Leading: Learning from Life and My Years at Manchester United

by Alex Ferguson

  I also made some ill-considered decisions when we bought and sold players that I came to regret. As I explained earlier, in 2001 we sold the Dutch defender Jaap Stam to Lazio for several million more than we had paid for him in 1998. Stam was 29 at the time, had just returned from injury and we were being offered a fat packet for him. So I sold him in a blink. Six years later he was still playing for Ajax with a Champions League final appearance for AC Milan along the way. In 2010 we bought the Portuguese winger, Bébé, even though we had not done our normal level of homework. Bébé struggled at United, never became part of the furniture and, after putting him out on loan several times, we eventually sold him.

  There were some occasions where hesitancy cost me. After we signed Carlos Tévez, the Argentinian striker, from West Ham on a loan deal in 2007, we started to think about putting him on a long-term contract. Unfortunately, Tévez did not control his own destiny, because his rights–under the perverse system of third-party ownership–were controlled by third parties. This complicated any negotiations, but the real reason he eluded our grasp was because I was unsure whether I wanted him. Before Christmas 2008 we could probably have bought him for around £25.5 million, but I wanted to see how he fared in some more games. By the time I had decided, it was too late, because Manchester City had arrived with an offer for what was said to be £47 million.

  I tried not to waste too much energy thinking about why, or how, other managers made decisions. There just was not enough time in the day, and it is hard to second-guess somebody’s decision if you haven’t been privy to their debates or are unfamiliar with the nuances of their situation. I experienced this myself throughout my career. For example, when I sold Ince, Hughes and Kanchelskis in 1995 I received a lot of criticism from people who were unaware that a hugely talented group of young players were about to emerge. Every now and again I would be perplexed if a top-tier club signed a player we had rejected and, sometimes, while privately cursing, I would admire a smart decision made by a fellow manager, especially if he had beaten us to the punch. Either way, nothing beats the lessons on decision-making imparted by the accounts of the way in which JFK handled the decisions surrounding the Cuban Missile Crisis–his calmness, his refusal to bow to pressure (whether from within or without), his willingness to contend with imperfect information while being under enormous pressure and relentless press coverage–puts everything else in perspective. Making decisions that send 75,000 people home happy at the end of a Saturday afternoon is one thing. Saving hundreds of millions from a nuclear war is another.

  10

  THE BOTTOM LINE

  Buying

  A big part of running a successful organisation is being able to convince people to join you, even if they can earn more money elsewhere. That challenge is accentuated in the Premier League because, unlike in other sports such as American football, there is no limit to the salary a club can award a player. This makes it really important for a manager and the scouting organisation to be able to sell the virtues of his club. Even at a club like Manchester United, where eventually we had access to huge transfer sums, we never wanted to get into the position where the size of our chequebook was the only route to success. It is just too risky, since there is always someone who appears with a larger pot of money.

  People don’t think of a football manager as a salesman. But he is. When we were trying to sign Paul Gascoigne in the summer of 1988, I pitched for my life. I went down to London and met him at his lawyer’s house and argued that if he chose to go elsewhere he would be thinking in 20 years that he had made a huge mistake. Since Paul was from Newcastle, I also played up the fact that United teemed with Geordies such as Bobby Charlton, Steve Bruce and Bryan Robson. I thought these appeals had worked, and then was floored to learn that he had chosen to go to Tottenham after the club bought his mother a house in Gateshead. But Gascoigne was an exception; we usually landed the players we really wanted.

  Any leader is a salesman–and he has to sell to the inside of his organisation and to the outside. Anyone who aspires to be a great leader needs to excel at selling his ideas and aspirations to others. Sometimes you have to persuade people to do things they don’t want to do, or to sell them on the idea that they can achieve something they had not dreamed about. Usually, this is to people who are already on the payroll. But then there is the challenge of reaching out to people who are not part of the system. In United’s case, this meant three main constituencies: potential fans, possible sponsors and potential players–especially youngsters. The commercial side of United took care of the first two, while I was responsible for the third. This meant that part of my job was acting like a sales manager in a company.

