At United, especially in the early years, I found it very reassuring to know that Bobby Charlton was on my side. I never went out of my way to curry favour with him, but he had originally helped advise the board to sign me as a manager and I always felt he was in my corner. During bleak times he often said, ‘You’ll be all right. You’re doing the right thing.’ In the months following our 5–1 loss to Manchester City in September 1989, I was feeling a mite vulnerable, and Bobby’s backing–particularly during this period–counted for a lot. Not only did his opinion carry a lot of weight through the club, but a few well-chosen words lifted my spirits too. Every leader needs an ally like that.
8
OWNING THE MESSAGE
Speaking
As a manager I communicated with a number of different constituencies and each required special handling: the owner, the coaches and other club staff, the players and the supporters.
Having a healthy, open line of communication with the boss is vital. Few of us don’t have a boss. Perhaps the founders of successful companies have designed things in such a way that they don’t feel they have anyone they need to please–beyond their inner demons–but the rest of us do. I might have been seen as ‘The Boss’ by the players, but in football the real boss is the owner, who can hire and fire the manager at will.
I learned this the painful way at St Mirren when I was always arguing with the chairman, Willie Todd, the owner of a painting and decorating company, who had bought the club shortly after I joined. He didn’t know much about football and I helped educate him. Before long he began to think he knew a lot about the game and we were soon at loggerheads. It was a very nasty experience, and got to the point where we were not talking to each other. In retrospect, there was only one way it was going to end–and that was badly for me. It did. I was sacked. Managers have to find a way to talk to their bosses, regardless of their differences in character; otherwise it will only end miserably.
At Aberdeen, I wasn’t about to repeat the mistake. The personality of Dick Donald, Aberdeen’s chairman between 1970 and 1993, was very different from Willie Todd’s, and I found him easier to get along with. Though we became close, our conversations were always tinged with formality. I addressed him as ‘Mr Chairman’, and he always called me ‘Mr Ferguson’, which helped show I understood the difference between our roles. It was important to establish these boundaries because he was a constant presence around the club, and we would talk almost every day. My other key relationship at Aberdeen was with Archie Knox, my assistant manager. We went everywhere together–working during the day and socialising, when we had time, with our wives in the evening. When I moved to United in 1986 I insisted that he came with me. His last name could have been Ferguson and, while I understood his decision to leave United in 1991 to help Walter Smith at Rangers, it ended a wonderful working relationship.
By the time I got to United I was 44, had experienced success at Aberdeen (where we had won ten trophies and a number of players had earned Scottish caps) and learned that maintaining a healthy relationship with the owner and club chairman was vital. I used to go and see Martin Edwards, United’s owner and chairman, in his book- and trophy-filled office at Old Trafford a couple of times a week. No subject was off limits, and I kept him fully informed of everything I was working on and concerned about. We saw eye to eye about most things, with the exception of my own compensation.
This was a time of great change at Old Trafford and in football in general. During the 1990s, the combination of the huge rise in television revenues and the 1995 European Court of Justice’s ‘Bosman ruling’, which lifted many transfer restrictions, gave greater impetus to the business side of the club. After Martin’s decision to float United on the Stock Exchange in 1991, the nature of its ownership was altered. The club’s stock was no longer concentrated in an individual, but rather distributed among dozens of investment fund managers and hundreds of individuals. For me this meant that, apart from making an appearance at the club’s Annual General Meeting, I was no longer in direct contact with all the financial owners of the club, but it was vital that I kept communicating closely with Martin and the board.
The other thing that changed was the gradual increase in authority of the chief executive officer of the club, stemming from the blossoming of United’s commercial activities. In 2000 this resulted in the appointment of David Gill. David was responsible for building and running the business activities of United. Over the years David and I became like blood brothers.
After the Glazers took control of United in 2005, the nature of the organisation changed again. Unlike Dick Donald in Aberdeen and Martin Edwards in Manchester, the Glazers did not live near the club they owned. Instead they lived in America and their principal conduit was David Gill. I had talked to Malcolm Glazer after his family bought the club, but I never met him in person. The two family members I saw the most were Joel and Avram who, best as I could tell, were its most enthusiastic football fans. However, it was David who kept the Glazers updated on the health of the club and relayed my requests about purchases of players or upgrades to our training facilities.
After the owner, the next most important constituency I had to talk to was the coaching staff. They were the pipeline for conveying my ideas to players–whether members of the first team or boys coming through the youth system. I am hard pressed to think of a day when I didn’t talk to any of the coaches. Even during those very rare times when I was ill in bed, I’d still talk to the staff on the phone. I understood intuitively that if there was a breakdown in communication with my staff, or if instructions were misunderstood or garbled in the re-telling, it would only lead to confusion on the pitch. So, first thing every morning, I would talk to the coaching staff at the training ground and set out my key priorities for the day.
