Leading: Learning from Life and My Years at Manchester United

by Alex Ferguson

  Handling the press in the moments after a defeat was really difficult. I might make some general comments about the team but I tried never to single out a player for criticism; though I do recall, to my chagrin, saying something negative about Nani after we lost 5–4 to Chelsea in a League Cup game in 2012. If a striker fluffed a chance, or there was a fatal back-pass or the goalkeeper had a lapse of concentration, the player himself would be more than aware of what he had done. Many of the best players are their own sternest critics and they did not need to read a disparaging comment from me in the Sunday papers. That wasn’t going to help. Usually, I tried to deflect the reporters’ attention away from both the team and the players, by pointing an accusatory finger at the opponent’s tactics, or a refereeing decision. I could always find plenty of reasons for us losing a game that had nothing to do with us, even though I knew in my heart that we had nobody else to blame. I always thought my role was to act as a player’s heat deflector in a moment of crisis.

  A major loss or pounding can exact a heavy toll on a group of people. It can shake their confidence and, if you aren’t careful, the consequences can linger. Whenever we lost an important game in which I knew we had played well, I tried to say very little. Nobody can absorb a message in times like that. You can whisper sweet nothings but the words aren’t heard. So I would just go around and pat each of the players on the head. They understood that message–maybe because they felt it too. In football, a whiff of vulnerability is tantamount to giving your competitors an adrenalin shot that would turn a mule into a Derby winner. When you lose, particularly if you get thumped, you carry that loss around. In football it doesn’t matter if the team has a lot of changes for the following game, everyone knows the club lost the prior outing. The players know it, the fans know it, and the press are baying like jackals. It adds unwanted pressure that can build on itself. It’s like getting a wee tear in your jacket. If you don’t get that tear sewn up immediately, it will only get worse. The reverse is also true. Taking to the field when your competitors are concentrating on survival is like having one or two goals in the bag before a boot has touched the ball.

  Back at the training ground on the morning after a defeat, I’d gather everyone around me and ask, ‘Are we enjoying the headlines this morning?’ or, ‘Anybody enjoy what happened to our football club last night?’ I’d have a scowl on my face and I wouldn’t make it easy, but I was also intent on rebuilding the players’ confidence. After any defeat I would tend to withdraw and become sullen. The players would be looking to me and muttering between themselves, ‘Bloody hell, he’s in some mood today.’ I am sure most of them did not want to come anywhere close to me in the canteen. I’d say something like, ‘If you don’t meet people’s expectations, you only have yourselves to blame. There’s no one else you can blame. We all know we’re better than this and we let ourselves down. At our club losing a game is big news, so let’s try and avoid the big news. Let’s talk about all the good things that we’ve got–all the good and great performances. I want to come out for the post-game press conference and say, “Fantastic. It was a fantastic performance.” I want to be able to say, “Well done Rooney, well done Welbeck, well done Chicharito.”’ Players who knew me well understood how much I valued winning. They would gradually absorb this sensibility into their own pores and eventually would be transmitting it to newcomers. We had a virus that infected everyone at United. It was called winning.

  Manchester City’s Premier League victory in 2012 was painful at the time–particularly because it was based on goal difference. It was also something of a tonic because it gave us something to work towards, and the following year we won the League. City finished second, 11 points behind. After my first League win in 1993, every time we finished second, which happened five times during this period, we won it the following season. There’s some merit in getting defeated–even though I’d never want it to be a habit. Team members who are hungry for victory and take great pride in their performance will be eager to avenge defeat.

