Leading: Learning from Life and My Years at Manchester United

by Alex Ferguson

  There are also too many cases of managers who have contributed sterling service receiving terrible treatment from the owners they have served. Jock Stein served Celtic for 13 years and won 25 trophies for the club before retiring in 1978. It’s hard to imagine a better leader than Jock. He didn’t drink or smoke, never took any credit for himself and diverted all praise towards his players. After all this, the directors refused to offer him a board seat. Instead, they told him he could work in the Celtic shop. They did the same to his assistant, Sean Fallon, who had spent 28 years with the club. It was a shocking way to treat people who had given their all.

  Every now and again I had assistant coaches who wanted to leave United because they knew I wasn’t going anywhere–and I always told them to be very careful about where they chose to go. Steve McClaren had replaced Brian Kidd as my assistant at United but, after three years, was chomping at the bit and wanted to leave to manage a club. He had offers from West Ham and Southampton, but elected to go to Middlesbrough because of the reputation of the owner, Steve Gibson. He was young and prepared to invest in the club. Middlesbrough had a fantastic training ground and it all worked out well for McClaren. He picked the employer that was right for him. Steve’s decision showed the value of taking time to assess the situation. He did his homework, he spent time assessing the club and, most importantly, he made a judgement about whether he would get the support he desired from the owner. It shows the value of taking sufficient time to make an important decision, rather than quickly hopping on to whatever lily pad happens to float by.

  Control

  The popular caricature of me is an authoritative tyrant with a lust for power. Not surprisingly, I beg to differ. I’ll plead guilty to having a thirst for winning and being fixated on maintaining complete control but–in my book–those are requisites for effective leadership. The skipper of any ship incapable of controlling its course, or altering its speed, is not going to arrive safely in port. The same goes for a football club. A leader who seeks control is very different from one who craves power.

  There’s a big difference between control and power. The leader of any group usually has considerable power, but it’s something that can be easily abused. One of the side-effects of the abuse of power is when someone leads by fear of intimidation. As time went by I learned to control my temper. Some of this was just the passage of the years but, more importantly, I realised that a display of temper is more effective if used sparingly. I just don’t believe that you can get the most out of people if they are perpetually afraid of you.

  There’s nothing wrong with losing your temper for the right reasons but, if you explode at the slightest provocation, it can paralyse an organisation. When I lost my temper, the thunderclouds would tend to blow over in a day or so. There were some players who wouldn’t buckle when I delivered my so-called ‘hairdryer treatments’, but I’m sure there were plenty of others, particularly the younger ones, who quaked in their boots. Sometimes I didn’t realise the effect that a few words from me might have on a player. People used to say that some players would be terrified if I so much as raised an eyebrow or just happened to look at them. I’m sure most leaders are not aware that they scare other people, especially if they rarely raise their voice or have never smashed a teacup on the floor. They probably think of themselves as reasonable and compassionate. Yet anyone who can raise a salary, or fire someone, is almost bound to be seen as intimidating or terrifying–or both. I’ll also say, in my defence, that the press sometimes made it appear as if I was in a perpetual bad temper. If you look at all my teams it was evident that they enjoyed playing and they tended to express themselves in an uninhibited fashion. People do not do that if they are quaking in their boots or if their boss has made them afraid of their own shadows. If that had been the case at United, people would have seen a team that concentrated on avoiding defeat rather than winning.

  I always thought of myself as tough but fair and found it hard to understand how anyone could view me as a monster but, as the years went by and United became ever more successful, I did gradually come to understood that a wink, a nod or a frown could play havoc with the confidence of a few of the players. In team talks I’d be careful not to single out any of the young players who were new to the squad, and would concentrate on the ones who could look me in the eye. When I knew for certain that a word from me, no matter how carefully phrased, would cause a player to have a sleepless night, I usually got somebody else like Mick Phelan, who eventually became United’s assistant manager, to convey the message. Harsh outbursts and temper tantrums can, when used sparingly, have an effect, but it’s a negative and corrosive way to run anything. It’s far better to give people a belief in themselves, and faith in the direction of their organisation, than to rule like Attila the Hun.

  At the same time I was always very careful that my control was not usurped. That explains why I sold players who tried to undermine my control. I hesitate to say this, because it will get wrongly interpreted as callousness, but everyone is disposable. Somebody once said, ‘Graveyards are full of indispensable men,’ and it’s a phrase worth dwelling on.

  The truth is, I just could not afford to have our club revolve around either the outlook or health of one or two people. It is just too risky. Let’s assume for a moment that I had never had any management issues with a player and they were not causing me the slightest bother. Imagine instead they had sustained a terrible injury, which either sidelined them for a long time or ended their playing career. In that situation I would also have had to figure out a way to prosper without them. Fortunately, in all my time at United, I only had a handful of major issues with players. When we honoured our promise to Cristiano Ronaldo that he could fulfil his lifelong desire to play for Real Madrid, I had to deal with the issue of the loss of the best player in the world, and I had to rebuild and look to a future without him. I hated losing him, and I knew his absence would be noticeable and might make our strike force seem a little gap-toothed for a while, but I also knew that if I made the right decisions then the club would continue to flourish.

