Fergie Rises

by Michael Grant

  Chapter 17

  WHAT’LL IT BE, DIGESTIVES OR CHOCOLATE BISCUITS?

  One morning a hand-written letter arrived in the post at Pittodrie addressed to Alex Ferguson. Club secretary Ian Taggart read its contents: ‘The letter was from a patient at Gartnavel Mental Hospital who wrote to Fergie saying, “It should be you who’s in this hospital, not me”.’ The author suspected mental illness because Ferguson had the chance to sell Doug Rougvie–a cult hero, but not to every fan’s taste–to Middlesbrough but turned it down. In fact, one of Ferguson’s great triumphs at Aberdeen was that he kept his team together for so long. Between 1978 and 1984 he sold only one player against his will: Steve Archibald, who had made up his mind to leave. All other departures were on the manager’s terms.

  Success was the adhesive that held the component parts together. There was no point leaving for Celtic or Rangers because there was a greater chance of winning with Aberdeen. Besides, the money on offer there was no better. In England, only Liverpool and Manchester United had the combination of size, history and financial muscle to make irresistible offers. It was the era before BSkyB, the English Premier League and the Uefa Champions League, and before the Bosman ruling ushered in freedom of contract. Aberdeen were not a rich club but they were financially competitive. Crucially, they could afford to keep their key men. In the early 1980s player salaries were closely tied to how much money came in through the turnstiles. The average league attendance in England’s top division in 1983–84 was 18,856; Aberdeen’s was close to that, at just over 17,000. Add to that the very real prospect of going the distance in the European competitions, and a high quality of life in one of Britain’s most affluent cities, and no one was in a rush to leave.

  It had not always been like this. When Aberdeen appointed Billy McNeill in 1977, Willie Miller heard the news while doing summer joinery work for a friend to supplement his club wage of £50-a-week, worth around £270 in today’s terms. In Ferguson’s first seasons the salaries had been so low Gordon Strachan had to request a loan from the club simply to buy a modest house. Willie Garner remembered: ‘The money was awful. They only stepped it up once guys became internationals. Until then you weren’t getting a lot.’ Low basic wages left the players reliant on appearance money and win bonuses to make a decent living. That gave Ferguson immediate control over them. It was not the ferocious hairdryer that the likes of Rougvie and Strachan feared, but their manager’s ability to dictate their finances by dropping them. Rougvie said: ‘Fergie realised early doors what power he had. If you didn’t play, you didn’t get appearances money, only your basic. If you played, you got your appearance money and a possible win bonus. That was your wages. We had to play. There was no way I was going to do anything to him. Fergie could just put you out of the game. I had a wife, a kid and a mortgage. If you’re out of the game, I’d be out bloody labouring to make money. It was one of those things where if Fergie said, “Jump!” the boys had to say, “How high?”’ Strachan admitted: ‘We all had a fear of him. He could make or break your career. When I wasn’t playing I had to say to my wife, “I’m not getting my bonus money this weekend.” It might mean you couldn’t go on holiday or something.’ The players had a phrase for how much money they could expect to take home in any given week. ‘If we played and won it meant chocolate biscuits. If we were dropped, it was digestives.’

  The size of the bonus payments was an enduring game of cat-and-mouse, with the players on one side and the manager and directors on the other. At one team meeting Ferguson told them he had consulted Dick Donald and the bonus for a tournament would be the same as the previous season: £300. Some of the players remembered it had been £400 the previous year. No, he said. He had checked. It was definitely £300. Neil Simpson had still to become one of the senior dressing-room figures and was not expected to voice an opinion. ‘I was listening to all of this and I knew it had actually been £500. Now £500 was a massive amount to me. So I piped up, “Actually it was £500.” Woof! Fergie was right on top of me. “Who the fuck do you think you are? There will be no fucking bonus.” He went out the door and slammed it! I never played for about three months after that! But to give him his due, in the following seasons he would ask me what I thought the bonus should be!’

  Stewart McKimmie was on £35 a week at Dundee. He moved to Aberdeen in December 1983, too late for the first leg of the Super Cup against Hamburg, though he did play in the return game at Pittodrie. ‘Let’s say the bonus for winning it was £1,000. I looked at my payslip after we beat them and it was only £500 up. So I chapped on his door. That was the first time he’d stung me. He said, “The £1,000 was if you played in both games, you only played in the second leg.” Well, I couldn’t argue. He had an answer for everything.’ The bonus for winning in Gothenburg had been £2,000-a-man.

