Football – Bloody Hell!

by Patrick Barclay

  At the subsequent board meeting, joy was not unconfined; there would be more arguments over money, more ear-bashings, more furies – despite Bobby Charlton’s bizarre assertion in his autobiography that he had never seen Ferguson lose his temper, another director testified to a tray of glasses having been dashed to the boardroom floor – and more years of hiatus in which the post-Ferguson era had merely been deferred. And no guarantee that the Keystone Kops defending of the first half of the season was not a sign of things to come. And maybe more signings as ill-starred as that of Juan Sebastián Verón, who cost nearly £29 million and whose first season in the midfield had done little but disrupt it. Ferguson was lucky to have the almost fanatical support of Peter Kenyon, who, upon taking over from Edwards as chief executive, had publicly declared that his first priority was to get the manager to think again about retiring.

  Three more years were agreed. Ferguson asked for £4 million a year and got £3.6 million. Then, in the summer of 2005, he said, there would be a clean break.

  Most observers were pleased he would be around a little longer. United, while incapable of living with an Arsenal who won the Double in a style epitomised by Thierry Henry, had played attractively in the second half of the season. Particularly once David Beckham, by now frequently falling out with Ferguson over the celebrity lifestyle he was developing since his marriage to Victoria, aka Posh Spice, had returned after a few matches’ ‘rest’.

  And, as for Ferguson himself, most people had understood that his appetite for the game remained. We had been reminded of St Augustine’s attitude to chastity. Ferguson wanted the joys of leisure, diversity and travels with his wife . . . but not yet.

  To a Long Life

  Ferguson ascribed his longevity as a manager to four factors. One concerned mental equipment and fell under the sub-heading of enthusiasm and determination. Another was health. He also claimed to have reaped the benefits of delegation and, finally, learned to switch his mind from football to the joys, which included fresh air and banter, of horse-racing.

  The story of Ferguson’s relationship with horse-racing while manager of Manchester United is a fascinating one. It began with him in debt and ended with United owing infinitely more. The main beneficiaries were bookies and banks.

  But first let us deal with delegation. Ferguson had been at Old Trafford only a few months before its attractions became evident to him and a staff of eight began to grow to nearly forty. He managed to resist the inevitable letters from sports psychologists with their talk of positive thinking and visualisation. Then Trevor Lea materialised: ‘A sports nutritionist. He was the start of it, of introducing things.’

  To hear Ferguson talk of Lea’s revelations – this was in 2006 and even the infamous reliance on lifestyle coaches of his friends the Blairs seemed more than a little passé – cast him in a charmingly naive light: ‘Trevor was working at the University of Manchester and, when somebody told me about him, I called him in. And he started telling me about what my body was. It was fantastic. He explained to me that it was historic. Your body thinks a famine is coming and that’s why you gorge yourself – because you don’t think there’s another meal coming. I’d never heard that before. And then he started to explain what he does, and I took him on.

  ‘Then we had a doctor come in to do a weight-training programme, and he said we really should get a full-time weight trainer. So we did. For speed and strength. Then we got a full-time doctor. I always remember that, at Aberdeen, my biggest challenge was to get a second physio. And they let me have one three months before I left! Here I’ve got five physios.’

  He was like a kid in a sweetshop: ‘We got an optometrist – and a podiatrician who comes in three days a week to look after the players’ feet. Bit by bit, we’ve added things because we know they are important. And you have to let them get on with it. You have to delegate.’ In this context, the academy system had helped him because he was obliged to delegate to Eric Harrison and later Brian McClair, whom he appointed academy director.

  Long gone were the days when Ferguson constituted his own youth-development staff. Now McClair and Ferguson’s longest serving assistant, the former Luton Town manager and United winger Jimmy Ryan, would identify the young talent, whether in England, Europe, Africa or South America, and all Ferguson had to do was charm the parents. ‘I come in at that stage. I let the experts do their jobs and it’s been easy for me because age makes you delegate. If I was still in control of the youth side, I think I’d be worn out by now.’