  Football’s version of a field sales team is its scouting system. I built two of these organisations–one at Aberdeen and one at Manchester United. We incentivised the scouts like salesmen: they had a small base stipend and various bonuses if a player they spotted progressed through our system. We gave them specific territories and school teams to cover, and they understood what I was looking for in young players. Like a sales manager, I wanted to approve the terms of each ‘sale’, because I didn’t want them signing players willy-nilly, lest I wound up with six goalkeepers, seven centre-backs and four left-wingers. The first week I was at United, I called a meeting with all the scouts and said, ‘I’m not interested in the best boy in your street. I want to know about the best boy in your area. That’s who I want.’

  Like all sales organisations, our scouting system had people who were better than others. It requires real talent to see something that is unpolished and imagine it as a shiny gem that fits within a tiara. The star scout at Manchester United was Bob Bishop, who was responsible for covering Belfast. He was like a pied piper. He was the scout best known for spotting and signing George Best, but he spotted a raft of good players.

  When I was young I picked up some selling tricks from watching other scouts. Bobby Calder was a scout from Aberdeen who I first met when he tried to sign my brother, Martin. He came to our house and brought my mother a box of chocolates, my father a carton of cigarettes and gave me a ten-bob note. Bobby wore a wee pork-pie hat and used to sit like a little, gentle angel. Later, when I was managing Aberdeen, he and I went to try and sign John Hewitt, a boy at a local school whom Manchester United, Celtic and Rangers all wanted to sign. We met with his parents and I went into a big sales pitch about what I was trying to do for Aberdeen and how it was going to be a big club. As we were leaving, Bobby said to the player’s mother, ‘Mrs Hewitt, I’ll come up tomorrow and tell you the true story about the silver city by the sea.’ I was furious with him. I thought he was going to screw up our chances. But he was right, and he taught me a very valuable sales lesson. He taught me to identify the decision-makers who influence any sale. In the case of young players, it isn’t the player. It also isn’t the father because, generally, he only wants to live vicariously through his son. The decision-maker is the mother. The mother wants to know what’s going to be best for her son. After that experience, I always told scouts to concentrate on the mothers.

  Our pursuit of David Beckham might have demanded a bit more effort than our quest for other youngsters, but, on the whole, it was fairly characteristic. Malcolm Fidgeon, who scouted for us in London, spotted him when he was 12 years old. It helped that David’s father had been a diehard United fan and that David had inherited this zeal. But it was also obvious that other clubs would be pursuing him, particularly Tottenham. So we kept very close tabs on him. I got to know David’s parents and siblings, partly because it pays to understand someone’s background, but also as a way to ensure that they felt we cared about their son. We invited David to Manchester, he attended summer training sessions and we would send him United kit; we invited him into the first-team dressing room when we were playing in London. It made him, and his entire family, feel that we cared–and we did.

  If you work for any successful organisation, it’s easy to get sloppy and complacent with sales. When I
got to United they took it for granted that any young boy in Manchester would migrate towards them, but instead they were going to Manchester City. Even Ryan Giggs was training at Manchester City. You cannot expect to triumph if you expect the world’s most gifted to be standing outside your door with a job application form in their hand. The world doesn’t work like that. You have to go and hunt for talent. At times, while our scouts would be scouring fields on weekends looking for the most talented young players, I would try to make the first overture to a player, or to his agent, who was part of another club, because the player obviously wants to measure the enthusiasm of his potential manager. When it came time to hammer out terms, I would turn things over to David Gill. This worked well for everyone because it kept me away from some of the tougher conversations that could potentially taint a relationship with a player.

  Frugality

  Throwing money at a problem has never produced a solution for me. From time to time it might provide a short-term fix–such as the excitement brought by Robin van Persie in 2012 when he was added to our striking line-up, but I cannot think of a single example in football where an open chequebook turned a club into a long-term winner. We also added a lot of fizz to the club with the arrival of Eric Cantona in 1992–but he only cost us £900,000. Money doesn’t suddenly create a club with breadth and depth; it doesn’t provide a lineage and history; it doesn’t fill stadiums with fans prepared to endure icy rain, and it doesn’t make young boys dream.

