Leading: Learning from Life and My Years at Manchester United

by Alex Ferguson

  In the past 40 years, advances in technology and the amount of information that is available have helped transform football in the same way it has changed other sports. If you compare the Formula One car that Lewis Hamilton drives today with those that Stirling Moss used to guide around circuits in the early 1950s and early 1960s, the bicycles that Chris Froome has used to win the Tour de France with what Eddy Merckx rode in the 1970s, or the tennis rackets used respectively by Rod Laver and Roger Federer, the equipment and training approaches are very different.

  Innovations in a variety of fields have been applied by football clubs. Everyone is always looking for the edge that will make them better than their opponents. As soon as you have fastened on that advantage, there’s always a desire to keep it under close wraps although, inevitably, word leaks out and others emulate advances. At United, innovation and information have marched side by side for the past 30 years.

  Diet has improved; players’ careers have lengthened; the pitches–thanks to soil technology–have better drainage, underground heating and stronger varieties of grass that no longer disintegrate into muddy quagmires after the first rainfall; footballs no longer absorb water the way they used to do; players wear kit made of synthetic materials compared to the cotton and wool of yesteryear. Today’s top-flight football game is played at a much higher pace than 30 years ago–helped, in part, by the back-pass rule, which was introduced in 1992, but largely because of the massive improvement in the pitches. These have given today’s players spectacular stages on which to perform. As a result, I would wager today’s players run 15 per cent more than those who turned out in the 1960s.

  Nutrition, sports and medical science, data and video analysis and, of all things, optometry have each played a part in the evolution of football. When people used to approach me and suggest that it was essential we adapt some new technique, I was invariably sceptical. Any number of peddlers used to approach us with the latest gimmick or fad. Some of their sales pitches would make you wonder whether they had bottled healing water from Lourdes. I always wanted someone to prove why a new-fangled idea would help us, and perhaps I sometimes came across as a bit old-fashioned. However, when it made sense and offered United a way to improve, I was eager to embrace it. I didn’t want United to get left behind because others had stolen a march on us. I absolutely did not want to miss the future. So we added sports science and nutrition programmes to our repertoire and made massive improvements to the quality of our medical care and staff. We also developed our video analysis systems.

  Nobody used to pay any attention to a footballer’s diet. The normal lunch before a game consisted of three courses. In Scotland it was usually soup, a pot roast or mince and potatoes, and a treacle sponge for dessert. I don’t know who came up with that menu–perhaps it was someone who wanted to guarantee a nice Saturday afternoon nap. It was definitely too heavy for me, so Cathy used to make me two slices of lemon sole followed by toast and honey for dinner on a Friday, and for a pre-game lunch on the Saturday.

  Diet was very much on my mind when I took my first job as a manager with East Stirlingshire. We were due to play against Falkirk (a team I was eager to beat because I had played for them) and I wanted to change habits. I informed the board that I would start taking the team to lunch before games as part of our preparation. There was complete uproar because the lunch was going to cost £28, and in those days players were expected to buy their own lunches. I went to the hotel in Falkirk the day before the game, talked to the chef and instructed him to serve each player with two slices of lemon sole and toast and honey. The chef told me the players would be starving and I said, ‘Good.’ We won 2–0. The same thing happened when I went to Aberdeen, where the team had been in the habit of holing up in a hotel and having a fillet steak before a game. The hotel owner had been friendly with Billy McNeill, Aberdeen’s previous manager, and, after hearing about my request for a menu change, predicted to the club chairman that I wouldn’t last long as manager. So we changed locations in a hurry and thereafter the team always had lunch at the Ferry Hotel, where the menu consisted of protein, carbohydrates and sugar–or two slices of lemon sole, toast and honey.

  Top-flight clubs in England began to take notice of the beneficial effects of diet in the 1990s. Most of the youngsters who came into the game in the early 1990s had just subsisted on a steady diet of pie and chips; for them, the idea of a nutritious regimen was as foreign as a bowl of spaghetti bolognese. The approach to diet has gone through different phases. Bananas were popular for a time, and then somebody thought carb-loading, with large helpings of spaghetti, would be helpful. At United we began to take it seriously in 1990–91 when I hired Trevor Lea, a nutritionist from Sheffield. It was odd, but earlier in his life he had owned a newspaper and magazine shop that sold sweets and chocolates, which was hardly the background you would expect for a nutritionist.

  Trevor understood that laying out healthy foods at the training centre only addressed part of the issue. So we called a meeting one evening with the players’ wives and girlfriends. Trevor explained to the partners what he was seeking and emphasised the need for the players to reduce their consumption of fatty foods on the days leading up to games. There was a severe aspect to his approach, and he had no time for people who wouldn’t comply with his regimen. This even extended to me during one of my attempts to lose weight and lower my fat levels. Every now and again I’d falter until he said, ‘Either you do it all the time with me or not at all, because you are wasting my time.’ He was right to admonish me. Under his guidance we lowered the players’ fat levels from 14–15 per cent of their body weight to about 8 per cent. We also had sunbeds installed at Carrington to help boost the Vitamin D levels of players who had grown up in sunnier climes than the north of England.