  It’s easy to think that control begins and ends with the person running the organisation. It doesn’t. People sometimes talk about me as if I was a control freak, but I don’t think of myself that way. It would be impossible to run an organisation like that. I certainly wanted to be in touch and know everything that was going on at the club and that affected my job, such as the observations from training sessions or reserve games, updates from the medical staff, news from the scouting side, the weather forecast for the next game and the condition of the pitch. But I couldn’t run everything. I did not need to know what brand of detergent was used in the laundry or the style of font we used in the match-day programmes. Other people had to do that. I was the puppet master, not the control freak.

  Delegation

  Control and delegation are two sides of the same coin, and in my younger years my instinct was to try and control everything. I must have automatically assumed that if I did something myself it was the quickest and best way to get anything done.

  Nobody had ever explained to me that working with, and through, others is by far the most effective way to do things–assuming, of course, that they understand what you want and are keen to follow. I gradually began to understand that this is the difference between management and leadership.

  I never had any formal schooling to be a leader. Obviously, I’d paid attention to the way that managers acted during my days as a player but, in any football organisation, there aren’t the decades-long programmes designed to produce a CEO like those at big companies such as General Electric or Goldman Sachs. No club is ever going to send an aspiring manager to an Executive MBA Program at Harvard or another business school. So I had to learn on the job and use my wits. I’d never managed a team of people, I didn’t understand how working through other people allowed you to do more and amplified your reach.

  The world is full of able managers. In life beyond football, cor
porate training schemes are designed to churn out managers by the thousand. At United we had plenty of people who could manage aspects of our activities far better than I could. The head groundsman knew far more about the technology of soil management and irrigation than I did. The doctors managed a realm whose subtleties I could not pretend to understand. The head of our youth academy knew far more than I about the abilities of each of the lads in the programme. I slowly came to understand that my job was different. It was to set very high standards. It was to help everyone else believe they could do things that they didn’t think they were capable of. It was to chart a course that had not been pursued before. It was to make everyone understand that the impossible was possible. That’s the difference between leadership and management.

  When I started managing, my own naïveté was, to some extent, exacerbated by the lack of resources at East Stirlingshire and St Mirren, the two Scottish clubs where I cut my teeth. There just wasn’t a lot of money available to hire people. So I tried to do everything by myself. I thought I could rule the world. I was ordering the cleaning materials and grass feed, making sure we had the right quantity of pies for the games and fussing over the contents of the match-day programmes. I banned the long-time supporters from coming into the tea room to get free pies and Bovril and there was a real uproar about that. I was just acting on my instincts and what I thought was the right thing to do because I didn’t know any better.

  As I explained earlier, Archie Knox, my assistant manager at both Aberdeen and United, was the man who educated me about the benefits of delegation. When you’re a manager, it’s vital to care about the details but it’s equally important to understand that there isn’t enough time in the day to check on everything. Some managers are fanatics. When Johan Cruyff was managing Barcelona he’d be on the pitch the day before the game with a device to measure the moisture levels. He even insisted that the turf be clipped to a particular height. Later in my career–even when I had become much better at delegating–I would sometimes spot a detail like that. One of the things to which I always paid attention was the width of a pitch. Opponents knew that I liked wide pitches where we could outrun and outpace the competition. Once, when we were playing Manchester City at their former ground at Maine Road, I went to inspect the pitch early one morning and found the groundsman, under orders from management, was narrowing it, which is not something you are allowed to do after you have registered the dimensions with the Premier League at the start of the season. So I complained to the referee, got them to widen the pitch and we thrashed City 3–0.

  These are exceptional examples. On the whole it is better to explain to the people around you that you care about little details, but that it’s their job to attend to them.

  When I hired someone to do something I trusted them to do it. I depended on them to get on with their job and come to me with any problems. At United that might have been the coaches or the scouts, but it was particularly true for the medical staff, sports scientists and video analysis crew. They all had the necessary training and technical background that was beyond me. I am not a doctor, dietician or computer whiz so, while it was up to me to make sure that we hired very capable people to run each of these departments, they had forgotten more about their specialties than I was ever going to know. If the doctor said that a player was not fit to take the field, I would not exert any pressure on them to change their opinion. A good number of the people in these departments started on the bottom rung of their respective ladders, but were promoted as they demonstrated their capabilities. Steve Brown was a young lad who started on a trial basis as a video analyst. He gradually progressed, flourished as he was given more responsibility, got successive pay raises and has become an essential part of that team.

