Alex Ferguson My Autobiography

About the Author

SIR ALEX FERGUSON

Sir Alex Ferguson was born in 1941 in Govan, Scotland. A goal-scoring centre-forward, he was later transferred to Rangers, the club he supported from boyhood, for a Scottish record fee of £65,000.

Entering management in 1974, he served East Stirlingshire and St Mirren before guiding Aberdeen to victory in the 1982–83 Cup Winners’ Cup. Arriving at Manchester United in 1986, he brought them 38 trophies, including the Club World Cup, two Champions Leagues, 13 Premier Leagues and five FA Cups. His overall haul of 49 trophies made him the most successful British manager of all time.

Knighted in 1999, Sir Alex announced his retirement in 2013, when United were again crowned Premier League champions. At the age of 71, he continues to serve United as a director.

PAUL HAYWARD

Paul Hayward is the Daily Telegraph’s Chief Sports Writer. He was twice named Sports Writer of the Year in the British Press Awards and is the current Sports Journalist of the Year in the Sports Journalists’ Association (SJA) category. He has covered most of the world’s major sporting events. In 2004 he co-wrote the autobiography of the footballer Michael Owen and a year later worked with Sir Bobby Robson on his life story, Farewell but not Goodbye.

www.hodder.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Hodder & Stoughton

An Hachette UK company

Copyright © Sir Alex Ferguson 2013

The right of Sir Alex Ferguson to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

ISBN 9781848948631

Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

338 Euston Road

London NW1 3BH

www.hodder.co.uk

To Bridget,

Cathy’s sister, rock and best friend

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Preface

1. Reflections

2. Glasgow Roots

3. Retirement U-Turn

4. A Fresh Start

5. Beckham

6. Rio

7. Lean Times

8. Ronaldo

9. Keane

10. Outside Interests

11. Van Nistelrooy

12. Mourinho – The ‘Special’ Rival

13. Competing with Wenger

14. The Class of ’92

15. Liverpool – A Great Tradition

16. A World of Talent

17. One Night in Moscow

18. Psychology

19. Barcelona (2009–11) – Small Is Beautiful

20. The Media

21. United’s 19th Title

22. Man City – Champions

23. Family

24. Rooney

25. The Last Campaign

Career Record

Index

Picture Section

Photographic Acknowledgements

THERE are a number of people I want to thank for their help in putting together this book.

Firstly, I must pay tribute to Roddy Bloomfield, my editor, and his assistant Kate Miles. Roddy’s wealth of experience, along with his support, was a godsend throughout. Combined with Kate’s diligence, they make a formidable team.

Paul Hayward was remarkably easy to work with and a real professional. He kept me on track and I feel he has done a great job of collecting my thoughts and presenting them in a way that I am more than happy with.

Photographer Sean Pollock captured a number of images over a four year period, and has done a fantastic job. His laidback manner and discretion ensured that he got what he wanted without being intrusive in any way.

Les Dalgarno, my lawyer, gave sound guidance over the course of producing the content; he is the most trusted and loyal of advisers and a great friend.

Overall, there were a large number of people who put in many hours in order to get to this point. Their efforts have been much appreciated by me and it has been a pleasure to have had such a talented team behind me.

SEVERAL years ago I began gathering my thoughts for this book, making notes in the spare time my job allowed me. It was always my plan to assemble a story that people inside and outside the game would find interesting.

So, although my retirement took the industry by surprise, this autobiography has been in my head for many years. It complements Managing My Life, an earlier volume. And therefore, while briefly reflecting on my youth in Glasgow and life-long friends made in Aberdeen, it focuses on my magical years in Manchester. An avid reader myself, I was eager to write a book that explained some of the mysteries in my line of work.

In a lifetime’s journey in football, you will have dips, lows, defeats and disappointments. In my early years at Aberdeen and Manchester United, I decided right away that in order to build trust and loyalty with the players, I had to give it to them first. That is the starting point for the bond on which great institutions thrive. I was helped by my ability to observe. Some people walk into a room and don’t notice anything. Use your eyes; it’s all out there. I used this skill in my assessment of players’ training habits, moods and behaviour patterns.

