Sensing this during an interview before Christmas 2000, I had asked if Steve McClaren might be moved into the job with Ferguson as general manager, on the Italian model. ‘That will be the club’s decision,’ he replied. ‘But I don’t think it would be easy for any one person to come in and do the job the way I’m doing it.’ This was when he referred to the strength he had drawn from Busby: ‘I was desperate to talk to Matt. One of the things people don’t understand about managers is that sometimes you’re alone and you don’t want to be alone. People assume you’re too busy.’
It was an argument that failed to persuade the board, despite the promotion from deputy chief executive of Peter Kenyon to replace Martin Edwards that year. Various ideas were explored – Ferguson might become a global envoy for the club, like Sir Bobby Charlton, or supervise youth development, or both, taking the title of president once held by Sir Matt – but negotiations kept stalling and a factor might have been the approach to them of Ferguson’s representative. Jason Ferguson shared his father’s fiery temper – he had it to a far greater degree than Darren, while Mark was relatively tranquil – and would sometimes show it during the discussions. Not every party to the talks thought this was such a helpful tactic.
Eventually his father had to go to the brink. Hence the end-of-season announcement that negotiations had failed and the threat that he might join a rival after his final year with United. It worked. To Kenyon’s satisfaction, the board awarded Ferguson £3 million for the next year and thereafter a five-year contract worth a total of £7.5 million.
The Business with Jason
Sometimes Jason got in the way. As a child, he had from time to time annoyed staff and directors at Aberdeen Football Club with his scamperings. On one occasion, as a teenager, he had danced on the Wembley pitch after United’s FA Cup final replay victory, briefly occupying the attention of police and stewards until his father intervened.
Upon settling down to the world of work, Jason had done well as a researcher with Granada television after being eased in by Paul Doherty, the head of sport and a friend of his father’s. Andy Melvin, a former football reporter from Aberdeen who also knew his father, then got Jason into Sky when Rupert Murdoch’s satellite broadcaster won the Premier League rights and here Jason truly impressed, rising to senior football director at the age of twenty-seven.
If only he had stayed in television.
Encouraged by his father, who thought him underpaid at Sky, he became an agent, a director of a little firm called L’Attitude in which his wife already had shares. In this venture Jason joined Kieran Toal, a former United youth player, and the man with the funds, Andy Dodd, who was a member of the Alex Ferguson network to the extent that he managed Mick Hucknall.
Jason continued to act for his father, helping to organise a testimonial year that was reported to have raised £1.4 million, some of which was donated to a cancer charity. In his autobiography, Ferguson had given a moving account of his dismay at conditions on the ward in which his late mother had been treated, and raged at ‘the Tory government’ for ‘vandalising the National Health Service’; the charity bore his mother’s name.
In the autumn of 2000, while the parties due to negotiate Ferguson’s future were tuning up, United received an invoice for £25,000 from L’Attitude in connection with the transfer of Massimo Taibi to the Italian club Reggina for £2.5 million (£2 million less than United had paid). The money was reluctantly paid. But that proved the biggest earner of L’Attitude’s short life and, after several vain attempts to make money on the rejects from United’s youth system, the firm went out of business.
Its sales pitch had been straightforward and unsubtle according to two of the youngsters approached towards the end of the 1999/2000 season, Dominic Studley and Josh Howard, who were interviewed separately for Michael Crick’s book two years later and between them told the most haunting tale of life behind United’s glamorous facade.
Howard was a midfield player who had trained with United since adolescence, alongside Wes Brown among others, and become the captain of a youth team sometimes featuring Luke Chadwick, in whom Ferguson had such high hopes. The manager decided that Howard would fall short of the first team but told him he would ‘make a living out of the game’ and said other clubs had already been in touch. ‘He asked who I had representing me and said I would need some help . . . then out of the blue I got a phone call off that Jason Ferguson . . . I thought it was a bit strange how he got my number.’
