for everyone; what do you want me to do?’ He was dissatisfied with our offer so we let him go to Chelsea.
As the decades ticked by, pay became more of a topic in football–at least for the press, in the main because of the huge escalation in the gap between an ordinary worker’s weekly ‘wages’ and the salaries amounting to tens of thousands of pounds per week that were now being paid out to top football players.
‘Wages’, or a ‘pay packet’ was what we usually called our compensation when I started as a player. This term was not a coincidence because, at the time, almost every player came from a working-class background. The father of Stanley Matthews, then the best-known player in England, was a boxer. Bobby Charlton comes from Ashington, a mining town in the north of England. When I signed for St Johnstone, the fathers of the other players all had working-class jobs. In Britain, football was the sport adopted by the working class, played by young men from working-class families, and this was reflected in the employment terms. If I had not been a footballer, I would probably have been a tool-maker and my team-mates would have worked in the nearby shipyards, steel mills or car factories.
There were more than a few
vestiges of Upstairs, Downstairs in the way that players were paid. Until 1961, the Football League had put a maximum limit on a player’s weekly wage which, at the time, during the playing season, was £20. Understandably the players, who were little more than indentured servants, felt abused and underpaid. There were no negotiations over pay. You took what the manager offered and, frequently, this meant one rate that applied during the season and another–either a lower rate, or no pay whatsoever–during the summer. Any player who took issue with his wages was likely to be sidelined. It was one thing to stage a strike at a factory when the machines would be sitting there on your return, it was quite another to miss a game that would never be played again. Even after the rules, on both wages and the freedom of transfer between clubs, were loosened at the start of the 1960s, some clubs, including Manchester United, tried to enforce an unofficial lid on wages. Eventually, though, market forces prevailed.
I don’t mean to suggest that players were indifferent about their pay, or that it was entirely uniform, but in an era that did not include lawyers, agents, accountants, business managers and publicists, it was not the subject of much debate or rancour. Before the Bosman ruling, clubs had all the power. It was primitive. Strikers used to get paid more than defenders and the club captain would usually receive a bit more than everyone else. When I signed for Queen’s Park in 1957, it was an amateur club, so I did not receive a wage. At the peak of my playing career between 1967 and 1973, this had risen to £80 a week, and in my last season at Ayr United, I got £60.
Though these days the numbers have more zeroes attached to them than 50 years ago, human nature has not changed much. Like other people, the players of my youth wanted to be paid what they were worth. Throughout my management career I always felt that there was a happy medium. Obviously the club did not want to be taken to the cleaners by some preposterous demand but, on the other hand, I always felt we should be paying players what they deserved. I know it sounds simple, but I found that, if you adhere to that approach, things work out fine.
When I got to Aberdeen the players were being paid £120 a week, which I thought was too low, so I got their wages raised. (Bear in mind the first £100-per-week player was the England and Fulham captain, Johnny Haynes, who had reached that level in 1961.) Beyond the normal haggling, the first time I had to confront serious compensation issues was after Aberdeen won the European Cup Winners’ Cup in 1983 by beating Real Madrid. This was, in a way, both the best and worst thing that happened to the club, because it shone a spotlight on the players. The players all wanted more money and every other club wanted to sign them. So within two years we had lost half the team to bigger clubs offering them far more money. We upped the salaries of our best players to £350 a week, adding bonuses for wins or League and Cup victories. Dick Donald was always guarded about using all our money to pay the first team and forgetting about everyone else. He was always eager to make sure we were paying the younger players properly.
I didn’t begrudge the players a single penny. In fact, I think the best footballers are underpaid. That might seem ridiculous to someone who is working as a car mechanic or as a nurse, but I look at the topic differently. Players good enough to turn out for any team in the upper echelon of the Champions League have outshone tens of thousands of lads who would give their eyeteeth for the same opportunity. They are talented enough to entertain people all over the world–usually in numbers that dwarf the audiences attracted by music or film stars, and certainly larger than those following other sports.
One by-product of the Premier League compensation system is that bonuses have more or less died out. Top players may get a bonus if they win the League or one of the big European competitions, but the complex, multi-page bonus systems, which used to compensate players for each appearance, or each victory or goals scored, have died out in the upper echelons of the game. While nobody complains about extra money, a financial bonus does not offer the same incentive to top players as it did 25 years ago. The more powerful incentives are to appeal to their competitive instinct, the pride they have in their profession and the prospect of a winner’s medal. Bonuses get spent. Medals are for ever.
