My mind was cast back to 1992. He had not won his first United championship at that stage and yet, as we talked at The Cliff, on one of those early mornings when he would offer a journalist ten minutes – the deal was that you had to arrive well before the staff and players started to come in – and keep nattering for an hour, until people were banging on his door and pleading for the day’s first decisions, I turned the talk to legacy and, amazingly, he had a full and detailed response.
‘Only one club in the history of the game,’ he said, ‘has been able to do it.’ He meant Liverpool. ‘To maintain success over two generations. Now that will be out of my remit because my lifespan as manager here will probably stretch no more than another six or seven years – if I’m successful. I’m trying to be realistic. But, whatever I do, I have to lay down a really good foundation that will continue the success. All the work that goes on in this club is not about today but about tomorrow.’
Tomorrow, as it turned out, was to be Ferguson’s. And the day after tomorrow. But his vision of the day he would go was clear: ‘The takeover should be sweet.’ By which he meant that the staff and players would be in place for continued success. ‘That’s my key job now.’ At that moment, he was working on the assumption that United would beat Leeds to the 1992 title, but it took them another season and from then a smooth transition, with none of the trauma involved in the departure of Jock Stein from Celtic, remained high on his list of priorities.
Heroes
Stein was one of the great formative influences on Ferguson’s management style. The other was Scot Symon. ‘I was only four months with him,’ said Ferguson, ‘but in that time I learned what it is to be a strong manager. He wasn’t the easiest with the press. A bit like Sir Alf Ramsey – he couldn’t be bothered with them. But Scot Symon knew the game. He’d been manager of East Fife when they won the League Cup and reached the Scottish Cup final in 1949/50 and even devised a 4–2-4 system [the Hungarians were not to unveil this until a few years later]. He called the players together and said, “We’re going to play 4–2–4. But don’t tell anybody – you know what the press are like.” They were a good team, East Fife, and Scot Symon was a brilliant thinker about the game. When he came into the dressing room, every player stopped talking. There was a sort of reverence.’
Stein taught Ferguson a different way of exerting power. ‘I wish I’d had longer with Jock,’ he said. ‘Jock had it all summed up. He knew everything about everyone. He knew every weakness in a person. Even the journalists. “Here they come,” he’d say, as the room filled up for a press conference. “There’s so-and-so – he’s had a few bets on the horses today.” He was in control. Because he knew everything. Because everybody told him a bit. He’s be sitting there like a big Buddha. “What’s happened today, son?” He used to phone me sometimes on a Saturday night. “Oh, I see you were at the game today – were you watching so-and-so?” And you felt forced to tell him. Because if you told him a lie he’d know.’
Then there was the gambling connection. ‘Alex has always liked a bet,’ said Bobby Seith, his old Rangers coach, ‘and so did Jock. These men are prepared to take the kind of chances the rest of us might not.’ Or, as Ferguson put it after the young substitute Macheda had secured a breathless 3-2 win over Aston Villa in 2009: ‘Risk – that’s what this club is built on.’
Seith also mentioned Stein’s fondness for the mind game. ‘Jock played them all the time,’ he said. ‘A good example was on the day before the European Cup final in 1967. Both sides had gone to look at the stadium in Lisbon. Inter’s manager was Helenio Herrera and, while both sides were on the field, Jock quite deliberately engaged Herrera in an argument in the full view and earshot of his players. Because Herrera was a god in football and the message Jock wanted to convey to his players was “I’m as good as him – and you’re as good as Inter.” He was always doing that sort of thing.’
It was Shankly who, as Celtic were celebrating their victory, strode into the dressing room at the National Stadium and told Stein: ‘John, you’re immortal.’ To Ferguson he certainly was. About eighteen months after Ferguson had won his first Champions League in 1999, he travelled to Lisbon with a film-maker and went to the National Stadium, now hardly used, to have himself recorded ‘savouring what Jock had experienced’. The film was for personal use.
Power and Control
Power and control. Those were the words Ferguson flourished in front of an audience of philosophy students at Trinity College, Dublin, in January 2010. ‘Through my development,’ he said, ‘I’ve come across two issues – power and control.’ Not necessarily in that order. ‘Control is important, very, very important. My control is the most important thing. If I lose control of these multimillionaires in the Manchester United dressing room, then I’m dead. So I never lose control. If anyone steps out of my control, that’s them dead.’
It might have been a florid way of outlining the background to the departures from Old Trafford of, among others, Paul Ince, Ruud van Nistelrooy, David Beckham and Roy Keane – but the message got across.