  The players accepted Aberdeen’s parsimonious attitude to money with a mixture of exasperation, fatalism and amusement. John McMaster remembers how the players were once ‘looked after’ by Dick Donald, the Pittodrie patriarch: ‘Dick was the best chairman ever. Board meetings would last four minutes and then the meal would last three hours. He’d say, “Whatever you do, Alex, don’t put us into debt.” I remember going to his house at Rubislaw Den, a lovely part of Aberdeen, the granite wall alone was worth £100,000. We’re playing cards and the chairman comes in–soft hat, a wee shuffle–and he takes out a big brown envelope and says, “That’s a wee treat for the boys.” We’re looking at it. It was sweeties. Actual sweeties!’

  The success at home and abroad brought in more money than the club had ever known. Increased attendances, prize money, sponsorships and commercial revenue saw cash flowing into the Pittodrie bank account. There had been £800,000 for selling Archibald, £45,000 for Ian Fleming and £82,000 for Dom Sullivan. The only significant money spent by Ferguson to that point had been the £300,000 paid for Peter Weir, £87,500 for McKimmie, £70,000 for Mark McGhee and £70,000 for Billy Stark. Ferguson was a chairman’s dream: a winning manager who made money. The Bayern Munich and Waterschei games cleared £300,000, and Aberdeen returned profits of between £200,000 and £300,000 in every year between 1981 and 1984. The club could not wait to open the mail every morning. Taggart said: ‘In the year after the Cup Winners’ Cup every delivery of the post seemed to contain a cheque from somebody for something. Money attracts money. It went on for months. A cheque from Uefa for this, a cheque from somebody else for that. We just thought, “Bloody hell, this is great”.’

  Shirt sponsorship had still to catch on among British clubs, but in 1979 Aberdeen struck an exclusive deal with Adidas to manufacture the team’s kit and boots. McKimmie turned up on his first day of training with his trusted pair of Nike boots. ‘It had taken me ages to break them in. I arrived there on the Monday morning, Archie Knox took my boots, threw them in the bin and said, “You’ll nae be needin’ them, we wear Adidas.”’ On one occasion a representative from Puma approached Eric Black, Neale Cooper and John Hewitt about switching sponsors. Tentatively, they went to run the idea past Ferguson. Hewitt said: ‘We knew he was friendly with the guy from Adidas, but we went to see him anyway. “Gaffer, we’ve been approached by a guy from Puma.” “Get fucking out!”’

  However, no one had any illusions about what really drove the manager. Ferguson reminded his players that Aberdeen gave them a platform to earn respect and admiration not just in Scotland, but across Europe. He told them it was ambition, not money, that tempted Scotland’s best players across the border to England. ‘But how many clubs, apart from Liverpool, can offer players such a good chance of being in Europe? I’m not looking for people saying, “Fergie’s done this and he’s done that”. I owe the players everything and I’m sure they’ll show loyalty to me. I want Aberdeen to be a club no one wants to leave.’ He understood the allure of the big English teams, though, and knew the risk they posed.

  Aberdeen players picked for Scotland were encouraged not to socialise with any Anglos, those Scots playing for the big English clubs. W
hen Gordon Strachan submitted a transfer request after the 1982 World Cup, Ferguson said: ‘This has happened to Aberdeen before. A player goes with the international squad and then comes home unsettled.’ Willie Miller can recall being advised ‘not to be listening to nonsense that these Anglos talk about money, it’s not all about money’. Miller, the rock at the centre of the great Aberdeen team, was an obvious target. He had two serious opportunities to move. In 1980 he was offered three times his salary to join Sunderland. He travelled to Wearside only to leave unimpressed that the manager, Ken Knighton, was acting on a recommendation from Jock Stein and had not personally seen him play. The second opportunity came in 1982 when he was out of contract. Rangers offered him a take-home wage of £200 a week, the same as he was earning. With an understanding that the Rangers captain also inherited a £40-a-week column in the Scottish Daily Express, he would have been better off. But only marginally, given that he could expect to earn more bonuses with a powerful Aberdeen than a weak Rangers. Miller said: ‘I didn’t think they had a particularly good team. We did, and it looked like we were going places and were maybe capable of doing something special.’ He asked Aberdeen for £220 a week to stay. Donald refused but offered £210. Miller accepted.