  While I enjoy a flutter on the horses, I have always had an aversion to wasting money. It drove me mad when players got into the habit of regularly exchanging their shirts with opponents or sending them to relatives and friends. Each of those shirts was expensive, and the club had to pay for new ones after exhausting the stock supplied by the sponsor. About six years before I retired, Albert Morgan, our kit man, told me we were going through several hundred strips a season. Most of these shirts wound up in the hands of souvenir traders or, these days, on eBay. I told the players they could keep swapping shirts but that they would have to pay for them out of their own pocket.

  The sceptics might point at some of my signings and say that I squandered money. The examples usually trotted out are Dimitar Berbatov, whom we bought for £30.75 million from Tottenham, of which we recouped only about 10 per cent when he was sold to Fulham; Juan Sebastián Verón, bought for £24 million, went for £15 million, and poor Louis Saha, a striker dogged by injuries, was sold for virtually nothing even though we had bought him for £12.4 million. However, if you take a closer look at all of my signings–over many years–the money was well spent. Even the very worst are not in the same postal code as some of the biggest blunders in the Premier League, such as the £50 million that Chelsea impulsively paid for Fernando Torres in 2011, which turned into a handful of dust when they traded him in 2015 to Atlético Madrid.

  Some of my churlishness about spending comes from my upbringing. My parents made sure that my brother and I never wanted for anything, but there wasn’t a lot of spare money sloshing about our tenement flat in Govan. The same was true when I became a player and a manager. Put it down to my Scottish roots, but I always tried to treat club money as if it were my own.

  My first salary as a footballer came at Dunfermline in 1964, as my first club Queen’s Park had an amateur status, so there were no wages. During my time at Dunfermline, I was on £28 a week (about £524 in today’s money), but because I quit my job as a tool-maker, my guaranteed weekly income dropped from £41, because I lost my £13 a week tool-maker’s pay packet, so it was very important to me to get bonus money for wins. When I went to Rangers I was paid £60 (£998) in the summer and £80 (£1,331) during the playing season. When I joined St Mirren as its manager, our first home game was against Hamilton, and we played in front of a crowd of 3,000 in a ground that could house 25,000. Everything about the club was run down. The players, who were part-time, were paid £12 a week during the season and £7 during the summer while the club was in the Scottish second division.

  At Aberdeen, the owner, Dick Donald, would keep a close eye on all outlays. He wanted to own a successful club, but was happy with a successful small club, and was always insistent that Aberdeen should operate in the black. He had no tolerance for red ink. He always wore the same tie and he also refused to buy new shoelaces. When one got frayed and snapped he’d just knot it back together. When Aberdeen reached the Scottish League Cup final in 1984, I realised that nobody had ordered any champagne, and so I phoned the club secretary, Ian Taggart, to make sure we took eight cases on the bus (most clubs would order about 20). Taggart panicked and said, ‘I can’t. Mr Donald will go off his head.’ Donald saw the cases and Taggart had to tell him that only two were going on the bus while the rest were going into stores. We ended up hiding the extra champagne in the bus toilet and, on the journey home, after the Cup had been won and the champagne was flowing, Dick turned to me and said: ‘Mr Ferguson, how many cups did we win today?’

  If I wanted to buy a new left-winger, he’d say, ‘Don’t we have another left-winger?’ And I’d answer, ‘Yes, but he’s only sixteen and he’s barely good enough to play in the reserve team.’ He’d always be grumbling about the wages and bonuses I’d award the players and he’d ask, ‘Why do you keep giving them raises?’ And I’d answer, ‘Mr Chairman, we’re in the world of football. You don’t go down the way, you go up the way, and the only way you’re going to keep your best players is by giving them big bonuses when they win things.’ Dick was afraid of complacency creeping in and, before the one final, he said, only half-jokingly, ‘It wouldn’t be a bad idea if we lost this game so the players don’t get too big for their boots.’ He used to say, ‘I never want to see the colour red in this football club’s finances.’ The most I spent at Aberdeen was £300,000 in 1985 for Jim Bett, and we used the sale of a player to defray part of that cost.