Of course I’ll miss the banter of the dressing room and all my opponents in management: those wonderful characters of the old school who were the greats of the game when I came down to United in 1986. Ron Atkinson showed no bitterness after leaving the club and had nothing but praise for us. Jim Smith is a fantastic character and a good friend. His hospitality would keep you there all night. When I did get home, my shirt would be speckled with cigar ash.

Big John Sillett, who managed Coventry City, was another great companion, and I can never forget the late John Lyall, who guided me through my early years and was so generous with his time. My first encounter with Bobby Robson was in 1981 when Aberdeen knocked out Ipswich in the UEFA Cup. Bobby came into our dressing room and shook every player’s hand. Sheer class, and his valued friendship was never forgotten. He was a big loss to our lives.

There were others of the old school who were survivors because they had a work ethic you had to admire. If I went to a reserve game, John Rudge and Lennie Lawrence would be there, along with one of the big personalities of the game whose Oldham teams brought a freshness that would never be replaced. I mean big Joe Royle. Oldham gave us some scary moments. Yes, I’ll miss all that. Harry Redknapp and Tony Pulis are other great characters of my generation.

I was blessed to have had wonderful, loyal staff at United. Some of them worked for me for over 20 years. My P.A. Lyn Laffin, has followed me into retirement and is still my P.A., in my new office; Les Kershaw, Dave Bushell, Tony Whelan and Paul McGuinness. Kath Phipps on reception, who also ran my after-match lounge at Old Trafford, has worked at United for over 40 years. Jim Ryan, who has now retired, my brother Martin who scouted abroad for 17 years (a very difficult job), and Brian McClair.

Norman Davies: what a man. A loyal friend who passed away a few years ago. His replacement as kit man, Albert Morgan, is also a big personality who never wavered in his loyalty. Our doctor, Steve McNally, our head physio Rob Swire and all his staff, Tony Strudwick and his energetic bunch of sports scientists, our laundry girls, all the kitchen staff; the general office of John Alexander, Anne Wylie and all the girls. Jim Lawlor and all his scouting staff. Eric Steele, goalkeeping coach. Simon Wells and Steve Brown of the video analysis team. Our ground staff, led by Joe Pemberton and Tony Sinclair. Our maintenance team, with Stuart, Graham and Tony: all hard-working men. There are maybe one or two I’ve missed, but I’m sure they know I respected them all.

Assistants and coaches helped me greatly down the years. Archie Knox, a real ally to me in my early years, Brian Kidd, Nobby Stiles, Eric Harrison, a truly wonderful youth coach. Steve McClaren, a very innovative and energetic coach. Carlos Queiroz and René Meulensteen – two magnificent coaches – and my assistant manager, Mick Phelan, a really shrewd, observant, true football man.

The foundation of my longevity lies with Bobby Charlton and Martin Edwards. Their biggest gift to me was the time to build a football club, rather than a football team. Their support was followed by the great bond I had with David Gill over the last decade.

There was plenty of ground to cover in this book. I hope you enjoy retracing the steps with me.

NEARLY three decades before this moment, I had walked through that tunnel and onto the pitch for my first home game, feeling nervous and exposed. I had waved to the Stretford End and been introduced from the centre circle as Manchester United’s new manager. Now, I strode onto the same pitch, full of confidence, to say goodbye.

The control I was able to exert over Manchester United was a privilege few managers will be lucky enough to know. However sure I felt of my abilities on the move south from Aberdeen in the autumn of 1986, there could have been no way of knowing it would turn out this well.

After the farewell in May 2013, the pivotal moments filled my thoughts: winning that FA Cup third-round tie against Nottingham Forest in January 1990, in which a Mark Robins goal sent us on our way to the final when my job was supposedly on the line; going through a whole month without winning a game, which gnawed away at my confidence.