Howard went to meet Jason and Kieran Toal at L’Attitude’s office in Manchester, where Jason said he had ‘a lot of contacts’ and promised to ‘get some clubs interested’. Among those who subsequently got in touch, said Howard, were Aston Villa, Birmingham City and Preston North End. He and Studley, however, then encountered another agent, Mel Stein (well known to Alex Ferguson as the adviser to Paul Gascoigne, who had joined Tottenham instead of United because much more money was on offer), and the fee Stein was seeking – 3 per cent of any deal – seemed markedly more modest than L’Attitude’s proposal.
The lads signed with Stein and, when Alex Ferguson found out, said Howard: ‘He called us in the office and said “What the fuck are you doing signing with him?” Then he just said to us, “You can fuck off out of here and I hope he gets you a club because I won’t.”’
That night, said Studley, he and Howard rang Stein, who wrote Ferguson a letter of complaint about the lads’ treatment and threatened legal action. They were called back to Ferguson’s office. ‘He was a bit slimy this time,’ said Studley. ‘He had Mike Phelan in the office with him . . . and me and Josh felt a bit intimidated by this because we were only young, only nineteen . . . and he read out the complaint that Mel Stein had written in to him and said to us, “Why have you said to Mel Stein that I said this? I didn’t say this.” And me and Josh just agreed with him and said “Yeah” because we felt intimidated . . . We just said to him, “We didn’t say those things to him, he must be making it up.”’ Both Studley and Howard remembered Ferguson nodding to Phelan, as if confirming that his underling was witness to the retraction.
For the second time, Studley left Ferguson’s office in tears, convinced that his career as a professional footballer was over, which was to prove more or less true. He drifted into parks football before making a semi-professional return in 2004 at Mossley, of the Unibond League Division One, but worked mainly as a personal trainer in Manchester.
Josh Howard got to Preston but could not adjust to living in ‘grotty’ lodgings and moved to Stockport County. There were further brief spells with Bristol Rovers, Barnet and three semi-professional clubs near his home north-east of Manchester – Stalybridge United, Hyde United and Mossley (with Studley) – before he settled with FC United of Manchester, a club formed by disillusioned Manchester United fans, in the North West Counties League Division One. He retired in his late twenties to pursue ‘successful businesses’.
So neither Studley nor Howard ended up with glittering careers at Real Madrid or Barcelona and it would be ludicrous to claim that Ferguson ruined their prospects of such glory. Howard, reviewing the episode in 2010, a decade on, was realistic about it, volunteering the opinion that the likes of Chadwick had more talent and freely agreeing that Preston, whom he joined immediately after United, were one of those clubs whose calls followed the meeting with Jason Ferguson and Toal.
It is possible that Ferguson’s anger was caused by a genuine belief that Jason and Kieran Toal represented the lads’ best hope of continued employment in the game, and it may also be that Ferguson’s recollections of these events differ from those of Studley and Howard.
Yet it still rankled with Howard that a ‘headmaster’ – that was how Ferguson had appeared to the errant pupils in his study in 2000 – could have behaved as he did. Or, as Studley put it: ‘It just takes the piss a bit the way he did say it and then got us in the office again and had the cheek to say he actually didn’t say it. He probably thought, “Oh no, I might get myself into
trouble here . . .”’
If Studley and Howard were right, Ferguson was exhibiting a strange concept of loyalty, a refusal to be countermanded by someone weaker that takes the mind back to June Sullivan, the secretary at St Mirren all those years earlier whom he treated harshly – and was himself judged adversely for it.
The demise of L’Attitude followed in a matter of months. Not that this was to finish Jason’s career as a transfer dealer. We were to hear a lot of it after his father fell out with two of United’s major shareholders, John Magnier and J. P. McManus, over the racehorse Rock of Gibraltar, and it also contributed to the long-running feud with the BBC.
At the end of the summer of 2001, by which time Jason had joined a new agency, Elite Sports Group, came the sudden announcement that Jaap Stam was going to Lazio. Those who knew Ferguson’s control-freak tendencies assumed it was to do with the embarrassment caused by Stam’s book, but Ferguson insisted the deal was just good business. He had bought Stam for £10.6 million and here was the Italian club offering a profit of nearly £6 million on a twenty-nine-year-old who, Ferguson felt, had ‘lost a bit’ after an Achilles tendon injury. He later admitted being mistaken about that.
