Leading: Learning from Life and My Years at Manchester United

by Alex Ferguson

  In Britain the trend towards foreign players accelerated in the 1980s, when we gradually stopped producing a disproportionate share of the best players in the world. One simple measure is the way that British teams have stopped qualifying for the World Cup. Wales hasn’t qualified since 1958, Northern Ireland since 1986, Scotland since 1998 and the Republic of Ireland last qualified in 2002. This happened for two reasons–Margaret Thatcher and BSkyB.

  I don’t know whether Margaret Thatcher consciously sought to destroy British football, because obviously (and correctly) she was vocal about her disdain for hooliganism and crowd violence, but that’s what she managed to do. Following an industrial dispute with the government, many teachers stopped organising extra-curricular sports activities. It had disastrous consequences. My experience was that young boys paid careful attention to their schoolteachers, and many of them became acquainted with the need to train and acquired substantial skills, discipline and youthful experience playing in front of critical and demanding eyes. Much of that evaporated, as schoolteachers were replaced by fathers, uncles and grannies. I’m sure they were all well meaning, but gradually, under their tutelage, the level of high-school football started to deteriorate. Competitive school football, which was the spawning ground of footballers for so many generations, was replaced by boys’ club football, where there was far too much emphasis on playing a very high number of games each season. For example, Ryan Giggs, as a 14 year old in his last year as a boys’ club footballer for Salford Boys and Deans FC, played well over 100 games.

  This trend was exacerbated by rules introduced as part of the new academy system by the Football Association that forbade clubs from coaching boys in their youth academies for more than an hour and a half per week. It was absolute nonsense. This was the equivalent of telling a child who liked to play the violin or piano that they could still aspire to join one of the world’s best symphony orchestras but they could only practise for 90 minutes a week. Great footballers and great artists aren’t made on 90 minutes a week. As a boy, prior to the Second World War, Stanley Matthews used to play with a ball for six to eight hours a day. George Best perfected his skills in Belfast during the 1950s by spending a childhood with a ball never far from his feet, and the same went for Cristiano Ronaldo when he was growing up in Madeira during the 1990s. Then we had to face the restrictive changes to the rules that meant we were only permitted to sign players to our academy who lived within one hour’s travel of Old Trafford. Had this been in place in 1991, we could never have signed David Beckham. The change in the law had a pronounced effect on our ability to develop players born throughout Britain and immediately forced us to look overseas for players who were not covered by this regulation. This has been a boon to fans because it means that all the best European clubs have widened their scouting funnels and the global competition for talent has led to a rise in the quality of the game.

  In 1992, at the beginning of the Premier League era, an avalanche of money began to pour into the game, with the signing of BSkyB’s television five-year contract, which was worth £304 million. (By contrast the latest TV contract, signed in 2015, is valued at £5.13 billion.) The foreign players arrived in several waves. The first came from northern Europe, and were followed by several superb players, in the twilights of their careers, who were attracted by the wages offered by Premier League clubs. Then there were the French speakers recruited by Arsène Wenger at Arsenal. Roman Abramovich’s purchase of Chelsea in 2003 marked the beginning of an unprecedented spending spree. The lengths to which clubs would go in order to sign players was exemplified by the case of Benito Carbone, who played for Sheffield Wednesday and Aston Villa before going to Bradford City. When Carbone moved to Bradford, he joined a team fighting for its life in the Premier League. In 2002 the club eventually claimed that continuing to pay Carbone’s wages of £40,000 a week would force it into bankruptcy. So Carbone forfeited £3.32 million and returned to Italy.