  And it was partly an instinct for self-preservation that drew him to the horses. He had always bet on them, of course, but then he experienced an urge to get closer. It was to do with the job; he was still trying to do too much. ‘I was going home at night and getting straight on the phone to the scouts. It was becoming an obsession. Football was taking me over and eating into me. In the sense that I’d nothing else. Nothing.’ And then one day he was invited to the Cheltenham Festival as part of a group hosted by Mike Dillon, public relations manager for Ladbrokes and a United fan.

  He took Cathy – ‘it was our anniversary,’ he explained – and enjoyed it immensely. ‘So I says to Cathy, “Do you want to buy a horse?” She says, “What do you want to buy a horse for?” I said I thought I needed a release. She said I was right there – but why a horse? I said, “I don’t know – I’ve just got a wee bit of excitement about it.” So she says okay. And I did find it a great release.

  ‘You’d go down to Newmarket after a European tie on the Wednesday night, say, getting the 6.40 flight to Stansted on the Thursday morning. You could be at Newmarket in twenty minutes. You’re out there on the gallops – and nobody can get you! You’re watching the horses train and taking in the fresh air. And I’d come back into training on the Friday and be fucking buzzing!’

  According to Ferguson, this was a significant factor in his career’s extension far beyond the 2005 deadline set when Eriksson was lined up and stood down (the Swede went on to guide England to the quarter-finals of two World Cups and a European Championship before being replaced by McClaren). Ferguson stopped visiting Newmarket after a few years, but still could not resist the horses. In 2006 he confessed: ‘I bought a new one in the October sales for a lot of money. I didn’t tell Cathy about it. But she found out. She read it in a newspaper. She came to me pointing at it and said, “What is this – are you trying to bankrupt us?” So I put the horse in her name to keep her happy – and let her name it.’

  Racing, though, had proved a mixed blessing – and far from the blissful release from football-related worries that Ferguson had envisaged.

  It was his own fault. His tendency to get over-involved soon surfaced as Dillon introduced him around and he became a member of an owners’ club (later he helped to start one for Manchester United supporters that flopped dismally). As a sporting celebrity, he was warmly welcomed at meetings. Except, he felt, by the snobbier members of the sport’s establishment. So he was always going to get on with John Magnier. They were both what the middle classes would call ‘chippy’.

  Magnier was self-made. He had bought Coolmore Stud in County Tipperary in Ireland and become one of the world’s top breeders. He was therefore extremely rich. He and his friend J. P. McManus, a big-time gambler and fellow Irishman, gladly took Ferguson into their circle and soon – in the summer of 1999, while Ferguson was basking in the afterglow of Champions League triumph and trying to fit book-signing sessions into his schedule – came the first reports of Magnier and McManus taking an interest in Manchester United.

  There was little alarm among the sort of fans who monitor such matters; they liked the idea of an alliance between Ferguson and rich men who were presumed (quite wrongly) to have only football at heart.

  A few months later, it emerged that the Irishmen had set up a company, Cubic Expressions, which had bought a small package of United shares. Within six months they were United’s second biggest shareholders, owning nearly 7 per cent. And still fans fantasised that th
ey would constitute Ferguson’s power base and keep him at the club, stronger than at any stage under the chairmanship of the lucratively fading Edwards, who had already made nearly £80 million from selling shares.

  A year on, Magnier offered Ferguson a share in the two-year-old stallion Rock of Gibraltar, which promptly won seven Group One races in succession. Ferguson was at Longchamps in September 2002 as it passed the six-race mark set by Mill Reef thirty years earlier. So this was no ordinary beast and, when it was retired that November, its stud value was estimated at £50 million.

  Amid speculation that Ferguson might be about to earn more than £4 million a year from his gift’s sexual activities, he wrote to Magnier shortly before Christmas asking about his ‘rights’ and the slow-burning fuse was lit on a very large bomb.