I would talk to the players in one of three settings–during training, on match days, and also by themselves in a one-on-one setting. In some circumstances, especially when I was talking to people I didn’t know well, I found it tricky to assess whether I was drilling my message home, so I got into the habit of imagining that I was in the shoes of the listener. I knew from my own experience as a player what it was like to listen to a manager drone on, especially if it was the day before a game, and you were just raring to get on to the training field and blow off some steam. As a result I always tried to keep my team talks short and punchy. I remember once saying this to the players, ‘This must be my thousandth team talk,’ and Brian McClair, who played 471 games for United between 1987 and 1998, chirped up, ‘Yeah, I slept through half of them.’ Managers often make things more complicated than they are. The best way to make sure people understand what you expect from them is to be clear and concise, and that was especially true as the number of foreign players increased, since some of them needed subtitles to deal with my Scottish accent. I’m sure there were a few that probably couldn’t tell whether I was speaking in English or Welsh.
I took pains to convey to the players that because I was not intimidated by the opposition, neither should they be. I was also careful to remind them of the necessity for us to win all the individual battles that take place during a game. And, more often than not, I would urge the team to be decisive in the final third of the game. At half-time I would relay to the players what I had seen in the first half, make observations about some of the opposing team, and try to tighten everything up. I made a habit of never going around issuing reminders to individual players. It just plants the seeds of doubt in their minds and they are left wondering whether the manager trusts them. Similarly, I never felt it made any sense to be perpetually barking instructions at players during games. If you have to resort to that, it means that you have not prepared or communicated your plan correctly, or you do not trust the players to do what they are supposed to do. Either shortcoming reflects more poorly on the manager than the players.
Bill Shankly, the long-time manager of Liverpool who, like me, came from Scotland, had a reputation for keeping thin
gs to the point. I often tried to emulate the effectiveness of one of Bill’s favourite lines which was, ‘If we get the ball, why don’t we pass it to each other? It’s a wee bit harder when the other team have got it.’ The instructions that I gave most frequently were very short. They were nothing more complicated than ‘Keep the ball’ or, ‘Do not let them score’.
One message that seemed to strike home (at least judging by the number of players who appear to have remembered it) were the words I used at half-time during the 1999 Champions League final when we were trailing Bayern Munich 1–0. I said, ‘When that Cup is going to be presented, just remember that you can’t even touch it if you’re the losers–you’ll be walking past it with your losers’ medals, knowing someone walking behind you is going to lift the Cup.’
With players, the manner of the delivery of the message could have quite an effect. While I had a reputation for sometimes steam-blasting players, I found that I rarely lost my temper (especially in my later years) in crucial games where we were trailing badly. Then it was vital to stay calm and be very precise with my feedback. Sometimes, Mick Phelan might tell me it was time to give everyone a bit of a roasting, particularly the new players, but tantrums quickly lost their effect. At half-time when we were ahead by a couple of goals, I would frequently put a bit of a bark into my instructions, to ensure that the players did not let their concentration lapse and allow complacency to seep in. I also wanted to notch up as many goals as possible in case an entire season might be decided on goal difference. By contrast, silence can be as effective a way of communicating as anything else. Sometimes, after we had a bad result, I would finish what I had to say to the players and then sit down on the bench and say nothing. The subsequent quietness was probably more effective than anything I said.
Whether the audience is one person or 75,000, you need to assemble your thoughts, know what you want to emphasise and just say it. In team meetings it’s important to maintain eye contact and look directly at the players because it adds intensity to the delivery of the message, although I tried to avoid staring at those who I felt might wither under my gaze. There are some managers who will enter a dressing room at half-time with a pack of notes. When they talk to the players they will use their notes as prompts. I cannot imagine how that is an effective way to communicate. If you have command and control of your subject, you don’t need notes. No player is going to believe that someone is in control of his material, or is an authority on a subject, if he has to keep resorting to notes. I relied on my memory and my own assessment and, that way, when I was talking to the players, I was able to maintain eye contact. I’m sure I got some stuff wrong. I’d miss a deflection or a foul but, in the grand scheme of things, those tiny details don’t count. It’s the message, the command of that message and its delivery that pack the punch. Everyone has their own style, but using notes when trying to motivate people is not mine.
If I wanted to convey a particular message, I might summon a player to my office at the Carrington training ground. There was a phone in the dressing room that I used to relay the invitation to come upstairs. I’m sure, when the phone rang, some of the players thought they were being hauled into the headmaster’s study for a caning. Some of them were right.
While I was always fixated on both physical and mental freshness, I was careful never to say to a player, ‘You look tired’, even if I thought that he did. I knew that if I uttered the phrase he would immediately feel tired. Instead I’d say to him, ‘You’re so strong, nobody is ever going to be able to keep up with you.’ Before a game, especially at Old Trafford, I’d emphasise the size of our pitch, which was daunting for most of our opponents, and the need to maintain a high tempo, rhythm and speed. I wanted to plant in their minds that we would have the opponents knackered out by the last 15 minutes of a game.