  The first non-British player I signed for United was Andrei Kanchelskis from Shakhtar Donetsk in March 1991. Peter Schmeichel followed in August 1991 from Brøndby in Denmark. The man who made the most waves was Eric Cantona. Eric was born in Marseilles, had played for Marseille, Bordeaux, Montpellier and Nîmes before crossing the Channel; he spoke little English when he joined us. Cantona had a huge impact on United, most of which emanated from his talent and drive, but some from his attitude towards training and fitness. The young players thought of him as the king and hung on his every word and he captained the team in 1996 and 1997. As Cantona started to blossom at United, other clubs all wanted their own version of Cantona. By the time Eric retired in 1997, foreign players had become the backbone of top-flight football in England.

  Gradually the complexion of United started to change. We were as avid as ever about identifying boys from Manchester or elsewhere in England, but our scouting system had expanded. We now trawled for players in many more places, and our scouting system became truly global. In the latter part of the 1990s we put scouts in Italy, Spain, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Portugal to supplement our network of contacts in those countries. Then in 2000 we began hiring scouts in South America, notably John Calvert-Toulmin in Brazil and Jose Mayorga in Argentina. Now United has also got a good base of contacts in Mexico and Chile. This gradually started to pay off with the signing of Diego Forlán, the Da Silva twins from Brazil and Chicharito, who became our first player from Mexico.

  The arrival of the foreign players presented new challenges. They were catapulted into a strange country where everything was different: food, weather and language. We did our best to make sure they settled in by finding them houses and arranging for schooling. We also tried to ensure they could eat their favourite foods. Barry Moorhouse, who was United’s player liaison officer, was responsible for this. Many of the English players had trouble with my Scottish accent, but that was nothing compared to the trouble it created for the foreign players. Anderson, a Brazilian, and Nani, a Portuguese player, who both arrived in 2007, were two for whom language, at first, was a formidable barrier. To their credit both players took the time to improve their English, and it became easier to communicate with them.

  Some players had an enviable ear for language. Patrice Evra speaks several, Nemanja Vidić picked up English within weeks, and Chicharito, who grew up in Mexico, and the Da Silva twins, who were born in Brazil, understood that their football would improve if they brushed up on their English. The standout was Diego Forlán. He had a great ear for language and could have been a translator at the United Nations because he could shift with ease between Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and French. When, in 2014, he signed for the Japanese club, Cerezo Osaka, he astonished his hosts by speaking in Japanese during his inaugural press conference.

  Beyond the language barrier, I think too much is made of the difficulties of integrating foreign players. I came to welcome what they brought to the club, and the multiculturalism enriched everything. Dwight Yorke, for example, who was born in Tobago, brought a lovely warmth and carefree sense of joy to the club after we bought him from Aston Villa in 1998, and that was good for morale. The gap between the home and foreign players was most evident at dinner at The Lowry, the hotel where we stayed prior to home games and where we always always had a buffet dinner. The staff would tend to congregate at one table and the British players at another, where they would all be solemn and speaking to each other in low voices. The table that was always the most raucous and alive with laughter was where the Serbs, Dutch, French and Portuguese sat.

  The foreign players also set an example for some of the English players. For one thing, they tended to stay away from alcohol. Some did this for religious reasons but it mainly stemmed from the fact that they had grown up in places where getting drunk on Friday and Saturday nights is not a matter of habit. They did not feel compelled to explore their body’s capacity for alcohol at Christmas parties or after we brought home a trophy. The majority of them would be very careful about their diet and
dedicated about training. One of the other traits that distinguished the foreign players was their physique. The medical scans of the players who hailed from climates warmer than Britain tended to reveal much healthier joints. Their knees and hips didn’t have the telltale signs of early arthritis that you would tend to find in the British players who had grown up in the damp and the cold. They also tended to be wiser about listening to their bodies. Unlike the British players, they would not try to play through injuries and risk turning a bad knock into a recurring aggravation. They just do not try to prove they can beat the pain.

  About the only issue I had with the foreign players was when they got homesick or had gone to play international games and wanted to extend their stays in their homelands. Eric Djemba-Djemba, the Cameroonian midfielder, who played for United between 2003 and 2005, often returned late from leave.