At any rate, it became known that Jason’s Elite Sports Group had been key to the deal. This time the invoice was for a great deal more than £25,000 – and it went to Lazio. Yet Lazio also dealt with Mike Morris, an English agent based in Monaco, and at least one other agent was involved. Transfers can be murky affairs but what bothered United, and in particular the plc chairman Sir Roland Smith, was the involvement of the manager’s son.
By now Ferguson senior earned £3 million a year plus endorsements and other income of which Jason, having turned his back on a career in television, was taking a slice; was it really necessary, the board asked, for him to risk the club’s reputation by taking part in transfers? The question was to be put again, and in public. The answer seemed obvious enough. Of course it was not necessary. But it paid well.
No Wenger, No Eriksson – Ferguson Stays
Jaap Stam was replaced by Laurent Blanc, who was slower than the supposedly creaking Dutchman – not surprisingly, at thirty-six and having apparently passed his best at Internazionale – and United conceded forty-five goals in the League.
They scored plenty with Ruud van Nistelrooy notching twenty-three in the thirty-two appearances of his first Premier League season. His capture had been classic Ferguson activity in the transfer market. It had started more than a year in advance. Every student of European football knew that the PSV Eindhoven striker was equipped for the very top. His value had swiftly risen from the £4.2 million PSV had paid Heerenveen to the £19 million United agreed. And then he collapsed in training; a cruciate ligament had gone and he would be out of football for a year.
In that time we saw two sides of Ferguson; by visiting Van Nistelrooy, constantly reassuring him, he showed enlightened humanity, but it irked PSV, who felt that he was disturbing the player’s rehabilitation, for which the Dutch club, having already footed the bill for his operation, were paying. Whatever the rights and wrongs of Ferguson’s visits, Van Nistelrooy recovered splendidly and proved an instant hit at old Trafford.
United could still finish only third, behind Arsenal and Liverpool. They made no impression on the domestic Cups and once again concentrated on the Champions League, looking especially strong in the second group stage and then in the quarter-finals as Deportivo La Coruña, who had beaten them at Old Trafford in the first group stage, were swept aside.
The final was to take place at Hampden Park, Glasgow, where a teenage Ferguson had gaped at the majesty of Real Madrid’s triumph over Eintracht Frankfurt in 1960, and Ferguson, who seldom missed an opportunity to strengthen his team psychologically, encouraged the belief that some force might be drawing them to his home city in the evening of his career. The prospect that Real might be their opponents only enhanced this line of thought. In 2008 he was to use the fifth anniversary of the Munich air disaster to motivate his players, and with more emphasis, and, it might be claimed, successfully, for United were to beat Chelsea on penalties. But in 2002 they did not even reach the final.
They were ousted, like Rangers in 1960, by the German team destined to lose to Real in the final. Bayer Leverkusen came to Old Trafford with a young Bulgarian centre-forward of whom the stadium was to see more. But Dimitar Berbatov had left the field when the crucial goal was scored. Oliver Neuville, who had replaced him, made it 2-2.
Neuville also equalised at the BayArena, but it was his away goal that took Leverkusen – an excellent side, with Michael Ballack, Bernt Schneider and the wonderfully adventurous Brazilian centre-back Lúcio – to Glasgow, where they were undone by Zinedine Zidane’s magnificent left-foot volley (a finer goal than any of the ten scored at Hampden in 1960).
And again Ferguson stayed on. It had been a strange season whose inconsistencies – encapsulated in a match at Tottenham that saw them deservedly 3-0 down at half-time yet emerge magnificent 5-3 winners – brought criticism from Roy Keane, by now seen as very much the manager’s voice on the pitch. Keane had already poured scorn on the club’s executive fans, with their ‘drinks and probably their prawn sandwiches’ and their ignorance of football, when he turned his attention to unnamed team-mates who were, he thought, shirking (Ferguson later ascribed a loss of dressing-room concentration to his own announcement that he was to quit).
