Leading: Learning from Life and My Years at Manchester United

by Alex Ferguson

  Distractions exact a heavy toll on individuals and organisations and it demands incredible discipline to keep them at bay. At United the players always had demands from the commercial, business side of the club. It was understandable, because the commercial department was responsible for bringing in television and sponsorship revenue, selling executive boxes, staging profitable events and running the hospitality organisation. Without all this revenue we couldn’t have done some of the things we did, such as sign some big contracts, pay hefty salaries, improve our training facilities or use private jets for travelling to games.

  The sponsors all wanted contact with the players and the demand was insatiable. As the television revenue kept increasing and as United got ever better known around the world, the number of sponsors started to climb. Shielding players from the requests of the commercial team was a big part of my job. Mick Phelan was a dab hand at juggling all this. The commercial guys who, quite naturally, wanted to be able to provide sponsors with behind-the-scenes glimpses of United would produce all these ideas and the stream of requests was endless. Mick would be our intermediary and he’d dole out favours as if he was passing around manhole covers. He made sure that a lot of these were fulfilled during the pre-season, so that we could say with a straight face that our obligations had been satisfied and this allowed us to rebuff demands during the playing season. Some sponsors would want to come and watch the training, which made me queasy because I didn’t want others to see who was training and who was injured. So I limited access to a handful of minutes at the start of a session and, otherwise, would make a few appearances at lunchtime and attend one or two dinners during the season.

  At United we always wanted to try and support local charities. Every Friday the players would sign around 100 shirts that could be given away to charities or auctioned for a good cause. The one global organisation we supported was UNICEF, and when we were on foreign tours we would take the players to witness some of their work. In Thailand we went by river, in skiffs, to visit a school to see kids who had been rescued from child prostitution, and in South Africa we visited orphanages. These were eye-opening experiences for all of us. But most of our charitable work was done close to home because we wanted to be good citizens and demonstrate that we cared about people all around Manchester. In 2006 we formed a special group, The Manchester United Foundation, to take care of the club’s charitable activities–particularly the local schools and hospitals. The players would go and visit schools and the bedsides of seriously ill children. All of these were great things to do, but I kept an eagle eye on them because the most important thing was winning a game on Saturday. The fans aren’t going to thank you if you’re doing charity work and it costs you three points.

  Big games have the most distractions. When I had my first taste of this at Aberdeen after we reached the European Cup Winners’ Cup final in 1983, one of the first things I did was make sure that the players’ wives and girlfriends understood their role. So, in jest, I wrote a memo to all of them explaining it was their responsibility to pack toothpaste, blankets and other essentials for the trip to Sweden and summoned them to a meeting at Pittodrie where they would hear more of what was required from them. Through the grapevine I very quickly heard that my joke had misfired and gone down like a lead balloon. I walked into the room in Pittodrie where I was greeted by a collection of wives and resounding silence. I apologised for the joke that had backfired and told them that the real purpose of my memo had been to bring them together so that we could prepare for what would be the most important game in their husbands’ careers, and perhaps the biggest occasion in which they would ever participate. I made sure the wives understood that their one task was to make sure that their husband was as well prepared as possible for the game and that, under no circumstances, should they do anything that could distract him. After I finished speaking I asked whether they had any questions. There were none. They all understood what I wanted: no distractions.

  There are fans that mob you at the airport; the hotel lobby where the team stays can also be teeming with autograph hunters. When United played in the Champions League final against Barcelona in Rome in 2009, I actually asked the hotel management to close off the hotel to fans, because I wanted to eliminate the hubbub. As the years ticked by, I found that I was able to close myself off from the frenzy and tittle-tattle that surrounded United. From time to time I’d notice that the coaching staff were chatting about something and I didn’t have a clue what they were discussing because I had been lost in my own thoughts. When we were approaching big games I’d isolate myself in a mental cocoon. Unless somebody brought up an issue relating to the team, I would barely hear anything that was said. I just tried to concentrate on the one big thing–my job. When I was lost in my own thoughts, Cathy would always say, ‘You’re not listening to me.’ She was right.