  Oddly enough my frugality was part of the reason I got offered the United job. In one of my first sessions with Martin Edwards, when we were discussing the importance of developing our own pipeline of talented youngsters, I said to him, ‘I’ve never been a buying manager.’ He said, ‘That’s one of the things we thought about when we decided to go for you.’ I cannot believe it’s attractive to any employer to think he is hiring a big spender.

  When I wanted to buy my first player at United, I could only get about £1 million from Martin. All the money had to come from the sale of season tickets or game tickets, or from the transfer of other players. There was no sugar daddy with more money than sense, ploughing money into the club. The very first player I bought was Viv Anderson–a defender. We bought him for £250,000 and then we bought Brian McClair for £850,000. After we did a fire sale of six players–including Jesper Olsen, Gordon Strachan and Paul McGrath–in 1989 I spent about £8 million on five players–the most expensive of whom was the defender, Gary Pallister.

  It took about £60 million to build the squad that took United through the 1990s and culminated in our Treble–the League championship, the FA Cup and the Champions League–in 1999. It took just over £320 million in transfer fees to furnish us with the firepower required to compete at the highest of levels for the following decade–but those are only the outlays and do not take into account that over £256 million was received from the sale of players. My largest signing between the time I joined United in 1986 and 2008 was the £29 million we paid for Rio Ferdinand, then aged 23, when we bought him from Leeds United in 2002. Rio then played 12 seasons and 455 games for United and 54 games for England (during his time at United), before moving to Queens Park Rangers a year after I retired. Even though Rio’s price was out of the ordinary, it was very good value. Amortised over the time that he was at United, Rio’s transfer fee cost the club about £2.5 million per year. But it is also worth bearing in mind his cost was largely offset by the £25 million we received from Real Madrid in 2003 when we sold David Beckham, who had cost us nothing.

  Beyond Rio, we built our defence on virtually not
hing–£5.5 million for Patrice Evra and £7.5 million for Nemanja Vidić, both of whom we signed in 2006. We signed Rafael da Silva and his brother, Fábio, in 2008, before either of them had turned professional. We solved the goalkeeping problems that had plagued me for six years following the departure of Peter Schmeichel, with the signing of Edwin van der Sar from Fulham in 2005. Van der Sar was 34 years old when we signed him for £2 million. Compare that to the sum spent by Chelsea in the same period. Between the time we signed them and my retirement, Evra, Vidić, the Da Silvas and Van der Sar played a total of 1,049 games for United.

  When I was thinking about buying a player, I’d always be assessing his speed, balance and technique. But I also always wanted to know about his reliability. It’s one thing to buy a player who is available for selection every week. It’s quite another to fork out a king’s ransom for someone who is injured every third game. There’s no point in buying that player.

  Our emphasis on youth produced two things: the pipeline of talent for the first team, and a very healthy sideline business. In my time as United’s manager we raised well over £100 million from the sale of players, spotted as youngsters and developed through our youth system. This includes not only the likes of Beckham and Butt but also Gérard Piqué and Giuseppe Rossi who were brought into our academy from overseas. We had spotted them, developed them, and wanted to be paid for our efforts, particularly since most were capable of playing very high quality football for ten to 15 years. Fraizer Campbell, Robbie Brady, Ryan Shawcross, Danny Higginbotham, David Healy and John Curtis are just a few examples of the youngsters who left United to go and play elsewhere. If a lad looked promising at one of our Schools of Excellence, it created little financial risk for us if we signed him. We signed Keith Gillespie as a 16 year old and he played a handful of games at United before we received £1 million for him as part of the deal that brought Andy Cole to Old Trafford. The biggest risk was that we had erred in our assessment of a particular boy and could have used his slot to work with a more talented youngster. We had to wait a little longer to see the real potential in some boys, because not everyone’s physique develops at the same rate. If we elected to sell them, we were hard-nosed about negotiations.