  Most footballers have very good eyesight and I had never thought much about the issue until Dr Gail Stephenson wrote to me out of the blue in the 1990s. She was a diehard United fan, but she was also a vision expert at Liverpool University. We had adopted a grey strip for away games and lost four of the five games in which we wore them. She wrote and told me that the drab colour made it much harder for the players to pick out their team-mates than our regular kit. We changed the strip and started to win. So Gail had my attention. I invited her in for a meeting, was impressed, and she became a valuable member of our back-room team. She then made the case that players’ performance could be enhanced if their peripheral vision was improved. Like lots of others, I had always assumed that peripheral vision was some natural trait, like hair colour or height. Players who spend most of their time roaming one side of the field (a left-back or a right-winger) will have good peripheral vision in one direction and poor in the other. Some of Gail’s work was based on research done with ice hockey players who were recovering from concussions, and our players came to benefit from her training.

  The same went for sports science. At United we started taking this seriously in 2007 when we hired Tony Strudwick as our first director of sports science. He massively improved our approach to conditioning and the benefits of mobility and flexibility and indoor warm-up sessions. Our gym, which previously had lots of weightlifting equipment, suddenly had rows of exercise bikes and treadmills and big television screens so that the players could watch their favourite shows while exercising. He taught us how to measure the intensity of workouts so we could monitor which players were taxing their cardiovascular and muscular systems. Instead of running for miles, as we did when I played, the emphasis turned to interval training–short, explosive (and gruelling) surges of speed. The furthest the players were made to run was about 200 metres. It amounted to a revolution in the way we approached fitness. Tony also emphasised core body work, and that too was a big help. When it became clear that compression socks helped players recover from games we added this detail to our physical preparation.

  It’s amazing to think that 40 years ago we’d do a training session and then run 8,000 metres or clamber up and down the endless sta
dium steps of Hampden Park. It was no wonder we were wiped out for days. When I played for Rangers, the training was pathetic. Every morning was the same. We’d go on to the running track and run a lap and walk a lap. Then we’d go behind the goal and do exercises and finally we’d have a game on the training ground. There was no technical training. The only time you’d see a ball was during the game. There was never any discussion of tactics. Our health checks were also primitive. We did not measure lung capacity, or muscle mass, and there were no stress and blood tests, CT scans or electro-cardiograms and echocardiograms.

  In retrospect, even at Aberdeen I was, unwittingly, torturing the players. We’d run them up and down hills and around a golf course. It was all quite old-fashioned but I didn’t know any better. At United new training techniques and fresh data allowed us to make sure players didn’t burn out. After each training session, Tony used to give me a summary sheet that would show how hard each player had worked. It was quite illuminating. We also started doing this during games–every now and again the reports were quite damning. All of these elements, and more, brought Manchester United into the 21st century.

  Data Overload

  Today there is so much information available that it can drown you. When I started in football I had the opposite problem–too little information. The clubs didn’t employ statisticians and data scientists; the players didn’t wear heart-rate monitors to measure their intensity during training, or GPS devices to track the distance covered in games. There were no televised recordings of opponents, let alone tightly edited clips. As a young manager the way I gathered information on players and teams was to go and watch dozens of games every season. I’d travel throughout Scotland, in all sorts of weather, every day of the week, to watch teams like Partick Thistle, Motherwell, Hibernian and Heart of Midlothian. In an average year I would put tens of thousands of miles on my car.

  When I sought information on players, I’d always try and keep it simple. I was very interested in understanding the character of the player and the sort of upbringing he had received. Apart from that I wanted to watch his speed, his balance, his ball technique, and get a sense for his enthusiasm. We never used stopwatches to see how quickly a player could cover 50 or 100 yards. We could just tell whether they were quick or slow, and for me quickness was vital. It is easy to make things too complicated. If you looked at Brian McClair and Carlos Tévez in training you would never guess that, during a game, they would run all day. If some computer had relied on data from their training sessions to predict their performance, it would have reached the wrong conclusion. With Ruud van Nistelrooy we knew he excelled at short sprints and that was his forte. So we sought to improve that, rather than his overall stamina.

  There have always been data hounds in football, just as there are in any sport. However, everything changed after Sky started blanketing the airwaves with football games. Prior to that, the only information a viewer would receive would be the result, the names of the goal-scorers and the times of the goals. These days the television coverage is drenched with possession percentages, assists, shots on goal–and what your dog had for lunch on Easter Sunday ten years ago. A manager receives all that information and a whole lot more. The statistical information was always important and I always looked at the data, but this did not determine how I picked a team. The data was more of a tool to ensure that standards were being maintained.