  From time to time there were distractions that could have been avoided. An example was the legal scrap I got into in the late 1970s when I sued St Mirren for wrongful dismissal. I acted emotionally and impulsively and, in retrospect, it would have been better for me to have spent every second thinking about how to turn Aberdeen into a title contender.

  Whenever we got caught up in a big match, I always told the players, ‘Don’t play the occasion, play the game.’ There’s all the other frippery that doesn’t matter: the bands, the pre-game theatrics, the new suits and all the travelling supporters buzzing with anticipation. The first time I took United to a Wembley final in 1990, I was as excited as a teenager on a Saturday night and distracted by the surroundings. I did what I had seen everybody else do and took the team out to inspect the pitch. It was a boiling hot day and we were roasting in our suits and I suddenly realised we were being daft and the players were getting dehydrated. An inspection of the pitch wasn’t going to influence the result so I ordered everyone to get to the dressing room. There’s only one way to enjoy a final and that’s to win it. Nobody ever remembers the losers.

  Failing

  When you look at a successful person, you cannot imagine that they’ve ever failed or had a brush with failure. You watch sports stars like Roger Federer, Serena Williams or, in the old days, Muhammad Ali and Stirling Moss, and it’s impossible to conceive of them as losers. The same extends to other walks of life, where someone of great accomplishment puts his wares on display. If I look at paintings by L. S. Lowry, the Mancunian best known for his bleak renditions of urban, industrial life, I have a tough time believing that he ever made a bad picture, or if you read one of Robert Caro’s books about President Lyndon B. Johnson, you cannot imagine him worrying about writing a paragraph that didn’t contain a carefully buffed phrase. But we are all haunted by failure. It paralyses some and motivates others. It was my own inner determination to avoid failure that always provided me with an extra personal incentive to succeed.

  After I left Rangers in 1969, it would have been easy for me to feel like a bit of a loser. I had tasted life in the top ranks of football, but I knew I was never a key part of the manager’s plans and, when I was transferred after two years at the club, all I had in my silverware drawer was a runners-up medal from a Scottish Cup final. We had got pipped at the post in the final game of the 1967–68 season for the Scottish League when we lost against, of all clubs, Aberdeen. So I could have been overwhelmed by self-pity when I was off-loaded to Falkirk, but I was determined not to be cowed.

  I would like to think that, somehow, the people I went on to work with at both Aberdeen and United came to share that same positive attitude towards failure. For me, that whole approach to life could be boiled down to the 101 seconds of injury time that it took United to turn what had looked like a 1–0 defeat by Bayern Munich in the 1999 Champions League final into a 2–1 victory. Bayern Munich’s ribbons had already been attached to the Cup in anticipation of the victory ceremony, and the president of UEFA was preparing to present the trophy to them, when our refusal to give up meant those ribbons were changed to red.

  As w
e prepared for the Champions League final nine years later in 2008, I played the DVD of the last three minutes of the 1999 game to emphasise to the players the importance of never, ever capitulating. For me, the only time to give up is when you are dead.

  When I started my life as a coach, I never dreamed that I would wind up as the manager of Manchester United. All I thought about was survival. Each time I joined a club–East Stirlingshire, St Mirren and Aberdeen–I just thought to myself, ‘I’m not going to fail here.’ It was one of the things that drove me. I always had that fear of getting humiliated, and failure was always that wee thing at the back of my mind. I kept silently saying to myself, ‘Failure. Don’t fail.’ When I joined East Stirlingshire as a manager, the only qualifications I had for the job was that I had been a player, had earned my coaching badges and could make a decision. I didn’t know anything else. Four weeks earlier I had been a 32-year-old player. Suddenly I was a manager, albeit a part-time manager, who was just hoping to survive long enough to figure things out. After I had been at St Mirren, and got my first wee taste of managerial success, I had a hunch that I would do well when I got to Aberdeen. It was the first time I was a full-time manager and the club had the nucleus of what it took to win–it was a one-town team which had a good owner, decent facilities and a healthy stock of players.