  There was plenty to keep him occupied with his core activity at Old Trafford. Not only those European nights after which he would clear his head at Newmarket; perhaps influenced by the trophy drought of the previous season, he sent a strong side into the League Cup fifth-round meeting with Chelsea at Old Trafford and was rewarded with a winner from the Uruguayan striker Diego Forlán, for whom he had paid the Argentine club Independiente nearly £7 million on the recommendation of his brother Martin. Another summer signing, the expensive Verón, also played and, unlike Forlán, stayed in the side until the final, which United lost to Liverpool at the Millennium Stadium, Cardiff.

  They were knocked out of the FA Cup by Arsenal in the fifth round, at Old Trafford, in a match that left little doubting the rancour between the teams and their managers and so irked Ferguson that he accidentally injured Beckham by kicking a boot during a post-match tantrum (an outraged and bleeding Beckham had to be dragged away from him, like Mark McGhee at Aberdeen all those years before). But by then United had the higher priority of a charge towards the League title.

  The Iraq Diaries

  United had begun the 2002/3 season poorly and it was the day before a Kevin Nolan goal gave Bolton Wanderers victory at Old Trafford when Ferguson rang Alastair Campbell to say he was ‘really worried’ – about Iraq.

  To be more precise, he was worried about the Government’s involvement with the United States in the impending invasion of that country. Despite all the footballing issues on his mind, Ferguson’s political antennae were at work and he cared enough to pass on their message. According to Campbell’s diaries: ‘He said he thought it [Iraq] was a very dangerous situation for TB [Tony Blair]. I said TB had a real sense of certainty on this one.’

  Apparently Ferguson was also ‘on the rampage’ about the press and ‘said we had to do something, they were out of control’. It is unlikely that, when Ferguson and Campbell spoke, the words ‘press’ and ‘control’ were ever very far apart.

  In more than politics they seemed to dovetail: they shared a distrust of the media. In A History of Modern Britain Andrew Marr notes that Campbell had worked in ‘the dirtiest, most cynical end of the newspaper market’ and come away thinking most journalists were idle liars, as well as biased against Labour. ‘He was tribal and assumed the rest of the world was too.’ On his watch New Labour became the most media-obsessed party in British political history (perhaps understandable given his experience of the Kinnock years) but, wrote Marr, damage was done to politics generally.

  Meanwhile, Ferguson, at least on the occasions of his touchline rants, criticism of referees and ill-concealed antipathy towards what would otherwise have been a relatively friendly section of the media, could be said to have done little for the dignity of football, even if the attractive manner in which he got his teams to perform unquestionably brightened our lives.

  The Premier League that 2002/3 season was won – United’s eighth under Ferguson – and the manager was heading for America on holiday when, early one morning on the Today programme on BBC Radio Four, John Humphrys interviewed the defence correspondent Andrew Gilligan, who alleged that Downing Street had ‘sexed up’ a dossier about Iraq’s having weapons of mass destruction.

  At length it became known that Gilligan had spoken to David Kelly, a respected scientist who worked for the Government. A committee of MPs summoned Kelly and asked if he was the informant. He denied it, but unconvincingly, and then took a knife and some analgesics and went for a walk in the woods from which he did not return.

  Two weeks later, Campbell received a call from Ferguson in the United States and told him, who knew he had been restless for some time, that he was to resign. Ferguson was sympathetic to both Campbell and his partner, Fiona, to whom he offered ‘my congratulations’. He told Campbell he had ‘done a great job’ and should now do what he felt was right for himself and his family, adding: ‘You’ve given enough.’

  Campbell departed at the end of the first inquiry, chaired by Lord Hutton, into events leading to Dr Kelly’s death. Its report found largely in the Government’s favour and against the BBC. The impression it left was that Kelly had spoken loosely and without as much knowledge as Gilligan had suggested. But a second inquiry, in March 2010, under Sir John Chilcot, saw Campbell and Blair called to a court of increasingly hostile public opinion about the war as a whole.

  Ferguson’s words of warning back in 2002 had been vindicated and Campbell and Blair, though the latter’s ‘real sense of certainty’ appeared still to be in place, may have had more than one occasion on which to reflect on the educated political instinct of their friend from Old Trafford.

