For my last 15 years at United I had a rolling one-year contract and an agreement that if I was sacked I would be entitled to two years’ salary, even if I turned up and started managing Manchester City the day after I was fired. That was more than enough for me.
I suspect most football managers get paid less–sometimes far less–than their star players. In the Premier League I imagine that only Arsène Wenger and José Mourinho pull down the amount of money earned by their best players. That probably explains why nothing much is written about a manager’s compensation. What message does it send to a team, if most of them are being paid more than their boss?
Negotiation
Buying and selling players provided me with an education in the art of negotiation. I got my first taste of negotiations by watching the trade-union leaders when I worked in the factories. There was a heavy Communist influence at the time, and I always felt they overstepped the mark. They’d go out on strike at the least provocation. They’d refuse to negotiate. It was always head-on confrontation. The last thing you want to do is go out on strike, but they always seemed to do it. What other weapons do you have if you are standing on the picket lines? What happens if someone calls your bluff and you are left warming yourself around braziers for three months? That image stayed with me, and so I always tried not to get myself boxed in during the tussles over players.
It’s hard to remain clear-headed during negotiations and not get swept away by the passion of the pursuit or emotions. It’s so easy to get over-stretched, and for a football manager it’s very easy to feel that one or two new players will change the fortune of a club. If discipline slips during a negotiation it can have all sorts of ramifications. Not only does it drive the price up for a particular transaction, but it has ripple effects. In football, just as in other businesses, it means that people now expect you to pay top dollar. It also has an effect on the rest of the team because it can create unrest if your entire compensation scheme is distorted because of one new arrival or one new contract.
It would be nice to think that everyone behaved in a gentlemanly manner during negotiations, but unfortunately that is not necessarily the case. You encounter some people with whom a handshake is sufficient to seal an enormously expensive transfer. Then there are others on whom you cannot turn your back for fear that they will try and do something underhanded. Over the years, and with dozens, if not hundreds, of negotiations under my belt, I got better at reading people. But I also learned that, no matter how many times you have been on the verge of signing a contract, there is always room for an ugly surprise.
I tried to stay unemotional and to keep a clear head when we were pursuing a player. When we wanted to sign Phil Neville, we consciously first went after his brother Gary. We knew the pair were very close, but we also knew that Phil had more natural talent and would be more sought after. However, I also knew that once we had bagged Gary, Phil would follow. There were occasions when the sellers tried to use emotion to their advantage. After a game at Old Trafford in August 2004 against Everton, David Gill, Maurice Watkins and I met the club’s owner, Bill Kenwright, and their manager, David Moyes, to discuss our offer for the 18-year-old Wayne Rooney. They pulled out all the stops. After we gave them our final offer, Kenwright got Rooney’s mother on the phone and she told me, ‘You are not going to steal my boy.’ We ended up by ploughing through the emotion and signing Wayne the following day.
I always tried to tell myself that it wasn’t the end of the world if we failed in a particular negotiation and that our success was not going to hinge on the arrival of one player. If you need one person to change your destiny, then you have not built a very solid organisation. We had a chance to buy Sergio Agüero before he went to Manchester City, but eventually his agent was demanding a price we were not prepared to pay. Right towards the end of my time at United, we were pursuing Lucas Moura, the immensely talented right-winger who, at the time, was playing in his native Brazil for São Paulo. We offered £24 million for him, which we upped to £30 million and then again to £35 million, but PSG signed him for £45 million. David and I were just not prepared to go to those sorts of levels. There were also times when negotiations to get a particular player came to naught but we wound up getting someone better. In 1989 I failed to get Glenn Hysén from Fiorentina, but wound up with Gary Pallister instead. My pursuit of the Dutchman, Patrick Kluivert, who was then playing at AC Milan, was also an exercise in futility, but it turned out all right because a bit later we snared Dwight Yorke.
Negotiations are often irrational. There are all sorts of reasons why people buy and sell things–it doesn’t matter whether it is a house, a company, a stock or a football player. I found predicting the outcome of a negotiation was always challenging because, while I tried, I never knew all the cards my opponent was holding or all the pressures to which he was subject. I did know, however, that it is always good to keep as many options open as possible. For example, in 1989, after we lost to Nottingham Forest in the quarter-final of the FA Cup, I told Martin Edwards, our chairman, that we had to sell Gordon Strachan. Sheffield Wednesday had wanted to sign Strachan, but I got a call from Howard Wilkinson, the manager of Leeds United, who had got wind of what was happening. I informed Strachan of the interest from Leeds, but for some reason he was set on moving to Sheffield. I told him that out of courtesy he should tell Wilkinson of his decision, and I also said, ‘You never know, he might offer you the moon. You never know what someone’s going to offer you.’ At the time Leeds were a rising club in what was then the second division, and their chairman, Leslie Silver, was willing to spend. That same night, Strachan phoned me and said, ‘Boss, I just wanted to let you know I’ve signed for Leeds United. They didn’t offer me the moon. They offered me two moons.’ Strachan wound up, at the age of 32, with a contract with Leeds that was far better than he was getting at United.