The handling of success was another subject he discussed. He had learned to do that, he told the students. ‘I’m more worried about how the players handle it. I’m very conscious of that and always will be. That’s my job.’ How perfectionism with humility was incorporated into the club ethos – the DNA – was described in an interview given to a French newspaper by Patrice Evra. ‘Manchester United,’ said Evra, ‘is a factory workers’ club. You have to respect that culture. It’s a club where we work hard.
‘They will not congratulate you after each win. Sir Alex frequently says, “Well done, my son” and that says it all. For them it is normal when you play well. It is normal to win the championship. It is Manchester United. We don’t have the right to make mistakes.’
Any manager can be demanding. Ferguson is equally ruthless with himself. He was quoted in Mandelson, a biography of Lord Mandelson by Donald Macintyre, as having warned Alastair Campbell at the start of the 1997 election campaign that it was all too easy to be distracted by thinking of life after victory, rather than what had to be done to achieve victory: ‘You’re in the position of a manager a month out from the end of the championship when you’re seven points ahead. What you have to develop is tunnel vision. If you see anything that doesn’t need to be there, get rid of it.’
In the spring of 2009, a special edition of the New Statesman was guest-edited by Campbell, who interviewed Ferguson. Asked to name the three most important qualities required for leadership, he replied: ‘Control. Managing change. And observation.’
The first was no surprise.
The second had been evident throughout his time at United, in how football’s evolution from a team to a squad game had been recognised at Old Trafford before anywhere else, in how the value of freshness was acknowledged by an ever-changing team; even Sir Bobby Charlton confessed in 2009 that he could seldom predict more than eight starters in a match. In how the spiralling fortunes of the players had somehow failed to blunt their hunger. And in how Ferguson had been obliged to accept things he could not control. As he told the Dublin students: ‘When somebody scored, everyone used to celebrate together. Today, they run across [to the crowd]. I don’t know whether it’s self-adulation or what. Tattoos, earrings – it’s not my world. I’m sorry. But I’ve had to adjust to it.’
Campbell asked what he meant by observation. ‘Spotting everything around you,’ he said, ‘analysing what is important. Seeing dangers and opportunities that others can’t see. That comes from experience and knowledge.’
And what was the key to a winning mentality? ‘There’s two for me. A will to win. And attention to detail.’ When they combined, it struck me, perhaps the defining images of the Ferguson era at Manchester United were composed: the late, late winners, notably Steve Bruce’s in 1993, Ole Gunnar Solskjær’s in 1999 and Kiko Macheda’s, after a substitution as inspired as any, in 2009.
The infinite capacity for taking p
ains was always there. The early starts, the first-light arrivals at The Cliff or Carrington for a bit of exercise before work; Ferguson believes in the link between physical health and mental alertness and, in 2004, after having a pacemaker fitted in order to regulate his heartbeat, was proudly back at his desk within twenty-four hours. And in the latter half of his sixties a distaste for the very notion of retirement became prevalent, prompting the thought that his place in the managerial pantheon might not be decided until the obituaries.
But here goes . . .
Where Stands He?
Ferguson is not a genius, as Brian Clough (with Peter Taylor) was in the early years of Ferguson’s career in management and José Mourinho has been towards the end. But he outlasted Clough and has since set standards of one-club achievement that cause Mourinho to throw up his arms in admiring despair.
He stands above both Bill Shankly and Bob Paisley because, in not only rebuilding Manchester United on a scale above anything that English football had known before but maintaining success with an aesthetic dimension, he has emulated each of the Liverpool legends.
Without being any cleverer than Jock Stein, he has repeatedly refused to allow success to form a rod for his back as Celtic’s nine consecutive Scottish titles had done for his friend and hero; the classic example of indomitability, surely, was Ferguson’s defiance in the face of Chelsea’s Mourinho-era dominance.
To compare him with Busby is inevitable but hazardous because we shall never know what the Munich victims would have achieved, especially in Europe, where many observers felt they were the natural successors to the great Real Madrid by whom Ferguson was to be enthralled in 1960 at Hampden Park. If anything like that had happened, an impossible standard would have been set for Busby’s successors, Ferguson included.
Moreover, Busby built his United from a post-war shell; the club then was anything but the relatively prosperous institution at which Ferguson arrived. It ought also to be said that Shankly found Liverpool in an under-developed second-division state, as were both Derby County and Nottingham Forest when Clough took charge.
Herbert Chapman built triple-championship-winning teams at both Huddersfield Town and Arsenal. Death cut short his career. Bill Nicholson, of Tottenham Hotspur, and Don Revie, of Leeds United, created great football, but even the latter could not sustain it as Ferguson has done.