In The Times, after one of two more defeats at the hands of Houllier’s Liverpool, it was said to be ‘a season too far, a fight too many for the ageing heavyweight’ Ferguson. He added to an air of indecision with conflicting messages to pals in the press, telling Bob Cass of the Mail on Sunday that he might change his mind about leaving and, when other papers rightly made a fuss of this, saying to Glenn Gibbons of the Scotsman: ‘I’m going all right. That’s been settled for some time now.’
While Scotsman readers were digesting that, Ferguson and his family went out for lunch. They had converged on his Cheshire home to celebrate the New Year and, after returning from the meal, continued to talk while Ferguson went to sleep in an armchair. This was the account he gave me years later. I had reminded him of the apparent relish with which he had spoken of retirement; he had even named an event, the Melbourne Cup horse race, which he planned to attend in Australia in the autumn. Not only that; he had stressed Cathy’s entitlement to more of his time. ‘Then I changed my mind,’ he said. ‘Or Cathy changed it for me.
‘I was regretting what I’d done anyway. I realised I’d been a bit hasty. So there we were as a family, all together, and I was snoozing when Cathy came and kicked my foot. I opened my eyes and the three of them [Mark, Darren and Jason] were standing behind her. And she said, “We’ve decided you’re no’ retiring.” I think Manchester United had interviewed someone for the job.’
This was an understatement. They had lined up Sven-Göran Eriksson after failing in an audacious attempt to wrest Wenger from Arsenal about which Ferguson, his great rival, may not have known. Around that time I asked Ferguson if Wenger might not be a good choice. He shrugged and ventured the thought that the Old Trafford crowd might not accept him. It was a chance the board appeared more than willing to take. But Wenger decided to stay at Arsenal and so they went for Eriksson. It was some time after they and Eriksson had shaken hands that the board realised they would not be needing him. For Ferguson had kept the outcome of the family conference to himself for several weeks.
Fifteen months earlier, he had become involved in the FA’s search for a replacement for Kevin Keegan as England manager. Adam Crozier, a fellow Scot who was FA chief executive at the time, came to him principally to ask if Steve McClaren could join a team of English coaches to work with the new man; he agreed to this. Then Crozier took the opportunity to ask Ferguson’s opinion of Eriksson, who was then with Lazio in Italy; again he spoke positively. But his regard for Eriksson seemed not to have survived the Swede’s apparently impressive first year with the England team – it had fea
tured a 5–1 victory over Germany in Munich – and this may have owed something to United’s notion that Eriksson could succeed Ferguson.
Ferguson waited a year and then gave an interview to The Times in which he sneered: ‘I think Eriksson would have been a nice easy choice for them. He doesn’t change anything. He sails along and nobody falls out with him . . . I think he’d have been all right for United – the acceptable face.’ Carlos Quieroz, who had replaced McClaren as his assistant when the Englishman went to manage Middlesbrough in the summer of 2001, knew Eriksson from Portugal, where Eriksson had been in charge of Benfica. ‘Carlos says what he did well was that he never fell out with anyone. He was best pals with the president and the press liked him. I think he does that. The press makes a suggestion and he seems to follow it.’
Eriksson never responded to that. Not even when, as manager of Manchester City in 2007/8, he supervised home and away victories over Manchester United. ‘I do feel things strongly,’ he once said during his time as England manager. ‘It’s just that I’m not very good at expressing emotion.’ We may never, then, know how he felt upon hearing that United no longer wanted him. Possibly a bit like Blackburn Rovers felt when, in 1997, he changed his mind about joining them and went to Lazio instead.
Terms had been agreed between United and Eriksson, but he was not to have started at Old Trafford until he had seen England through the World Cup in the Far East that summer. A United deputation had arranged a meeting in London with the FA – the subject had not been specified, but it was to be the official proper-channels approach for Eriksson – and the very day before the relevant directors were due to travel south Ferguson rang one of them, Maurice Watkins, and announced his change of heart.
Football – Bloody Hell! Page 27
