“It was obviously strange having the manager of Manchester United sat
in your front room, speaking to your parents, and coming personally to
ask you to sign for United. It was on my 14th birthday. Obviously I had
no hesitation in saying yes.”
That was Ryan Giggs, speaking late last year about his first meeting with Sir Alex Ferguson,
in November 1987. Manchester United were a mediocre club back then –
scratching around in mid-table or worse. Ron Atkinson had been sacked
the year before, and a Scotsman with an auspiciously impressive record
as manager of Aberdeen was hired in a bid to inject some new life into a
rapidly fading institution.
There was no sudden renaissance. Ferguson did things slowly, in the
way no manager of today would be permitted to. The silverware would have
to wait. First, it was time to put the foundation stones into place. So
it was that instead of fretting at the training ground or sitting on
the phone chasing agents, Ferguson spent an autumn afternoon in 1987
quietly persuading a precociously gifted Welsh schoolboy to sign for the
red half of Manchester. It was an important meeting, because the
manager of one of the youth teams Giggs played for was a City scout.
Really, Manchester City should have got their man, but they didn’t. And
Giggs? He still plays for United today.
A quarter of a century later, Robin van Persie, the deadliest striker in the Premier League, was keen to move clubs, fed up with Arsenal’s
failure to win trophies. The media were led to believe the new Premier
League champions Manchester City were the buyers. Why? Ferguson had
gathered together a selection of journalists who regularly cover United
matches and told them he was not remotely interested in signing the
Dutch centre-forward. It was of course the perfect cover: with the
spotlight removed, Ferguson and Van Persie
could accelerate negotiations towards a contract. It was another
classic Fergie coup: 25 goals later, Van Persie has been the single
biggest factor in Ferguson’s 13th Premier League title. Giggs and Van
Persie are team-mates today, and they are also symbolic bookends to the
perfect managerial career.
When the glorious British summer of 1976 came to an end, it was
commonly accepted that whatever else the weather Gods might conjure up,
until time immemorial, there would never be a more delightfully
sun-kissed season. It’s the same with Ferguson now. His remarkable reign
at Old Trafford has rendered any debate about comparable greatness
redundant. Sorry about that, Jose.
Manchester
United Manager Alex Ferguson celebrates as United beat Bayern Munich in
the European Champions League Final at the Nou Camp Stadium, Barcelona,
Spain in 1999
Ferguson showed that world-class man-management skills were more
important than picking the perfect formation. It took something
approaching genius qualities to get Eric Cantona, Roy Keane and Peter
Schmeichel – all volatile personalities with exceptionally big egos – to
pull together for the common cause.
As the years have gone on, the insidious cancer-like growth of agents
has diminished much of professional football’s Corinthian spirit. And
yet Ferguson has largely defied the agents. His ability to hang on to
Wayne Rooney when the occasional dark cloud has materialised is
particularly noteworthy, but there are many players — Ole Gunnar
Solksjaer is an example — whose United careers were a lot longer than
they might have been under other managers.
And when big players had to go, they cost the purchasing clubs big
bucks. The Spanish recession might have been avoided if David Beckham
and Cristiano Ronaldo hadn’t been bought for a collective king’s ransom
by Real Madrid.
An old-fashioned disciplinarian with a notorious temper, Ferguson
sold his excellent defender Jaap Stam on the simple pretext that the
Dutchman had gone mildly off-message in an autobiography. It was hardly a
gross breach of conduct, but his manager was spitting nails – and Stam
was soon gone.
The Ferguson rage sometimes expressed itself in physical terms. In
his final season at Old Trafford, Beckham suffered a cut above his eye
after Ferguson kicked a boot at his face during an infamous half-time
row.
Stamping out any vague whiff of insurgence at the first conceivable
opportunity was Ferguson’s way of exerting his authority. In time,
people began to use the word “bully” to describe those attributes. But
if he had a short fuse with his own players, he also lovingly nurtured
them, tending to their needs like a champion racehorse trainer might
deal with his latest batch of expensive thoroughbreds. It is, perhaps,
no surprise that Ferguson has developed a keen interest in racing and
owns racehorses of his own.
But there was never going to be any reporter out there who was going
to help Ferguson win a trophy. So when it came to dealing with the
media, he had no qualms about dictatorially banning certain individuals
on the basis of an impertinent question or an article that cut close to
the bone. Sometimes he would embarrass a particular writer by
castigating him in front of his peers. Perhaps that helps illustrate the
emotive accusation that he can be a bully.
Certainly, you would have to be a United fan to be enchanted by him,
but it’s impossible not to admire the man and marvel at his ability to
wield power.
Consider this: he suspended all interviews with the BBC for
seven years until 2011 on the basis that a TV documentary had painted
his son, an agent, in an unkind light. Technically, he wasn’t allowed to
ban a rights-holding broadcaster, but the Premier League was too
frightened to impose a fine. Of course, the various fawning eulogies on
the BBC’s website on Wednesday failed to even record this fact.
Ferguson’s epic adventure with Manchester United began in the tiny,
cramped dugout of a notoriously poky stadium, Oxford United’s Manor
Ground, which has since been turned into a hospital. It will end on 19
May, in a game of no real consequence, when Manchester United travel to
West Brom.
When that last wad of gum is mercilessly chewed and spat out, like so
many teams Manchester United have beaten over the years, English
football will lose its patriarchal figurehead. Even for those who
disliked him, it will be difficult to adjust to life without Fergie.
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