  Football is full of setbacks beyond the simple pain of defeat, but it’s useless drowning in self-pity. I do not remember a time when every single member of the squad was at peak fitness and ready to play. Somebody was always injured. It was normal for a tenth of the squad to be injured. I also don’t remember a time when one of our long-time competitors was not fielding a player we had missed signing. Take December 2009–it was a horror show. We had 14 of the first-team squad laid up by injury–including two goalkeepers, seven defenders, three midfielders and two strikers. A fit 11 picked from the injured 14 could have beaten any club in Europe. Yet, while they were on the bench, or with the doctors, we lost at home to Aston Villa and away to Fulham. We also occasionally got hammered by viruses that swept through the squad; at the end of 1994 and start of 1995, things were so bad that I even considered closing the training ground. Nine of our players were felled by the flu and, while they were in bed, we dropped points to Nottingham Forest, Leicester City, Southampton, Newcastle United and Crystal Palace. There is nothing I could have done about either the injuries or the flu; we just had to make the best of bad situations.

  We made plenty of decisions that we came to regret in the transfer market, but you cannot change history. United probably could have won a couple of League titles with a team composed of players we scouted but did not sign. In 2003 I went to see Petr Čech in goal for Rennes in a game against Auxerre. We thought Petr was a bit young for the bruisers in the Premier League, but Petr went to Chelsea and in the subsequent decade kept 220 clean sheets for the club. We got our wires crossed on another goalkeeper too, in 1999, after Peter Schmeichel had announced his intention to retire. There had been some preliminary interest in Mark Bosnich, who was playing at Aston Villa, and I was also very interested in Edwin van der Sar who was at Ajax. By the time I informed Martin Edwards, the club chairman, that we had received bad reports on Bosnich, it was too late. Martin had already shaken hands on a deal and Van der Sar went to Juventus.

  Didier Drogba was another. He was playing at Olympique de Marseilles and we went to check him out, but the club wanted £25 million for him and Chelsea moved in for the kill before we had made up our minds. Thomas Müller, who scored five goals for Germany in the 2010 and 2014 World Cups, was a ten year old playing for an amateur team several miles from Munich when we first heard about him. We had him watched and the following day he committed himself to Bayern Munich. We wanted to sign Ronaldo, the Brazilian striker, from Cruzeiro in 1994 but we could not get a work permit, and he went to PSV Eindhoven in the Netherlands. We looked at Robin van Persie when he was about 16 and playing for Feyenoord’s reserve team, and even then the price on his head was about £6 million. Jim Ryan, who was on our coaching staff for 11 years before becoming United’s director of youth football for another decade, watched Van Persie get sent off and subsequently exchange insults with the supporters. Jim wasn’t the only person unimpressed by Van Persie’s temperament on that occasion, because his club immediately suspended him. There were plenty of other players I would have liked to sign–such as Alan Shearer, the striker who became a thorn in our side while he played for Newcastle, or the Argentinian, Gabriel Batistuta, who spent most of his career playing in Italy, or Samir Nasri who went to Manchester City in 2011. Then, in 2011, I hurtled down on the train from Euston to Lille to sign the young French defender Raphaël Varane. David Gill was getting into the finer points of the contract with Lens, Varane’s club, when Zinedine Zidane got wind of this and somehow scooped him up for Real Madrid from under our noses. I don’t think José Mourinho, who was then managing Real Madrid, had ever seen Varane play.

  I could have let these decisions eat away at me, but I tried to avoid this. We made these choices, nobody else did. You also cannot field a team with players that you don’t own, so what’s the point of flogging yourself?

  As time went by, these missed opportunities and the setbacks and defeats we suffered along the way eventually helped me become a better
, or at least more gracious, loser. When I was a young man I was a very bad loser. After any defeat I would go home and sulk. In Aberdeen, after one particularly bad defeat, I ran the players through the town centre so the punters could all give them stick. When we got back to the dressing room I told them, ‘Let that be a lesson to you.’ Every winner hates to lose. In football all the best players are bad losers, although they display it in different ways.