  Few of the players had agents and Ferguson tended to keep them in the dark if he received a phone call asking if someone was for sale. Even so, it was only a matter of time before the unit began to split. The first player to break ranks was Strachan. When he submitted his transfer request Ferguson said he would not sell him for less than £2 million. Strachan was talked into staying, and he continued to make a major contribution while patiently awaiting the chance to leave. By midway through the 1983–84 season, though, he had had enough. It was his sixth season in the North-East and his fifth under Ferguson. He told the manager he would be leaving in the summer. Ferguson said Strachan’s explanation was that he was ‘bored’, a statement the manager thought ridiculous. ‘My advice was uncomplicated, “Go and get yourself un-bored.”’ Relations between the two soon deteriorated. Strachan said: ‘I felt there was a bit of tension because I was the first one to leave him. He felt that was a slight against him as a coach, and it wasn’t. I couldn’t speak more highly of him. I just wanted to move on. I just wanted to see other places. Willie Miller has always said to me it’s easier for defenders to stay at one club, the game comes to them. Forwards have to reinvent themselves and that’s what I was having to do. So there was friction, an underlying friction. My transfer request used to come into play now and again, every time I had a bad game. “Who’s going to buy you?”’

  Strachan had his own weekly column in the Scottish Daily Express. When Ferguson left him out for a game against Hearts on 2 April 1984, he immediately retaliated in print. Under the headline WRONG, FERGIE: HEARTS MATCH WASN’T THE TIME TO DROP ME, he fired off an astonishing opening salvo: ‘I am livid with my boss, Alex Ferguson. He dropped me against Hearts on Monday night and that hurt. But what has made me really angry is his timing.’ Strachan claimed Ferguson had forced him to play for two months with a hamstring problem only to drop him when he was fully fit. Ferguson reacted against caricature. He had not cut his nose off to spite his face when McGhee swung for him after Gothenburg, and he did not do it when Strachan stepped out of line either. Strachan was brought straight back into the team five days later–he scored the winner against Motherwell–but was told his lucrative newspaper column was finished.

  Cologne had sent a representative to the Motherwell game and over the following weeks Bernd Killat, a German agent already known to Aberdeen from organising pre-season tours, helped negotiate a deal. Strachan signed a pre-contract agreement. Unaware of that, Ferguson was trying to drum up interest from England, because Aberdeen would receive a higher transfer fee. He secured an agreement with Manchester United. When Strachan then told him about the written deal with Cologne, Ferguson was incandescent. ‘I said, “What do you think you’re doing going to a club like Cologne?”’ he wrote in his first autobiography, A Light in the North. ‘“Last year they played to crowds of about 3,000 in some games. You need a big platform. That’s why you’re leaving Aberdeen in the first place.” I told him there was no bigger platform than Manchester United.’ Strachan recognised that he had made an error. He was still leaving, but not to go to Germany. Cologne were furious and the transfer became an ugly, drawn-out mess. On 29 July, Strachan was even banned from playing by Fifa until there was a resolution. Eventually, after the involvement of the SFA, Uefa and Fifa, Aberdeen paid Cologne a sum to invalidate the deal Strachan had signed, and he went instead to United for a far higher fee of £500,000. The transfer was concluded on 8 August.

  Strachan was unapologetic about leaving, but felt guilty that he became distracted during the second half of the season. ‘I wasn’t proud of my behaviour. I didn’t upset anybody; I was still best mates with them. But my mind wandered at times. I’d never had an agent, this was new to me. I was hoping I’d get a hand from people in the club but I didn’t. Me and Mark [McGhee] would be sitting about fifteen minutes before a game, turning to each other, saying, “Has that guy from Hamburg phoned you back?” “Aye, I don’t know what I’m going to do.” “I might go to Cologne or Man United.” This was going on for a long time. I hope it didn’t affect the club too much. We did win a double.’

  Strachan and McGhee were two of the dressing room’s big characters. Intelligent, strong-willed and quick-witted, they were among the first to answer back if they felt Ferguson was taking liberties. They were also close friends. While Strachan was negotiating with one German club, McGhee was in talks with another. But the move which took McGhee to Hamburg went through without any complications or controversy. There had been no prospect of keeping him. During the closing weeks of the 1983–84 season, when he first heard what the Germans could offer, he was stunned. His personal Adidas sponsorship alone would be bigger than his salary at Aberdeen. The transfer fee was £280,000.