  Then came the collapse of the global economic system and, although the scandal over MPs’ expenses affected all parties, the Government headed by Gordon Brown bore the brunt of public disaffection. In the election of May 2010, the Labour Party lost the keys to Nos 10 and 11 Downing Street. Ferguson had remained loyal to the cause, appearing in a television programme to extol the virtues of Brown and the party. Perhaps the supportive profile was a little lower than before. Or maybe it was just that Ferguson’s energies were focused on the other cause, lost three days after the election when Chelsea’s title was confirmed. At any rate, as one observer put it, ‘the curtains were drawn on New Labour’. Thirteen years, it was, since Ferguson had rung Campbell to suggest he draw Tony Blair’s curtains on the new dawn.

  The Rock and a Hard Place

  That 2002/3 season had been one in which Ferguson, when he managed to turn away from work, became increasingly concerned about not just Iraq but his understanding with Magnier and McManus over the horse; he wanted to know just how rich he was going to become.

  On the field, though, things went as he liked them to go, at least in the League, with a gathering momentum that might have reminded him of the Rock’s pounding hooves.

  In late November, missing their injured captain, United had lain as low as fifth, but Roy Keane returned and, with Van Nistelrooy in riotous form, led them to the top. Their last League defeat was on Boxing Day. Once more Arsenal had been eclipsed (though Wenger’s men lifted the FA Cup) and towards the end of the season record Premier League crowds of nearly 68,000 at Old Trafford underlined United’s growth, although already Ferguson was pushing the directors to expand the ground further.

  In the Champions League, United had been obliged to pre-qualify, but then it was the usual procession through the two group stages, lent additional excitement by the quality of home and away victories over Juventus and the mouth-watering fact that the final was to be at Old Trafford. Beat Juventus and you win the trophy: it was not a bad rule at the time and it proved reliable. Milan beat Juventus in the final, Andrei Shevchenko converting the decisive penalty on the turf that Beckham, Keane and Van Nistelrooy called home.

  United had gone out in the quarter-finals to Real Madrid, who were 3-0 up at the Bernabeú when Van Nistelrooy pulled one back. The return match was wonderfully dramatic, even though Ronaldo, the Brazilian who had been leading scorer at the previous year’s World Cup, seemed to have killed it as a contest with his first goal in the twelfth minute. He scored again after Van Nistelrooy had struck, and yet again after an Ivan Helguera own goal an
d departed to a standing ovation from United and Real fans alike. Beckham then scored twice, following up a free-kick with a less characteristic dribble and drive, to give United victory on the night.

  Almost overlooked in the excitement was Ferguson’s apparently bizarre decision to start the match with Beckham on the bench; their relationship had become increasingly tense amid rumours that Real were taking an interest. As soon as Beckham had taken over from Verón, the threat of a thrashing was lifted and United obtained the consolation of victory on a glowing night. Roman Abramovich was a guest at that most memorable match – his ticket had been ordered by the agent Pini Zahavi – and legend has it that he decided there and then to buy a Champions League club. Price, availability and location, apparently, all gave Chelsea the edge over United.

  United shares, meanwhile, had been steadily accumulated by Magnier and McManus, but any popular notion that Ferguson would benefit had been dispelled. Quite the opposite; early in 2003, just as United were finding the form that was to carry them to the title, Ferguson began to pursue the matter of the stud fees for Rock of Gibraltar. He followed up his letter to Coolmore with a telephone call and then contacted the stud registrars and, with the feeling a man gets in the pit of his stomach when a multi-million-pound invoice is disputed, learned that his name was not specifically entered next to the Rock’s.

  Ferguson and Magnier started to talk (McManus stood aside, while supporting Magnier’s version of events). Magnier made various offers over a period of months, culminating in one of £300,000 a year for the entirety of the Rock’s stud career – expected to be about twenty years – or a flat payment of £7 million. Ferguson rejected this but now reduced his demand for 50 per cent of the horse’s earnings to 20 per cent.