  The most gracious lesson I received about the manner in which to handle defeat was given by Ottmar Hitzfeld, the manager of Bayern Munich between 1998 and 2004, and 2007 and 2008. After we beat Bayern in the Champions League final in 1999 by scoring two goals in the last three minutes (after a campaign that for United had consisted of 63 games and 96 hours of play), I could tell that he was devastated. Within 180 seconds he had gone from thinking the trophy was his to seeing his players either prostrate or holding their heads in their hands. It must have been soul-destroying, but he was most gracious and that was amplified a year later when I went to Munich to watch Rangers, who had a player that interested me, play Bayern. After the game he invited me to have dinner at his table with his two brothers, and they were all so gracious and warm. Then some of the Bayern players came and shook my hand and offered congratulations, even though they must have hated losing. It was a great display of the quality of the club.

  Perhaps the most important lesson in how to handle failure was handed down to me by my own dear mother. When I was 21 I’d been playing part-time for St Johnstone and had been in and out of the team, and only played about 50 first-team games in four years. I was really disillusioned. I had broken my nose, cheekbone and eyebrow in a reserve game, and then, after I recovered, the reserve team got destroyed several games in a row. So I went to Canada House on Waterloo Street in Glasgow, and took out papers to emigrate to Canada, because all my dad’s family had already moved there. I just didn’t want to play another game for the club.

  So one day I got my brother’s girlfriend to pretend that she was my mother and call Bobby Brown to tell him that I had the flu and couldn’t play. He wasn’t fooled and sent a telegram to my mother, because we didn’t have a phone, telling me to ring him. I went up the road to the phone booth, dialled Stanley 267 (which is a number I suppose I remember because of the embarrassment), and Brown ripped into me. He said, ‘You’re a disgrace. You think you’re kidding me. You got someone to pretend to be your mother. I’ve got a whole team down with the real flu and you’re playing tomorrow and you report to the Buchanan Hotel at twelve o’clock.’

  In that game I scored a hat-trick at Ibrox–the first player from a visiting team to do so–and that wee bit of luck changed my life. I had come within a whisker of quitting. My mother had read me the riot act after she’d discovered what had happened. She taught me never to give in and, ever after, one way or another, I have tried to convey the same lesson to others.

  Criticism

  Football is one of those subjects in which everyone is an expert even if their knowledge of the game couldn’t fill a thimble. It’s like other forms of entertainment or creative endeavour, where it’s easier to be a critic than a practitioner. Everyone has opinions about restaurants, airlines, films, cars and paintings, even if they couldn’t cook a boiled egg, fly a kite or draw a square. It’s different when you get into more exotic fields and the man on the street is intimidated from passing comment because of ignorance. Only real experts can offer a valuable opinion about the mechanics of a suspension bridge or the best way to set up a laboratory experiment. That’s just not the case in football, where managers of top-flight teams have millions of critics–from those closest to them, to fans on the other side of the world.

  Some leaders have to contend with criticism from within their own organisation. They might have ambitious underlings vying for their job, or a board of directors muttering between themselves. Whenever someone new assumes a role, there will always be doubts about his capabilities until he has proved himself. If a leader has had a long stint at the helm and encounters a bad patch, he will often have to endure times when people ask whether he is past his sell-by date.

  There were only a few times when I had to contend with carping inside the place I worked. At St Mirren, where I was the manager between the ages of 32 and 36, I was politically naïve and got on the wrong side of the owner so, to some extent, I helped stoke his criticism.

  There were a few periods when I found the criticism demoralising. Although I don’t remember ever being booed by United fans, I do remember a particularly tough time in 1989 when, during the whole of December, we failed to win a game. We had lost or drawn ten out of 15 games. Somebody held a banner high up in the Stretford End that said: ‘3 YEARS OF EXCUSES AND IT’S STILL CRAP… TA RA FERGIE’.

  I suppose my confidence was shaken a bit because the day after the game I phoned my brother Martin; I knew he would be objective, give me a fair assessment and tell me where I stood. He said, ‘You’re just going to have to dig in,’ which was a sentiment I found reassuring. Years later, the person who had held up that banner wrote a book titled Ta Ra Fergie, and a copy showed up at the house. I mailed it back to the publisher. But on the whole I think I weathered the criticism fairly well. Certainly in 2004 and 2005 when we were not playing well and some fans were on my back, it didn’t really bother me.