  It was only really in my last year at Aberdeen that I started mapping out a path for my future. Prior to that I was just concentrating on surviving and not failing. The complete perfection that Celtic achieved in their 1966–67 season, when they won five competitions, seemed like the stuff of miracles and myth. Even in our strongest seasons at United the fear of failure and the striving for perfection drove me on. Although I helped fill the trophy cabinet at Old Trafford, the club, under my leadership, never managed to go through the entire League season–like Arsenal did in 2003–04–undefeated. The experience of defeat, or more particularly the manner in which a leader reacts to it, is an essential part of what makes a winner.

  Before games I always had a churning in my stomach. It never left me. It was always there. I could never find a way to get rid of it. I remember feeling acutely nervous when I played at Rangers because I never felt that the manager had confidence in me and I always felt I had to justify my place in the team. But in some ways it may actually have got worse as the years went by, no matter how many cups lined the trophy cabinet, because the expectations, and the pressure, increased. Whenever we went to Anfield to play Liverpool I always had butterflies in my stomach.

  The worst time was always during the pre-match warm-up. I hated it. If we had a 3 p.m. kick-off, I would give the team talk between 1.15 p.m. and 1.45 p.m. Once I had delivered my piece I would leave the players alone. We had prepared as best we could and last-minute instructions always leave players wondering whether they command the manager’s confidence. At 2 p.m. my assistant manager would take our team-sheet to the referee and we would discover what team our opponent had decided to play. Then, after everyone was in their warm-up gear, the dressing room would empty about 2.15 p.m. I detested the next 30 minutes, which always seemed to drag on and on. I was often by myself in our dressing room and the pair of clocks on the wall never seemed to move.

  During the pre-match warm-up, when we played at Old Trafford, I used to sit in my office and read the match programme or flip on the television and watch the horse racing. I’d sometimes wander about and try to find someone to talk to. Occasionally a visiting manager would come and have a cup of tea. The loneliness was much worse when we played away games because I had no office to use as a refuge. Then, I would often find myself sitting alone in the dressing room. I don’t think this feeling, certainly in my later years as a manager, was caused by worrying about failing. Rather it was prompted by the apprehension, anxiety and uncertainty that always surrounds a big occasion, which might be exacerbated when you depend on others to implement your wishes. I’m sure other leaders experience similar feelings, no matter how worldly and important they may seem to others.

  Even now, when I’m watching United from the directors’ box or at home on the television, I feel twinges in the pit of my stomach. I never tried to get rid of this feeling. Maybe some people, before a big performance or important encounter, try to calm their nerves with breathing exercises or a dram of whisky, but I never did so. I just accepted that nagging anxiety as part of my job. It accompanied me through life and it would have been a big warning sign that I was no longer up for the task had that anxiety–which really was a sign of how badly I wanted to win–ever disappeared.

  The old adage that you learn more from defeats than you do from victories has certainly been true for me. While I am sometimes inclined to say that I never look back, it isn’t really true. I wouldn’t harp on at the players about defeats, and I would certainly try to mask whatever I was thinking, but privately I always spent more time contemplating games that we lost than the ones we won. It’s also true that if, during any season, we failed to win a major competition that we should have won, I found myself stewing on the reasons during the summer so that I could correct whatever was wrong before the start of the next season.

  My record is full of defeats. Between 10 August 1974, the day I first managed East Stirlingshire, to 19 May 2013, the day I left the field for the last time as manager of Manchester United, my teams lost about two out of every ten games that they played. There were also plenty of draws that I considered as bad as losses. So I had plenty of opportunities to learn from defeats and setbacks. Though I never got fixated by statistics, my overall win rate as a manager was just under 60 per cent. In United’s best season we won nearly 72 per cent of the time.