  The coaching staff, in particular the goalkeeping coaches, tend to get fixated on analysing the way in which opponents take penalties, particularly if a game heads towards a sudden-death finish. They will be poring over this data for hours and will be full of predictions about whether the ball will be struck to the left or right or into one of the top corners. I always thought this was useless, and kept telling our goalkeepers to stay in the middle rather than go sprawling to one side. I had no idea until recently, when a friend pointed it out to me, that in 2005 some Israeli economic psychologists, after analysing 286 penalties, had published a paper titled, ‘Action bias among elite soccer goalkeepers’, which arrived at the same conclusion: the best way to save a penalty is to stay in the centre of the goal.

  Television coverage spawned another speciality: video analysis. These days every club worth its salt has a video analysis room and a team of people responsible for compiling clips from games. Maybe because I had managed for years without video analysis, I never used it as a crutch. It was a helpful aid, but it’s easy to spend too much time watching hour after hour of footage. For the most part I relied on my eyes. No machine is going to tell you whether a player is lazy or has the right attitude. The evidence was always right in front of me: not on a screen but on the football pitch. I would always glance at the data, but it almost never told me anything I hadn’t already concluded. Sometimes I completely disagreed with the data. In 1987, the United chairman, Martin Edwards, came to see me while I was watching a reserve game to tell me that Steve Bruce had failed his medical as we were concluding his purchase from Norwich City. I said, ‘He’s hardly missed a game for about five years, so how can there be a problem?’ And we went ahead with the deal.

  One piece of information that I did find useful crept into use during the 1980s. This was the data gathered during pre-season ‘bleep tests’–a series of short, 20-metre sprints used to gauge the players’ fitness. The bleep tests were brutal but accurate–and always useful for me and my staff. We used to measure a player’s fitness level at the end of one season and then, when we regrouped for pre-season training, we would test them again, so that we immediately had a sense for whether they had taken care of themselves during the summer break.

  Years ago, the only way you could take a look at a player or team was by travelling to watch him play. There’s still nothing that beats that sort of inspection, but today’s video coverage is coming closer. At Aberdeen we had primitive video analysis. It consisted of VHS tapes of the handful of televised games that were usually shot with a couple of cameras. These tapes were of a low quality and we had no equipment and no people to edit the tapes. They were better than nothing–but not by much. Nowadays they seem to have cameras at every game, filming from all sorts of angles. At United our video analysis team reduced endless hours of tape to their essence.

  We first installed specialised video analysis systems at United in the early 2000s. These allowed us to show players what they needed to improve and changed the way we planned for the future. It also gave us a lot more information and data about opposing teams and players. It’s a very important part of the planning process, and really shines when the calendar gets packed and Premier League games start to pile up, with Champions League, FA Cup and League Cup fixtures.

  The videos illuminated the system of play employed by an opponent, the substitutes they were likely to use in particular situations, and their approach to corners and free kicks. It helped me pick the right teams because I always had to be planning several games ahead–knowing that I had to field our strongest XI for a particular fixture. In my later years at United I worked even harder to do this and would rest players for two games so that they were primed for the most important.

  The sports science and video analysis crews would forever be coming up with new ways to measure things, which was fine by me since I was always curious about fresh insights. However, I had grown up in an age before computers could generate heat maps of a player’s performance or tell you how many yards he ran during a game, so I always relied more on the accumulated expertise garnered from watching tens of thousands of players compete in thousands of games, rather than on a computer printout.

  As time went by we were sitting on top of a heap of information that kept growing in size. The immediate and natural impulse of any competitive person is to keep information private. However, I always thought of information in two buckets: what I was willing to disclose and nuggets I wouldn’t tell my grandmother.

  One mark of a leader is his willingness to share information. A great leader is happy to share his knowle
dge–or, at least, a portion of his knowledge. Bobby Robson, when he was the manager of Ipswich, introduced me to the notion of sharing information before Aberdeen played his team in a UEFA Cup match. Bobby invited me to watch the Ipswich training drill and I actually picked up a wee passing drill that I used for a while. I’m sure Bobby knew that I was already familiar with all his players, because I’d either seen them play or watched them on television, and all I was doing was watching a training session. I thought this was a generous gesture and a mark of the man and it is something I took away with me.

  People used to be surprised how willing I was to let coaches from all over the world come to our training ground and take notes. Maybe they thought I was teaching them how to make an atom bomb using cornflakes, ketchup and two cups of flour. Once Ernst Künnecke, the manager of Waterschei, had come to watch Aberdeen play before the 1983 semi-final of the European Cup Winners’ Cup. He was staying over a few days and I invited him to come and watch us train. He was flabbergasted but all we were doing was running a normal session emphasising possession, crossing and finishing. Nonetheless, I’m sure he went away thinking, ‘Bloody hell. That’s some club. They let you watch the training.’

  In 2011 Bayern Munich let us check out their medical centre when we were thinking about improving our own. Steve McNally, United’s senior doctor, and I nipped across to Germany to take a look. They let us inspect everything. They ran their medical centre like a hospital; we were massively impressed and borrowed a lot of their ideas. They also had a video analysis centre with amphitheatre seating, where the videos came up with subtitles for foreign players who didn’t have a good command of German. I would have loved to have that at United for the players like Carlos Tévez and Juan Sebastián Verón who didn’t understand English.