Arsène Wenger was responsible for the most handsome football played since the top-level English game was rebranded as the Premier League in 1992 but chose to redefine success as winning while balancing the books. In this he was ahead of Uefa’s thinking on ‘financial fair play’. But Arsenal went several years without a trophy. Wenger is probably the most closely comparable to Ferguson – dedicated to improving youngsters, passionate, football-mad – and on at least the same level of talent, if not solid-metal achievement.
In Europe, Ferguson bears scrutiny along with such veterans as Marcello Lippi, Giovanni Trappatoni and Ottmar Hitzfeld but cannot be said to have exceeded any because so much of what he has done has taken so long. There was a twenty-year span between his first European trophy and his fourth. José Mourinho won three in seven years. But Ferguson is up with the very best of the rest.
Loyal to the Last
Ferguson has also been involved in more controversy than any famous manager since Brian Clough, at least until Mourinho came along.
From the start, his belligerent nature was visited on Scottish referees sheltering from the thunder outside their dressing-room door. It seemed that the Scottish FA tried at first to control Ferguson with escalating punishments before gradually giving up, and he appeared to have learned from that in his dealings with the FA in London, pushing them as far as he could and, in the end, controlling their disciplinary bodies with a mixture of intimidation and the flattery of a personal appearance in which he not only ventured but sought opinions. ‘We agree with a lot of what you say, Alex,’ he was told as late as 2009, ‘but we’ll have to fine you.’ He said he quite understood and took a light slap on the wallet with equanimity. No wonder Liverpool’s erstwhile manager Rafa Benítez became so wound up by Ferguson’s manipulative tactics.
The truth was that the FA’s so-called ‘Respect’ campaign, to which Benítez alluded, was having a coach and horses repeatedly driven through it by a leading light of the League Managers’ Association, which had pledged full support to this worthy attempt to improve behaviour towards referees and linesmen at every level of the game.
Was Ferguson always setting a good example to the young and impressionable? Amid all the scorn he expressed for aspects of the young society around him – tattoos, earrings, self-adulation – there was seldom a glimmer of self-recognition or acceptance of any personal contribution to change or decay. While maintaining admirable discipline at Manchester United, did his behaviour towards authority undermine that very quality in the world outside the stockade that was always fundamental to his professional modus operandi? And, finally, did the more extreme elements of his workplace behaviour ever infinge the principles supplied to him in that Govan youth? The answer to each question would have to be a guarded ‘Yes’.
It was Mark McGhee, Ferguson’s first signing for Aberdeen and as perspicacious a man as any to whom I have spoken in connection with this book, who confirmed the impression that Ferguson’s life has been, in essence, a quest to please his father. ‘I think he would feel he is proving himself to his father more than anything else,’ said McGhee. ‘I think he would want to prove to his father that he could maintain his standards. Everyone who gets close to him feels that, if you are performing badly, you are letting him down and I think he doesn’t want to let his family down. It’s a very working-class ethic.’
If a thing’s worth doing, said Alexander Ferguson Senior, it’s worth doing well. Sir Alex Ferguson has done football management so extraordinarily well for so long that his life in the game is not only unprecedented but, in near-certainty, unrepeatable.
Discipline and good manners were also in the family tradition. Along with something else. And, before we come to that, let it be said with utter confidence that, if Alexander Ferguson Senior were here to be asked what he felt of his elder son’s life, he would – after manifesting a reluctance to be boastful or effusive – express nothing but pride.
But, then, the Fergusons always did believe in loyalty.
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NO DOUBT ABOUT IT
Among the Idiots
A Hero and an Inspiration
The Rich Loam of Home
IN THE BEGINNING
A Govan Childhood
Street and School
Tools of the Trade
A Saint at Perth
Into Europe with Dunfermline
Learning to Coach
Playing for Scotland?
Rangers: Welcome to Hell
Fighting at Falkirk
The University of Life
EAST STIRLINGSHIRE
Small Wonders
SAINTS ALIVE: THE LOVE STREET YEARS
Building on Baldy
Stark Improvement
A Nest of Vipers
Rancour and Defeat
The Forgotten Man
ABERDEEN
An Emotional Battering
Ferguson is Working
Making Winners
Chastened by Liverpool
Strachan and the Shankly Tapes
Fooling Bayern
Beating Real Madrid
Flailing at Ferguson
Great Stuff, Lads
After Strachan and McGhee
Doing Deals
Snubbing McGhee
Life and Death with Big Jock
Aberdeen, Itchy Feet and Scotland
It’s Barcelona or United
At the World Cup
Pittodrie Postscript
MANCHESTER UNITED: EARLY DAYS
A Chat with Bobby Charlton
Drinking to the Past
Turning Off the Fans
Youth Culture
Jousting with Graham
Strachan Leaves the Nest
Welcome to Hell
You Bastard!
Football – Bloody Hell! Page 34