  As the business of football has grown, so too have the organisations. This has underlined the need for a football manager to delegate more widely and empower those around him. Nowadays all the big clubs have chief executive officers responsible for all commercial activities and making sure the books are in balance–or, for many clubs, not too far out of control. So I let David Gill worry about television contracts, securing sponsorships, finalising the niceties of player contracts, managing the finance and marketing organisations, dealing with auditors and lawyers, ensuring compliance with health and safety codes and all the laws and regulations that govern any organisation, let alone a place where 75,000 people congregate on a regular basis. I had quite enough on my hands managing the football side of the business.

  There’s one final example of the power of delegation that I always carried with me from early in my career. In 1972 I went down to Derby to watch a huge end of season game–Liverpool versus Derby County. Jock Stein had set me up with the tickets and Bill Shankly, the Liverpool manager, very kindly gave us a tour of the Derby boardroom. It was about 7.25 p.m. and it was a 7.30 kick-off and I asked Bill whether he should be with his players. He said, ‘Son, if I’ve got to be with my players for the deciding game of the season, there’s something wrong with them.’

  When we walked into the tunnel all the players were lined up and one, Tommy Smith, the captain, was bouncing a ball on his head. Shankly said, ‘Tommy, take them home, son. You know what to do.’ That one sentence said everything about Shankly’s style of leadership.

  Decision-making

  Effective delegation depends on the ability of others to make decisions. Some people can make decisions, others cannot. It just doesn’t work if you are congenitally hesitant and allow things to linger in a state of suspension. When I was a player I had a couple of managers who always changed their mind. Bobby Brown at St Johnstone would pin a team-sheet on the board and, if somebody complained about the line-up, half an hour later a different team would replace it.

  Men like Bobby Brown perhaps lacked the confidence required to stick to decisions. Others are in a perpetual quest for the last possible morsel of information, using that as an excuse not to make a decision. When you are in the football world, and I suspect in almost every other setting, you have to make decisions with the information at your disposal, rather than what you wish you might have. I never had a problem reaching a decision based on imperfect information. That’s just the way the world works.

  During my time at United I got rid of several people who could not make decisions. I could never deal with people who were wishy-washy or whose judgement rested on the opinion of the last person they had talked to. They just made my life harder. When I arrived in Manchester in 1986, the chief scout was Tony Collins, who had previously occupied the same position during Don Revie’s successful time as manager of Leeds United. Tony was a nice man but he just couldn’t give me an opinion about a player. He always used to say, ‘Go see him yourself,’ or ‘You go and watch him.’ I replaced him the next summer with Les Kershaw, one of my best ever signings.

  Some characters are more suited to being second in command rather than the leader. That isn’t a criticism, although it may be interpreted in that manner. I would have been a terrible number two because there is a part of my personality that needs to be the leader. It takes considerable skill to be content as a second fiddle because, even though you may work just as hard as the leader, you will never receive the same praise or financial rewards. Brian Kidd was my assistant manager for seven years, and excelled in that role. He then tried his hand as a manager, which was a taxing experience for him, and has flourished, particularly at Manchester City, as the essential assistant manager.

  There is also the question of when you should make a decision. There are probably only two times to do so–too early and too late. If I was going to err on making one of those mistakes, I far preferred to make the decision earlier rather than later. That’s much easier to say than to do. After all, it wasn’t until I was approaching 50, in 1990, that I fully appreciated this. I was in my fourth season at United when I finally ripped up the team–something, in retrospect, I should have done several seasons earlier.

  If people wobble when making
decisions about others, they can be even worse when it comes to making decisions about themselves, because these so often involve emotion and cloudy judgement. In football guys are forever taking jobs that are losing propositions. When Carlos Queiroz left United the second time in 2008 to manage Portugal, I told him he was crazy. I said, ‘You’re going to be judged on just two things–whether you can win the World Cup or European Championship, and tell me again: when did Portugal win the World Cup?’ But Carlos’s heart was set on managing his country and so he did so. It was a bad decision and turned into a disaster for him. If he had not returned to his homeland he could well have succeeded me as United’s manager.

  When I was young I made many more impulsive decisions than in my later years.

  At St Mirren I remember taking off Billy Stark, a midfielder, after about seven minutes of play. It was a daft move. Unless he has been booked, injured and about to be arrested for burglary, it is silly to remove a player after less than 10 per cent of a game has been played, given that you obviously thought he was good enough to start a few minutes earlier. It turned out that in that game I badly needed Billy. Decades later, when United trailed West Ham 2–0, I was, as I mentioned previously, much more careful. I had started the game with Patrice Evra at left-back, but he had been on international duty and it showed. I waited until half-time, took off Evra, moved Giggs to left-back and we fought back to win the game 4–2.