Without the FA Cup victory over Crystal Palace nearly four years after my arrival, grave doubts would have been raised about my suitability for the job. We will never know how close I was to being sacked, because the decision was never forced on the United board. But without that triumph at Wembley, the crowds would have shrivelled. Disaffection might have swept the club.

Bobby Charlton would have opposed any move to dismiss me. He knew the work I was doing, the ground we were making up on the youth development side, the graft I was putting in, the hours I spent reforming the football operation. The chairman Martin Edwards knew it too, and it reflects well on those two men that they had the courage to stick by me in those dark days. Martin would have received plenty of angry letters demanding that I be cast aside.

Winning the 1990 FA Cup allowed us breathing space and deepened my sense that this was a wonderful club with which to win trophies. To win the FA Cup at Wembley made the good times roll. But on the morning after our victory, one newspaper declared: ‘OK, you’ve proved you can win the FA Cup, now go back to Scotland.’ I never forgot that.

one

IF I needed a result to epitomise what Manchester United were about it came to me in game No. 1,500: my last. West Bromwich Albion 5 Manchester United 5. Crazy. Wonderful. Entertaining. Outrageous.

If you were on your way to watch Manchester United you were in for goals and drama. Your heart was in for a test. I could have no complaints about us throwing away a 5–2 lead against West Brom within nine minutes. I still went through the motions of expressing my annoyance but the players could see right through it. I told them: ‘Thanks boys. Bloody great send-off you’ve given me!’

David Moyes had already been named as my successor; as we sat in the dressing room after the match Ryan Giggs teased: ‘David Moyes has just resigned.’

Despite our defensive frailties that day I was proud and relieved to be delivering this fine group of players and staff into David’s care. My work was done. My family were there, in the Regis Suite, at West Brom’s ground, and a new life stretched out before me.

It was one of those days that unfold like a dream. West Brom handled it with real class and looked after me perfectly. Later they sent me the team-sheets signed by both sets of players. Most of my family were with me: three sons, eight grandchildren and one or two close friends. It was a joy to me to have them there, and for us all to experience this final instalment together. Our family marched out as one.

Descending the steps of the team bus outside West Brom’s ground, my intention was to savour every moment. It was not hard for me to let go because I knew the time was right. The night before the game the players let it be known that they wanted to make a presentation to mark my retirement. Their most special gift was a beautiful 1941 Rolex from the year I was born, with the time set at 3.03 p.m., the minute of my emergence into the world, in Glasgow, on 31 December 1941. They also handed me a book of photographs encapsulating my time at United, with the grandchildren and family on the centre-spread. Rio Ferdinand, a watch enthusiast, was behind the main gift idea.

After the book and watch were handed over and a round of applause spread round the room I noticed a particular look on some of the players’ faces. It was a moment some weren’t sure how to handle because they had always had me with them; some for 20 years. I could see a vacant expression that seemed to say: what’s it going to be like now? Some had known no other manager but me.

There was still one game to play and I wanted it to be handled properly. We were three–nil up within half an hour but West Brom were in no mood to give me an easy send-off. John Sivebaek scored the first United goal of my time in charge, on 22 November 1986. The last was registered to Javier Hernández on 19 May 2013. At 5–2 to us it could have finished 20–2 in our favour. At 5–5 we might have lost 20–5. Defensively we were a shambles. West Brom scored three goals in five minutes, with Romelu Lukaku running up a hat-trick.

Despite the late avalanche on our goal, it was all light-hearted in the dressing room. After the final whistle we stayed on the pitch to wave to the United end. Giggsy pushed me forward and all the players held back. I was alone in front of a mosaic of happy faces. Our fans spent the entire day singing and chanting and bouncing. I would love to have won 5–2 but in a way 5–5 was a fitting sign-off. It was the first 5–5 draw in Premier League history and the first of my career: one last slice of history in my final 90 minutes.