  On occasion we got badly punished and I did not like it one bit–such as the two consecutive League games we lost in the 1996–97 season: 5–0 to Newcastle and 6–3 to Southampton. I don’t recall any other times we conceded 11 goals in two consecutive games. In 1995 we lost the League and FA Cup in the space of seven days–one to Blackburn Rovers and the other to Everton. However, I don’t ever think I had to contemplate a series of setbacks as severe as those that Bayer Leverkusen suffered in 2002 when they played in a League decider, the German Cup final and the Champions League final–and they lost all three. You would need more than a couple of aspirin to get over that.

  At Aberdeen and United, once the squads were properly organised, I always felt our defeats, or disappointing results, were caused by what we failed to do rather than what our opponents did. I found it healthy to approach disappointments in that manner because it meant we were in control and could improve. I was always a better manager after a loss. For whatever reason, it made me sharper. I suppose sometimes I wanted to prove I was not a loser, and at other times I wanted to avenge a defeat. After the 1993–94 season, every year when we did not win the League title seemed like a failure to me. At some point in my life the desire and need to win outstripped my fear of failure. Winning was a matter of pride. It did not matter whether it was the first team or reserves. Losing is a powerful management tool so long as it does not become a habit. I felt that way to the end of my career. After we got pipped at the post for the Premier League by Manchester City in 2012, we were subjected to ugly taunting by some diehard Sunderland fans at the Stadium of Light (which, at that moment, seemed poorly named). Afterwards, in the dressing room, I told all the players–and emphasised it to the younger ones–that they should remember the treatment they had just received every time they returned to play Sunderland. And they did. The following season we returned and beat them 1–0.

  Defeats rarely got the better of me, though I am aware that, especially in retirement, it is easy to put a gloss over the past. There is no changing the fact that, beginning in 2008, we reached the Champions League final three times within four years yet only won once. So while I was elated on one occasion, I was disappointed on three. There were some moments of profound despair. In October 1989, as a favour, United had travelled to St Johnstone for a mid-season friendly to help them open thei
r new stadium, McDiarmid Park. We won 1–0 but our performance was worse than pathetic. After the game I went back to my hotel room, eager to escape. Archie Knox, my assistant manager, knocked on the door and told me I had to attend the reception being held for the teams. I was in my bed and told him, ‘I’m not going. I can’t face those players. They’re not good enough.’ Archie was right. It took me some time, but eventually I did drag myself downstairs, although I can’t say I was good company. A few other defeats stand out because I could not get to sleep after Aberdeen’s loss to Dundee United in the 1979–80 Scottish League Cup final, and went home to bed after United’s 5–1 defeat to Manchester City in 1989. The two worst defeats were probably both Champions League fixtures–against Borussia Dortmund in 1997 and Real Madrid in 2013. Those defeats were more painful than the humiliations of a 5–0 trouncing by Newcastle in 1996, the 5–0 thumping by Chelsea in 1999 and our League Cup final defeat to Sheffield Wednesday in 1991.

  When I knew we were going to be beaten, I always tried to make sure we didn’t get smashed to smithereens because of the effect on morale. We played Manchester City at Old Trafford in October 2011 and got beaten 6–1. It was our worst thumping by our crosstown rivals in 22 years, and our biggest home League defeat since 1955 when United were hammered 5–0, also by Manchester City. The irony of it was that for most of the game we outplayed them. City scored two goals either side of half-time, and though we scratched our way back to 3–1, we conceded three goals in the last 13 minutes. In retrospect we should have just bolted the door, prevented City’s last three goals, and avoided the embarrassment of the terrible newspaper headlines and the jubilation on the other side of Manchester. More importantly, we lost the League to City that year on goal difference, which made this result even more painful.