  For United there were only positives about extending our reach, mining new countries for talent and importing these players. When we won the Champions League in 1999, we did so with five players from outside Britain on the field–if you excuse the Irishmen–but our successes in the ensuing 14 years were only made possible because we travelled beyond our pre-existing borders.

  Commentators frequently remark on the number of foreign players in the Premier League, but they often ignore the nationality of managers. In the 2014–15 season, there were eight foreign-born managers at the helm of Premier League clubs. Like the foreign-born players, they have enriched the game, although the first to arrive from outside the United Kingdom or Ireland, the Czechoslovak, Dr Josef Vengloš, did not appear until 1990 and only had a brief stint at Aston Villa. But, since then, foreign-born managers have become a staple of the Premier League, and the fact that many played for, or managed, first-rate European clubs, where they were schooled differently, has added layers to the game. (I’m referring to more than just the style of dress you see on the sidelines, though they look mighty dapper. Just look at the turnout of managers like Roberto Mancini, Roberto Di Matteo–during his brief time at the helm of Chelsea–or Roberto Martínez. Fortunately, José Mourinho proves that style is not just the preserve of managers named Roberto.)

  Injecting these foreign sensibilities into the Premier League has made it a better sport for the fans, even if, from time to time, I might have objected to some of the tactics. The only managers who ever took the Premier League away from me have been from outside England: Arsène Wenger (France), Roberto Mancini and Carlo Ancelotti (Italy) and Kenny Dalglish, who was managing Blackburn Rovers at the time (Scotland). One small, yet startling, point: the last time an English manager won the English League was in 1992, when Howard Wilkinson was at Leeds.

  It’s actually remarkable how many Scotsmen have done well as Premier League managers–it’s one of those rare statistics to which I do pay attention. Believe it or not, when Paul Lambert was sacked by Aston Villa in 2015 it was the first time since 1984 that there had been no Scottish manager in the Premier League. Just four years before that, seven of the 20 teams in the Premier League were headed by managers who had been raised in the Glasgow area. I know I am hopelessly biased, but I think managers like Kenny Dalglish, David Moyes, Paul Lambert, Owen Coyle, Bill Shankly, George Graham and, of course, Matt Busby just have, or had, a dour grit, stubbornness and determination about them that equips them well and is part of their heritage.

  13

  TRANSITIONS

  Arriving

  Leaders who are new to an organisation are often far too eager to stamp their imprint on everything. I know there’s a widely held belief that a leader only has a chance to make his presence felt during his first 100 days, but it is not something to which I subscribe. There is a right and wrong way to arrive in a fresh setting–especially when you are the new sheriff in town. It is very tempting to appear with a fresh posse of trusted lieutenants and all guns blazing. In football, some of this behaviour occurs because of the inordinate emphasis on short-term results. A new manager knows that he has a limited lifespan if he does not generate quick results, even with a multi-year contract in his pocket and an owner promising to be patient.

  I made this mistake when I became the manager of St Mirren. I was 32 years old, with all of four months of management experience, a bit too cocky for my own good and determined to shake things up. Instead of taking time to get my bearings and assess everything, I arrived with too many preconceived ideas. I was hot-headed, very passionate about my job, and did not want anyone to make me look like a fool. I’m sure some of that had to do with my own insecurity and inexperience. I was wondering to myself, ‘What are they all thinking? What are they going to do? How are they going to react?’ Then, of course, there are the periods of self-doubt when you are wondering whether you are making the right decisions. I was too eager to show that I was the boss and too quick to make decisions. Quite frequently I made decisions that I regretted.

  Steve Archibald, a fantastic striker at Aberdeen, drove me nuts shortly after I arrived. He had an opinion on every subject, and was not bashful about sharing them. He should have been a professor and he did not make my arrival at Aberdeen easy. He was constantly questioning everything. But he was stubborn, wanted to win, and I just found a way to deal with his personality.