Back in Manchester a deluge of post landed in my office. Real Madrid sent a beautiful gift: a solid silver replica of La Plaza de Cibeles, home to the fountain in Madrid where they celebrate league title wins, with a lovely letter from Florentino Pérez, the Real president. Another present arrived from Ajax and one from Edwin van der Sar. Lyn, my P.A., worked her way through heaps of correspondence.

For the home game against Swansea City the previous weekend, my last at Old Trafford, I had no idea what to expect, beyond a guard of honour. By then we were at the end of an intense week of telling family, friends, players and staff that I had chosen to move on to a new phase of my life.

The seeds of my decision to step down had been planted in the winter of 2012. Around Christmas-time the thought became sharp and clear in my head: ‘I’m going to retire.’

‘Why are you going to do that?’ Cathy said.

‘Last season, losing the title in the last game, I can’t take another one like that,’ I told her. ‘I just hope we can win the League this time and reach the Champions League or FA Cup final. It would be a great ending.’

Cathy, who had lost her sister Bridget in October, and was struggling to come to terms with that bereavement, soon agreed it was the right course. Her take was that if I wanted to do other things with my life I would still be young enough. Contractually I was obliged to notify the club by 31 March if I was going to stand down that summer.

By coincidence David Gill had called me one Sunday in February and asked if he could come to see me at home. A Sunday afternoon? ‘I bet he’s resigning as chief executive,’ I said. ‘Either that or you’re getting sacked,’ Cathy said. David’s news was that he would be standing down as chief executive at the end of the season. ‘Bloody hell, David,’ I said. And I told him that I had reached the same decision.

In the days that followed, David rang to tell me to expect a call from the Glazers. When it came I assured Joel Glazer that my decision had nothing to do with David relinquishing day-to-day control. My mind had been made up over Christmas, I told him. I explained the reasons. Cathy’s sister dying in October had changed our lives. Cathy felt isolated. Joel understood. We agreed to meet in New York, where he tried to talk me out of retiring. I told him I appreciated the effort he was making and thanked him for his support. He expressed his gratitude for all my work.

With no prospect of a change in my thinking, the discussion turned to who might replace me. There was a unanimous agreement – David Moyes was the man.

David came over to the house to discuss his potential availability. It was important to the Glazers that there was no long period of speculation when my retirement became official. They wanted the new man in place within days.

A lot of Scots have a dourness about them: a strong will. When they leave Scotland it tends to be for one reason only. To be successful. Scots don’t leave to escape the past. They move away to better themselves. You see it all over the world, in America and Canada especially. Leaving the homeland creates a certain resolution. It’s not a mask; it’s a determination to get things done. The Scottish dourness others talk about sometimes applied to me as well.

The Scotsman abroad doesn’t lack humour. David Moyes is not short of wit. In their jobs, though, the Scots are serious about their labours, an invaluable quality. People often said to me, ‘I never see you smile during a game.’ I would reply, ‘I’m not there to smile, I’m there to win the match.’

David had some of these traits. I knew his family background. His father was a coach at Drumchapel, where I played as a lad. David Moyes senior. They have a good family feel about them. I’m not saying that’s a reason to hire someone but you like to see good foundations in someone appointed to such high office. I left Drumchapel in 1957 when David senior would have been a young boy, so there was no direct crossover, but I knew their story.

The Glazers liked David. Right away they were impressed by him. The first point they will have noticed is that he is a straight-talker. It’s a virtue to be straightforward about yourself. And to put one concern to bed, there is no way I would get in David’s way. After 27 years as manager, why would I want to involve myself on the football side? This was my time to leave that part of my life behind. Equally David would have no trouble embracing our traditions. He was a fine judge of talent and laid on some marvellous football at Everton when he was allowed to sign a higher class of player.

I told myself I would have no regrets about retiring. That won’t change. In your seventies it’s easy to go downhill fast, physically and mentally. But I was busy from the moment I stepped aside, taking on projects in America and beyond. There was no risk of me lapsing into idleness. I was looking for new challenges.