I used to lie in bed thinking about new themes to talk to the players about, because I never wanted them to feel that I was about to deliver a sermon they had heard the previous week. Once, after I had been to see my very first performance of a classical concert with Carlos Queiroz in Manchester, I talked to the players about the experience. They must have thought I’d gone off my rocker, but I was trying to explain to them how the conductor of the concert, which featured Andrea Bocelli, was trying to obtain the same things from his orchestra as I was doing at United: control, harmony, tempo, timing, rhythm. I knew that the players had never heard this story before because it was brand new, but I’m sure my message was lost on some. There were some stories about teamwork that I’m sure Ryan Giggs or Paul Scholes feel they heard dozens of times, like my tale about large flocks of Canada geese, which can migrate thousands of miles because of the way they work as a team. The birds take turns breaking the air at the front of the flock and, at the back, if one gets injured, a couple drop away from the flock to look after it. I was not asking them to fly for thousands of miles, I was only asking them to play 38 games of football.
Making sure players grasped where they stood was very important. Like all of us they are fragile human beings and it’s easy to send unintended messages. If I was not planning to pick a player in a particular game, I’d always try to find a way to explain the reason. They would be worrying that they had fallen out of favour or I had my eye on someone else to fill their boots. Instead I’d try to let them down gently and provide reassurance. Sometimes it was because I was resting them for a more important game. I’d take pains to explain the bigger picture–that the campaign was more important than the game and that we needed to plot out a way of winning every game. In the bigger European games, where we would travel with a squad of 24 players, I would need to explain things to the 13 who were not included in the starting line-up. I tried to make them feel they were part of a squad and that it was the squad–rather than the starting team in any particular game–that would eventually win the League or a cup.
It was all well and good to be chatting with the coaches or the players in quite small groups, but it was another matter to be speaking in front of crowds of people. As you encounter success, more people tend to get interested in what you have to say. I never thought when I first became a manager that I would ever address a crowd of 75,000 people, not to mention the millions more watching on TV–which is what happened after my last ever game at Old Trafford.
Tons of people have told me they are scared witless about speaking in front of others. For some reason it’s never bothered me. Even as a boy I was always busy organising other people, and I’ve long been accustomed to some form of public speaking, even though I am not pretending for a moment that I could deliver a Churchillian speech or the Gettysburg Address. As a teenager I had my stint as a shop steward and, later, when I ran my two pubs, I often had to say something to all the customers. Neither of these settings required great oratorical skill, but I suppose they are one reason why I’ve never been plagued by the nervous butterflies that afflict many people when they have to stand up and address a group.
I’ve always marvelled at the way in which some highly skilled public speakers’ command of language allows them to convey their thoughts in a powerful fashion. In Scotland in the 1960s and 1970s, everyone paid attention to Jimmy Reid, the trade-union leader and one of the guiding forces of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Love him or loathe him, he knew how to command the attention of a crowd. He was one of the last great political platform speakers–whether it was in the shipyards of Clydebank or in less raucous settings. I spoke at his funeral in 2010 at the Govan Old Parish Church and remember saying that while my education had consisted of football, Jimmy’s took place at the Govan library. Words just seemed to flow from him. The speech he made when he was installed as Rector of Glasgow University in 1971, during which he implored the students to reject the rat race, was reprinted in full by the New York Times, which described it as the greatest speech since Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
When Nelson Mandela spoke at the Laureus Sports Award dinner in Monaco in 2000, you could have hear
d a pin drop. He didn’t speak for long, but his remarks made the hairs on my neck stand up. Such force; such presence. My pal, Hugh McIlvanney, is no politician, but he is probably the greatest sports writer I have encountered and his control of language is fantastic. I could listen to him all day because he speaks in complete paragraphs.
I don’t pretend to command language like a Reid, a Mandela or a McIlvanney, but as a football manager I frequently found myself speaking in public, and sometimes in front of a stadium packed to the gills. Talking to smaller groups is a useful way to practise speaking to bigger audiences. The principles are the same. You need to know what you want to say; you have to contemplate how you are going to deliver the message; and you have to maintain control of the audience. If someone has belief, they can find the words to express it. I’ve never been one for reading verbatim from a speech written out in longhand, nor have I ever used a Teleprompter. For me it’s been more important to plan what I want to say, have a mental road map for the points I want to emphasise, and then try to maintain my train of thought. I’m quite comfortable improvising, particularly when the subject has something to do with football. Usually this works but, on occasion, it’s an approach that has failed me.
In 1974, after four months as manager of East Stirlingshire, I became manager of St Mirren, where I was also just relying on instincts. Nobody had given me public-speaking lessons or public-relations tips, so I did what I thought was appropriate. St Mirren was a club located in Paisley, a town that had been hard hit by the closure of the cotton mills and a slump in the automobile industry. Glasgow, which is only ten miles away, cast a long shadow over Paisley, and each weekend bus-loads of men would disappear to watch Celtic or Rangers. The whole town had a major inferiority complex, and I was determined to lift spirits and convince the people there that their football club had a bright future. I decided that some public speaking would do the trick.
Leading: Learning from Life and My Years at Manchester United Page 17