One of my best negotiating lessons came in August 1989 from Colin Henderson, when we wanted to sign Gary Pallister to strengthen United’s defence. Henderson was chairman of Middlesbrough and also a senior commercial manager of ICI; he played us for all it was worth. I was eager, perhaps desperate, to sign Pallister so that he could play in a game two days later against Norwich City, and I suspect Henderson detected this. We even had Pallister sitting in the car with his agent outside the hotel in Middlesbrough so that we could get all the documents signed.
I’d told both Martin Edwards and Maurice Watkins, United’s solicitor, that the maximum we should pay for Pallister was £1.3 million. In 1989 that was a huge sum, particularly because–prior to that–the largest amount United had ever paid for a player was the £1.8 million we had spent on Mark Hughes in 1988. Maurice and I spent a long night haggling with Henderson and had started the bidding at around £1.3 million. Eventually, we shook hands at £2.3 million, a British transfer record, and no sooner had I breathed a big sigh of relief when Henderson said the payment had to be up front. This was a shocker because, in those days, it was customary to pay big transfer sums in instalments.
I always appreciated the need to strike early during the two annual transfer windows, which were introduced in 2002–03. Other managers would complain about the transfer windows, but I liked their introduction because it meant I did not have to deal with agents for six months of the year. The last thing you want is to have your back up against the wall with the clock ticking while everyone knows that you are on the prowl for a particular type of player. But I would trade that time pressure for the freedom it created for such a large period of the year. In the summer, we would try to make up our minds about who we wanted to pursue before I went on holiday in June, even though the transfer window did not close until the end of August. We would make our intentions known early when David Gill made contact with the chief executive of the club from which we wanted to sign a player. It was just important for us to be in the mix early so that we did not get blindsided. There was a notable occasion in May 2007 when David Gill, accompanied by Carlos Queiroz, who spok
e Portuguese, went to Portugal and signed Nani from Sporting Lisbon and Anderson from Porto in the course of 24 hours. That very same month, incidentally, a full ten weeks before the end of the transfer window, we also signed Owen Hargreaves from Bayern Munich.
The setting for negotiations can also play a role and, as I said earlier, I found that the hotel in the south of France where Cathy and I go on holiday was a great spot at which to convince players to cast their lot in with United. It is far away from the madding crowd and, with its view over a sunny Mediterranean, is far more conducive to the notion of a bright future than a small conference room in a stadium or a hotel suite on a rainy day in London. Phil Jones was just one of the players who brought his parents and agent to our hotel; we had a nice little chat in this delightful spot and the deed was done. Sometimes I would also use the aura of Manchester United to help seal a deal by walking a prospect out on to the pitch, or showing him around our Carrington training facility. The players would always be star-struck when they saw the gymnasium.
Contrast that relaxed approach with the problem of negotiating under pressure. Daniel Levy, chairman of Tottenham, nailed us to the flagpole in 2008 when he took us all the way to the last day of the transfer window before agreeing terms for Dimitar Berbatov, Tottenham’s talented Bulgarian striker, in whom we had long had an interest. When we got wind of the fact that Levy was trying to sell Berbatov to Manchester City, we stuck in our oar, chartered a plane and flew the player to Manchester, agreeing on terms with the player and, as I thought, a transfer fee with the club. Then Levy came back to us and said he needed Fraizer Campbell, one of our young strikers, as part of the deal. David Gill demurred, so Levy then upped Berbatov’s transfer fee a little. Finally, in order to get the deal over the line, and to add insult to injury, we sent Campbell on loan to White Hart Lane and paid the increased fee. We were up until midnight signing and faxing papers to make sure all the paperwork went through before the deadline expired. That whole experience was more painful than my hip replacement.
Brokers
Agents have become like tsetse flies. These days they are everywhere in football, and almost all of them do nothing but feather their own nests and mess up the relationships that players have with their clubs and managers. They have turned many players into merchandise; a conversation with most agents is like trying to arrive at a deal in a souk.
As a result I’ve developed a pronounced aversion to any middle-man who gets between me and the players with whom I want to have a close relationship. Brokers have their own agendas and both player and club suffer the consequences. I was struck when I read The Snowball, the biography of Warren Buffett by Alice Schroeder, to learn of his distrust of investment bankers. I feel about football agents the way Mr Buffett feels about bankers–they are what he calls ‘money shufflers’.
Before the introduction of the Bosman ruling, we always used to deal directly with the players and their families. Any boy good enough to play for Manchester United would, almost inevitably, have attracted the attention of other clubs, which meant that our offers would be determined by the forces of the market. Word would always get around and we would usually have a keen sense for what we were up against.
The truth is these days few players have a need for an agent, either because their lives are straightforward or they have little interest in becoming celebrities. If all their income comes from their club contract and they either aren’t the type, or don’t have the charisma, to attract the interest of sponsors and advertising agencies, all they need is a lawyer and an accountant. A few, and there aren’t many of them, have more complicated lives, become mini-business conglomerates and do need someone to take care of all their relationships. Both Gary and Phil Neville signed seven-year contracts in the summer of 1997 in 15 minutes. I loved their father’s response to the question of why they had done so–‘Because they wouldn’t give us ten years.’