One great difficulty, in the days around the announcement, was telling the staff at Carrington, our training ground. I particularly remember mentioning the changes in my life and Cathy’s sister dying, and hearing a sympathetic, ‘Aaah.’ That really broke through my barriers. I felt a real jab of sentiment.

Rumours had begun circulating the day before the official statement. At that point I had still to tell my brother Martin. It was a difficult process to manage, especially from the New York Stock Exchange point of view, so the partial leaking of the news compromised me in relation to some of the people I wanted to confide in.

On the Wednesday morning, 8 May, I had all the football staff in the video analysis room, the main staff in the canteen and the players in their dressing room. The moment I walked into the dressing room to tell the squad we made the announcement via the club website. No mobile phones were allowed. I didn’t want anyone communicating the news before I had been given the chance to tell everyone at the training ground. With the rumours, though, they knew something big was coming.

I told the players: ‘I hope I haven’t let some of you down, because you may have joined thinking I would stay.’ We had told Robin van Persie and Shinji Kagawa, for example, that I would not be retiring any time soon, which was correct at the point I said it.

‘Things change,’ I continued. ‘My wife’s sister dying was one dramatic change. Also, I want to go out a winner. And I’m going out a winner.’

Shock could be seen in some of their faces. ‘Go to the races today and enjoy it,’ I said. ‘See you on Thursday.’ I had already given the players the Wednesday afternoon off to go to Chester. And everyone knew that. It was part of the plan. I didn’t want people thinking the players were being heartless by attending Chester races on the day I brought the curtain down, which is why I made a point the week before of confirming they would go.

Then I went upstairs to the football staff and told them. They all applauded. ‘Glad to get rid of you,’ one or two remarked.

Of the two main groups the players were the more dumbstruck. Immediately in those circumstances questions will have filled their minds: ‘Will the new manager like me? Will I still be here next season?’ The coaches would be thinking: ‘This could be the end for me.’ The time was approaching for me to retreat from the scene of all this announcing and explaining and gather my thoughts.

I had decided in advance to go straight home because I knew there would be a seismic reaction in the media. I didn’t want to be leaving Carrington through a swarm of press and flashing lights.

At home I locked myself in. Jason, my lawyer and Lyn sent texts simultaneously at the point the announcement was made. Lyn would have been sending texts consecutively for 15 minutes. Apparently 38 newspapers in the world carried the news on the front page, including the New York Times. There were 10- and 12-page supplements in the British papers.

The range and depth of that coverage was flattering. I had my run-ins with the written press down the years but I never held grudges. I know journalists are under a lot of pressure. They have to try to beat television, the internet, Facebook, Twitter, many things, and they may have an editor on top of them all the time. It’s a hard industry.

The coverage proved also that the media held no grudges against me, despite all our conflicts. They recognised the value of my career and what I had brought to press conferences. They even made a presentation: a cake with a hairdryer on top and a lovely bottle of wine. It was well received.

For the Swansea game the stadium announcer played Sinatra’s ‘My Way’ and Nat King Cole’s ‘Unforgettable’. We won it the way we did so many of the 895 matches in which my teams prevailed: with a late goal, in the 87th minute, from Rio Ferdinand.

My speech on the pitch was all off the cuff. I had no script. All I knew was that I was not going to praise any individual. It was not about the directors, the supporters or the players: it was about Manchester United Football Club.

I urged the crowd to get behind the next manager, David Moyes. ‘I’d like to remind you that we’ve had bad times here,’ I said over the PA. ‘The club stood by me. All my staff stood by me. The players stood by me. So your job now is to stand by our new manager. That is important.’

Had I not mentioned David, people might have asked: ‘How about that, I wonder whether Ferguson wanted Moyes?’ We needed to show our unconditional support for him. The club has to keep on winning. That was the wish that bound us all. I’m a director of the club. I want the success to go on as much as anyone. Now I can enjoy games the way Bobby Charlton has been able to since he retired. You see Bobby after a victory and his eyes are blazing, he’s rubbing his hands. He loves it. I want that. I want to be able to attend European ties and tell people: I’m proud of this team, this is a great club.