  When I arrived at United in November 1986, I was only accompanied by Archie Knox. Cathy stayed in Aberdeen with the boys so that they did not interrupt their schooling which, in a way, was a blessing for me, because all I had on my plate was work. Archie and I had been together for three years at Aberdeen and I wanted him with me at United because we looked at the world in a similar manner, which gave us a unified consistency. He excelled at his job and was hard-working and trustworthy. I did not consider it a handicap to work with the United staff that had worked for my predecessor, Ron Atkinson. I actually thought it was helpful because, unlike me, they knew the club and were familiar with the players and our competitors in what was then the first division. In a way it is a little bit similar to what happens when a new prime minister arrives in Downing Street. He does not change the people who run all the Civil Service departments, but he does set out his own agenda and make his priorities clear.

  I was more than happy with the backroom staff and coaching team that I had inherited at Old Trafford, with the exception of the chief scout, whom I asked to leave at the end of my first season. All of them were good, solid characters, and they had an interest in seeing that the new manager did well. Not only was it in their self-interest, but it was also a matter of professional pride.

  I knew that it would take time for me to take stock of everything at United, and I also wasn’t about to make foolish promises about what was possible. I knew there was a lot to address, but I knew too that I couldn’t do everything immediately. I immersed myself in the club; looked carefully at their performance history; examined the way they approached the pre-season; investigated their youth and scouting system; and gradually started to understand each of the players. I developed a keener sense for how much the club’s heritage relied on attack. United had embraced an attacking style of football from its earliest years as a club, and this was a tradition that threaded its way back through the eras before and, of course, after the Second World War. Today’s generation still knows the names of Bobby Charlton, George Best and Denis Law, but others such as Willie Morgan, David Pegg, who died in the Munich air crash, Charlie Mitten, who played in the early 1950s, and Billy Meredith, who played at the start of the 20th century, are only known to the diehards. This heritage, which had worked so well for Sir Matt Busby, fitted me like a glove, since attacking was my natural instinct.

  All this took time. And then there were the surprises. For example, I would never have guessed that the undersoil heating at Old Trafford did not work. It had gone on the blink during our first FA Cup third-round tie against Manchester City, and we discovered that rats had chewed through the underground cables. It had been repaired in time for the fourth-round tie, three weeks later, against Coventry City but, again
, on the morning of the match, we found out that half the ground was frozen and the other half was a swamp. You cannot anticipate things like that; it just shows that, when you are trying to build the pyramids, some guys will always drop or break some stones. I’d wager that no winning organisation has ever been built in the first 100 days. If you want to build a winning organisation, you have to be prepared to carry on building every day. You never stop building–if you do, you stagnate. I always used to say, ‘The bus is moving; make sure you’re on it, don’t be left behind.’ Manchester United was always a bus on the move.

  There is no point suddenly changing routines that players are comfortable with. It is counterproductive, saps morale and immediately provokes players to question the new man’s motives. A leader who arrives in a new setting, or inherits a big role, needs to curb the impulse to display his manhood.

  If I were given the chance to replay my arrival at United, I would do two things differently, because in one respect I moved too quickly, and in another too slowly. Before I arrived at Old Trafford, I had been alerted to the fondness that some players had for the pub, and I was well aware of the fact that alcohol is one of the enemies of high performance. I wasn’t about to let it fester, and so I tried to stamp out the drinking immediately. The Monday after my first game in charge of United, I gathered everyone in the club into the gymnasium. There were around 40 people in the place–players, coaches and backroom staff. I just told everyone plain and simple, ‘Look, all these stories I’m hearing about your drinking habits have got to change. You have got to change because I’m not going to change.’ I’m sure that a lot of the audience were thinking to themselves that they had heard it all before. It was not as if any binges had occurred in the few days that I had been in charge, or that I had any firm evidence that a player had crossed the line. I was just working from hearsay, and that’s not wise.