  A third blow struck Ferguson. If he was resigned to losing Strachan and McGhee, the departure of Doug Rougvie was a bitter setback. Ferguson was furious to discover that Rougvie, out of contract, had gone for talks with newly-promoted Chelsea. Rougvie has always maintained that he wanted to stay with Aberdeen, but the club were inflexible about his request for a modest rise. He felt at the top of his game. He was twenty-eight and he had just won the Super Cup, a league and cup double, and had been capped for Scotland by Jock Stein. ‘All I was wanting was a decent wage and Ferguson said, “You’ve been down speaking to Chelsea, you mercenary bastard.” Unbelievable! He slaughtered me in the papers. He left me without a name and that was the biggest disappointment. I had wanted to stay but he wouldn’t pay what I was looking for. When I think of Fergie, I think, “He didn’t give us a bag of money, but he did give us a bag of medals.”’

  Rougvie felt Ferguson was trying to please Dick Donald by keeping wages down, with the result that the Gothenburg team broke up unnecessarily when they could have been appeased with reasonable rises. In truth, the financial gulf between Aberdeen and Europe’s elite clubs was such that Strachan and McGhee’s transfers were inevitable. According to Strachan: ‘I made a huge leap in money when I went to United. I was getting five times what I was getting at Aberdeen. They couldn’t compete with that. I wouldn’t have embarrassed them by asking.’

  The trio’s departures left enormous holes in the team. Chunks had been taken out of the defence, midfield and attack. Strachan was an impish magician, capable of turning even the biggest matches, and in six seasons under Ferguson he had weighed in with eighty-eight goals from midfield. McGhee’s total was 100 over the same period and he had been the club’s top scorer in three of the previous four campaigns. Aberdeen needed a lift. It seemed to come when a story broke that they had opened talks to land the outstanding Juventus and Poland midfielder Zbigniew Boniek. ‘At first they were prepared to let him go and the player was keen to come,’ said Ferguson. ‘But then Juventus changed their mind.’ The deal, if it had ha
ppened, would have been sensational. Boniek had just won Serie A and the European Cup Winners’ Cup with Juventus. But nothing did happen, and Ferguson made no mention of any move for him in his two autobiographies that included the Aberdeen years. Instead he found replacements on his doorstep. Fearing that Strachan might leave earlier, as he wanted to, Ferguson had signed one of his former St Mirren players, midfielder Billy Stark, in the summer of 1983. To replace Rougvie he went to Clyde for their hard-working left-back Tommy McQueen. As for a goalscorer to fill McGhee’s boots, he raided St Mirren for the fifth time in six years to land their squat, powerful and prolific striker Frank McDougall.

  That great team, the Gothenburg team, had become so familiar that the fans were shaken by the departures. Here was the first confirmation that the club did not exist in some sort of never-ending fairy-tale. The consequences of Aberdeen’s new profile and status were not all positive. Manchester United, Hamburg, Chelsea and others had hovered over Pittodrie, sensing easy pickings from a comparatively small club. For the first time Aberdeen had become fashionable. Everyone wanted a piece of the club. Ferguson and director Ian Donald returned to Paris for another award from Adidas, this time a bronze prize for being Europe’s third best team in 1983–84, behind Liverpool and Juventus. The manager attended the Midland Soccer Writers’ Player of the Year dinner in Birmingham. The Variety Club of Great Britain named him their first ‘Scottish Sports Personality of the Year’. He was invited to Buckingham Palace to receive an OBE. At the end of the year, Ferguson and Miller were invited to London for the BBC Sports Review of the Year. It was thought Aberdeen might be named as the Team of the Year. They were beaten by Olympic ice dancers Torvill and Dean. Miller was a guest on BBC’s A Question of Sport and took his place with snooker star Terry Griffiths on Emlyn Hughes’s team. Miller said: ‘I’m sure I’ve got the footage somewhere on a VHS in a box in the cellar. That all came from what Aberdeen were achieving. At first nobody knows you. Nobody had any idea who Aberdeen were at first. Who Willie Miller or Alex McLeish or Jim Leighton were. Not a Scooby. Then Scotland went to Wembley and we beat England in 1981 and they start to take notice of you. From then on they recognise you as being a player. That was unusual, for anyone who played for Aberdeen to be noticed in England.’