In the event I found myself picking out Paul Scholes. I knew he would hate it but I couldn’t stop myself. Paul was retiring as well. I also wished Darren Fletcher all the best in his recovery from a colonic illness, which few picked up on.

At an airport a few days later, a guy walked up to me with an envelope, saying: ‘I was going to post this to you.’ It was an article from an Irish paper arguing that I had left the club the way I had managed it: on my terms. Typical Ferguson, the author wrote. I enjoyed that piece. That was how I saw my time in charge of United and I was proud to see it described that way.

As I slipped out of the picture, David brought in three of his own staff – Steve Round, Chris Woods and Jimmy Lumsden. He also added Ryan Giggs and Phil Neville, which meant that René Meulensteen, Mick Phelan and Eric Steele lost their jobs. It was David’s call. I told him that if he kept my staff I would be delighted, but it was not for me to interfere or prevent him bringing in his own assistants.

Jimmy Lumsden had been with David a long time. I knew him from my Glasgow days. Jimmy was born about a mile from me, in the next district along from Govan. He is a good wee lad and a fine football man. It was just a disappointment that good men lost their jobs, which happens in football. But it was handled well. I told the three of them how sorry I was that they would not be staying. Mick, who was with me for 20 years, told me I had nothing to apologise for, and thanked me for all the great times we had shared together.

As I looked back I focused not only on the triumphs but also the defeats. I lost three FA Cup finals, to Everton, Arsenal and Chelsea. I lost League Cup finals to Sheffield Wednesday, Aston Villa and Liverpool. And two European Cup finals to Barcelona. That is part of the tapestry of Manchester United too: the recovery. I always kept in mind that it was not all victories and open-top parades. When we lost the FA Cup final to Everton in 1995 I said: ‘That’s it, I’m making changes here.’ And we made them. We brought in the young players, the so-called Class of ’92. We couldn’t hold them back any longer. They were a special group of lads.

Losing football matches at Manchester United resonates with you. Mulling it over for a while and then carrying on in the same old way was never an option for me. When you lose a final it affects you deeply, especially if you have 23 shots on goal and the opposition have two, or you end up losing a penalty shoot-out. My first thought was always: ‘Think quickly about what you should be doing.’ My mind went straight to the business of improvement and recovery. It was an asset for me to be able to make quick calculations when it would have been easier just to be disheartened.

Sometimes defeats are the best outcomes. To react to adversity is a quality. Even in your lowest periods you are showing strength. There was a great saying: It’s just another day in the history of Manchester United. In other words fighting back was part of our existence. If you are lackadaisical about defeats you can be sure there will be more to come. Often we would drop two points in a game by the opposition equalising with the last kick of the ball and then go on a six- or seven-game winning run. It was no coincidence.

For the fan there is a culture of going to work on the Monday assailed by emotion from the weekend’s game. A guy wrote to me in January 2010 and said: ‘Can you please refund me the £41 I paid for my ticket on Sunday? You promised me entertainment. I did not get entertainment on Sunday. Can I have my £41 back?’ That was a fan. My idea was to write back saying: ‘Can you please debit the £41 from my profit over the last 24 years?’

You win all these games against Juventus and Real Madrid and someone asks for their money back after a slightly quiet Sunday. Is there any club in the world that can give you more heart-stopping moments than Manchester United? In any set of programme notes I might have warned the supporters: if we’re losing 1–0 with 20 minutes to go, go home, or you might end up being carried out. You could finish up in the Manchester Royal Infirmary.

I hope no one will disagree when I say: nobody was short-changed. It was never dull.

two

THE motto of the Ferguson clan in Scotland is: ‘Dulcius ex asperis’ or, ‘Sweeter after difficulties’. That optimism served me well through 39 years in football management. Over that time, from East Stirlingshire for four brief months in 1974, to Manchester United in 2013, I saw beyond adversity to the success on the other side. The act of controlling vast change year after year was sustained by a belief that we would prevail over any challenger.