  It is sometimes tricky to put criticism in its proper place when you are under a lot of pressure, haven’t had enough sleep and everything is going wrong. It might have been a bit easier for me because growing up in Govan was not for the weak. It was a tough neighbourhood–physically and emotionally. There was no option but to be able to protect yourself from bullies and bruisers, and as boys we would get into fights about everything. My brother, a cousin and I would have fights with the five brothers of the Granger family who lived nearby, and from a fairly young age I had become accustomed to physical pain, the taste of blood in my mouth or bad bruising.

  I always found it helpful to put criticism in perspective and these memories of my childhood helped. It’s easy for me, decades later, to romanticise aspects of my childhood or my playing career, but both had more than their share of raw moments. Yet physical pain is one thing, mental anguish and emotional pressure are entirely different.

  I’ve seen lots of people crack from the emotional pressure of playing or managing. Obviously I might not have been privy to their personal problems, but there are tremendous pressures. The worst example is Robert Enke, the German international goalkeeper who committed suicide in 2009. He had had a difficult few years playing in Spain before joining the Bundesliga team, Hannover 96, and his personal life had been savaged by the death of an infant daughter. After Enke died, his wife revealed that he had been struggling with depression for many years. Fortunately, we never had to deal with anything as distressing during my time at United.

  Everybody has their fears; all footballers want to be in the first team, and many will torture themselves when they are injured or have been dropped, fearful that their playing days are ending. There are plenty of them who have turned to drink or gambling and got sucked into a rat-hole of despair.

  Managers, most of whom are on short-term contracts, are not immune to the unrelenting pressure and know that the guillotine blade can descend at any moment. Ralf Rangnick, who managed, among others, Hannover 96 and Schalke 04; Gérard Houllier, who worked at Liverpool and Lyon; and Johan Cruyff, after his stint at Barcelona, stepped away from management because of stress. Pep Guardiola took a sabbatical from football after leaving Barcelona to recharge. You have to wonder whether Kenny Dalglish, the great Celtic and Liverpool player, who later managed Liverpool, was ever the same after the horrors he endured in the aftermath of the Heysel stadium disaster in 1985, where 39 fans died, and the Hillsborough disaster in 1989 that claimed 96 lives. And of course I have always lived with the memory of Jock Stein’s collapse and tragic death.

  If you’re in the public eye, the press coverage creates other issues–especially if you ar
e in the sports business. The press helps inflame irate fans. After we moved to Manchester we used to get so many abusive phone calls that we had to change our home phone number several times.

  When things were at their darkest for me at United, I remember my wife Cathy asking me what I’d do if I was sacked, and I told her that we would just have to go back to Scotland. I’m sure I would have been crushed if I had been fired, but I always knew I’d be able to support my family and it wouldn’t have been the end of the world.

  The press can certainly play their part too. Matt Busby told me, ‘I never read the papers when we lost a game. They’re not going to write nice things about you. So just don’t read those stories.’ While Matt Busby’s advice made sense, it’s impossible to be completely oblivious to what appears in the press. In Scotland I was in the habit of reading the match reports, but after I got to United I would very seldom read the papers. Even if I didn’t read the papers or watch the football programmes on television, friends would ask whether I’d heard about what somebody had said or written about me, and United’s press officer would brief me on inflammatory stories or rumours that had made it into print. But I learned to deal with it and, during my last ten years or so as a manager, I found the press criticism far less troublesome than when I was younger.

  The best protection against attacks from others comes from a few people whose opinions you really care about. The yells of a horde of abusive banshees always fade away when you have the support of a few people that you respect. If we lost a game in Aberdeen I usually had to face the chairman in the boardroom after the game. He would be drinking his Coca-Cola–because he never touched alcohol–and would let off steam by giving me stick about the line-up or a particular player. All his criticism stayed in that room and it usually blew over after ten minutes. Either way, outside the room he was unstintingly loyal. The fact that he never voiced a word of criticism behind my back was probably more helpful to me than pounds of praise or a big hug.