When lined up against the annual compensation for people who run hedge funds, players like Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi seem woefully undercompensated. I read recently that the top 25 hedge-fund managers got paid almost £7.5 billion in 2014–more than the combined payroll of the Premier League, Bundesliga, La Liga and Serie A, and that seems even more preposterous when you learn that many of them recorded worse returns than the stock market.
If a footballer’s performance lags for any prolonged period, he finds himself on the bench or put up for transfer. The inequity seems even more pronounced when you consider that, compared to other people, a footballer’s peak earning years are very abbreviated–usually about six years and almost always fewer than ten. Don’t tell me that some 28 year old who can manipulate a spreadsheet (of which there are hundreds of thousands, maybe millions) deserves to be paid more than a midfielder playing for Swansea City or Southampton.
Every now and again players would get peeved when they read about one of their team-mate’s contracts. Some, like Gary Neville or Paul Scholes, didn’t pay any attention to what others got paid because they trusted us to compensate them fairly. Even towards the end of their careers, when Gary, Paul and Ryan Giggs were all on one-year contracts, it did not bother them. They were realists and knew we would treat them right. However, others got irked and I understand why. It doesn’t matter if the compensation scheme is denominated in hundreds of thousands of pounds per week or in bags of potato crisps. It’s all a matter of relative worth, because a lot of people either feel, or want to feel, that they are more valuable than anyone else.
Sometimes a player would be in a particularly strong position and know it. I encountered this with Ruud van Nistelrooy in 2003 after his first couple of spectacular seasons with United. He managed to negotiate a clause in his contract where he would have been allowed to go to Real Madrid if they offered a certain amount of money. This put him in the driver’s seat and was not something we repeated. Eventually we let him go to Real Madrid, but he was one of only a tiny number of players who wanted to leave United. When he did leave, after we had enjoyed his services and goals for years, he was 30 and we received most of our initial outlay back.
I had a sharper pencil when negotiating contracts with players than I did for myself. Some leaders don’t have much compunction about feathering their own nests at every opportunity. Others are too bashful about pressing to be paid what they are worth. I probably fell between those poles, particularly when the larger sums of money started to flow into football in the 1990s. Perhaps I am wrong, but I have noticed that leaders are sometimes so busy running an organisation that they do not take care of themselves properly. They will invariably not eat, sleep or exercise properly, but they also get into the habit of neglecting the management of their own financial affairs. They will spend tons of time working out remuneration details for others, and just a tiny fraction of that time on their personal arrangements. They are not careful enough about the terms of their own contracts and, if they are lucky enough to salt away some money, they will always have a tough time figuring out how to manage it properly. Maybe it is just because the best leaders tend to be missionaries rather than mercenaries.
When I started at Aberdeen I was paid £12,000 a year, or the equivalent of about £65,000 today, and in my last year in Scotland I was making £25,000, with a good bonus structure. I made a little more money on the side by doing some newspaper columns and public speaking, but it would not have bought many cases of wine. This was at a time when the highest-paid player in the team was on £15,000 a year, and sponsorship deals were tiny by the standards of today’s top-echelon Premier League teams. When I started talking to United they actually offered me less than I had made, with bonuses, in my last year at Aberdeen.
After United started to win big competitions on a regular
basis, I began to pay more attention to my own compensation. In 1989 Martin Edwards, the club chairman, had tried to sell United for £20 million–laughable by today’s standards, but a hefty amount at the time. The deal fell through, however, after the buyer failed to raise the money. After United became a public company in 1991, there was no mystery about the value of Manchester United and I could not help but start to think about the role I had played in that. In 1998 Rupert Murdoch offered £623 million for United, which valued Martin’s stake at about £87 million. Perhaps it was my Scottish trade-union heritage that gnawed at me, or maybe I just felt undervalued.
Martin was a good chairman. The club was in his bones and he cared about its welfare, but every time I raised my salary with him it became contentious. I’d go and see him in his office at Old Trafford and he used to punch my requests into this large desk calculator he kept near his phone. Years before, in order to show him I was underpaid, I even handed him the contract of George Graham who, at the time, was manager of Arsenal. I made very little headway and, in a way, I was negotiating from a position of weakness, because Martin knew that there was no football job I wanted more than to be manager of Manchester United. Once David Gill became chief executive, the situation was defused. David was more objective and my salary was adjusted to an appropriate level.
When the Glazers and David Gill agreed to a big increase in Wayne Rooney’s salary in 2010, they wanted to know how I felt. I told them I did not think it fair that Rooney should earn twice what I made and Joel Glazer immediately said, ‘I totally agree with you but what should we do?’ It was simple. We just agreed that no player should be paid more than me. We agreed in less time than it takes to read the previous sentence.
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