Agents cleverly, and slyly, insert themselves between the player and the club and try to up the ante. They claim to represent the interest of their clients but their ultimate motive is to maximise the amount of money that flows into their own pockets. Players, particularly the youngsters, have been bamboozled into thinking that it is impossible to obtain a fair deal without an agent, and they have also been fooled into thinking that the only route towards a fair deal is to play monkey games during negotiations that can take an eternity. The opposite is true, because few players calculate the amount that they are forking out for these agents over the course of their careers. The sums can be staggering. An agent will expect to receive 5 per cent of his client’s basic salary from a contract negotiation. So, in a transfer where a player signs a five-year contract worth £100,000 a week, the agent will receive £1,300,000. Staggering. Harry Swales, who represented Ryan Giggs, Bryan Robson and Kevin Keegan for many years, would always refuse to take a percentage of the player’s income from the club. Instead, he just took a percentage of any commercial contracts in which he was involved.
I frequently tried to use a respected player as our contract negotiator. Youngsters and their parents tended to view players as their natural allies, rather than someone like David Gill or myself, who would, inevitably, be viewed as management and, at least when we were in the thick of a negotiation, as their adversaries. I have already mentioned that, in their role as captain, both Bryan Robson and Steve Bruce were very helpful in this regard, as was Brian McClair. The same goes for Gary Neville, although I have to say there were occasions when I dreaded his appearance almost as much as the arrival of an agent. We took to calling him ‘Arthur Scargill’, the long-time leader of the National Union of Mineworkers, who was known for his uncompromising position on almost everything. Gary was similar. He would come into my office with a player and announce, ‘I think your offer is rubbish.’ He would be genuinely offended by some of our offers and would let us know that in very colourful language. But Gary was fair and he was good for the player and good for the club. I would rather deal with Gary at any time of day or night than with an agent.
There are some decent agents, but you don’t need all the fingers of one hand to count them. Jorge Mendes is one. He represents some of the best players, including Cristiano Ronaldo, Ángel Di María and Diego Costa. In dealing with Jorge, especially when I was working to keep Ronaldo at United for another year in 2008 when he was pining to go to Real Madrid, I always felt that he was trying to represent the player’s best interests. But Jorge is a rarity.
Many agents have no qualifications beyond the ability to ingratiate themselves with the player and his family.
I did not have a problem so much with Carlos Tévez as with his advisor, Kia Joorabchian. I always felt he was engineering another move for Tévez and, as a result, never had the feeling that the player belonged to United. It just seemed like we were renting him until Joorabchian could cut a better deal elsewhere.
There are one or two football agents I simply do not like, and Mino Raiola, Paul Pogba’s agent, is one of them. I distrusted him from the moment I met him. He became Zlatan Ibrahimović’s agent while he was playing for Ajax, and eventually he wound up representing Pogba, who was only 18 years old at the time. We had Paul under a three-year contract, and it had a one-year renewal option which we were eager to sign. Raiola suddenly appeared on the scene and our first meeting was a fiasco. He and I were like oil and water.
From then our goose was cooked because Raiola had been able to ingratiate himself with Paul and his family and the player signed with Juventus.
This sort of atmosphere makes it hard to establish a close relationship with a player and massively complicates life for a manager. If I felt these people genuinely had the players’ interests at heart, I might feel differently. Players do not understand that their lives would be better–both financially and emotionally–if they paid a lawyer on an hourly basis to help them with their contracts. Paul Scholes was represented by Grant Thornton, the accounting firm. He paid them a simple fee and the job was done.
/> Agents have just become an unsavoury part of football life. I wish guys like Paul Scholes and Ryan Giggs, some of the very best players of recent times, would help educate youngsters and their parents that there is no need for them to employ agents. They would be doing the boys and football a tremendous favour.
11
BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT
Innovation
Between 1986 and 2013, the commercial side of United changed almost beyond recognition. In my final year at the club the turnover had risen to £363 million. While success on the field provided the foundation for this growth, I had little involvement in the details associated with making the cash registers ring. The commercial growth was the responsibility of the chairman and CEO. They had to worry about dealing with the sponsors and negotiating the sponsorship contracts; expanding our catering, hospitality and events activities; organising the pre-season tours, and assembling the tools for the media and marketing side, including MUTV, the website, the magazine and, these days, feeding our Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts. They also built up the human resources function, because you need it when you are employing 800 people. All this changed as the club grew.
In retrospect, I suppose there was always the risk that I would get diverted from my job by taking on a wider set of responsibilities at the club. But there was always a natural division of responsibilities and I cannot think of any top-flight manager who runs the football and commercial activities of a club. The separation of duties in football is somewhat equivalent to what you would find at a newspaper or fashion house or advertising agency. At each you have someone responsible for putting out the product–the editor, designer, or the head of creative. And then you have a CEO who takes care of all commercial activities–selling subscriptions and advertising; opening shops and selling dresses; soliciting clients and making ends meet. Either way, I had enough on my plate keeping the team in contention, and staying one step ahead of all the changes that crept into the game.
Leading: Learning from Life and My Years at Manchester United Page 23