Years ago, I read an article about me that said: ‘Alex Ferguson has done really well in his life despite coming from Govan.’ Spot the offending phrase. It’s precisely because I started out in the shipbuilding district of Glasgow that I achieved what I did in football. Origins should never be a barrier to success. A modest start in life can be a help more than a hindrance. If you’re examining successful people, look at their mother and father, study what they did, for clues about energy and motivation. A working-class background wasn’t a barrier for many of my greatest players. On the contrary, often it was part of the reason they excelled.

In my time in the dug-out, I advanced from managing East Stirling players on £6 a week to selling Cristiano Ronaldo to Real Madrid for £80 million. My St Mirren squad were on £15 a week and were left to fend for themselves in the summer because they were part-time. The maximum any Aberdeen first-team player earned in my eight years at Pittodrie was £200 a week, the ceiling set by Dick Donald, my chairman. So the financial journey for the thousands of men I managed in nearly four decades was from £6 a week to £6 million a year.

I have a letter on file from a chap who said that in 1959–60 he worked in the dry docks in Govan and used to visit a particular pub. He remembers a young agitator coming into this establishment with a collecting tin for the apprentices’ strike fund and delivering a firebrand speech. The only thing he knew about this boy was that he played for St Johnstone. His letter ended with a question: ‘Was that you?’

At first I had no recollection of this visit to the political arena, but the note jogged my memory and eventually I recalled going round the pubs in our area to raise money for the strike. I was not auditioning for a role in politics. To call my shouting a ‘speech’ would embellish it with oratorical qualities it almost certainly lacked. I remember ranting on like an idiot after being asked to justify my request for money. Everyone would have been nicely lubricated and in the mood to hear the young fundraiser explain the cause he was advancing.

Pubs were a large part of my early experiences. My earliest business idea was to use my modest income to enter the licensed trade, as security for the future. My first establishment was at the junction of Govan Road and Paisley Road West and was populated by dockers. Pubs taught me about people, their dreams and frustrations, in a way that complemented my efforts to understand the football trade, though I was not to know that at the time.

In one of my pubs, for example, we had a ‘Wembley Club’, into which customers would pay for two years so they could get to the England v. Scotland match at Wembley. I would double whatever was in the kitty and off they would go to London for four or five days. Or, that was the theory. I would join them on the day of the game itself. My best mate, Billy, would head off to Wembley on the Thursday and come back seven days later. Inevitably, this unscheduled extension of the trip would cause ructions with his family.

One Thursday, after a Saturday game at Wembley, I was at home when the phone rang. It was Anna, Billy’s wife. ‘Cathy, go and ask Alex where Billy is,’ Anna said. I pleaded ignorance. Maybe 40 of our customers would make the trip to the Twin Towers and I had no way of knowing why Billy was absent without leave. But for the working men of my generation, a big football match was a sacred pilgrimage, and they loved the camaraderie as much as the game.

The pub we had on Main Street, Bridgeton was in one of Glasgow’s biggest Protestant districts. The Saturday before the Orange walk, big Tam the postman would approach me to say: ‘Alex, the boys are asking what time you’re opening next Saturday morning. For the walk. We’re going down to Ardrossan,’ which is on the west coast of Scotland. ‘The buses leave at ten o’clock,’ says Tam. ‘All the pubs are open. You’ll need to open.’

I was flummoxed. ‘Well, what time should I open?’

Tam says: ‘Seven.’

So there I was at 6.15 a.m., with my dad, and my brother Martin, and a wee Italian barman we employed. We’re well equipped because Tam has told me: ‘Get stocked up, you’ll need plenty of drink in.’ I open at 7 a.m. The pub is soon full of Orangemen in full voice and the police are walking by, not saying a word.

Between 7 a.m. and half past nine I took four grand. Double vodkas, the lot. My dad sat shaking his head. By 9.30 we were hard at work getting the place ready for the rest of our clientele. Scrubbed the place, we did. But there was four grand in the till.

Running pubs was hard work. By 1978 I was ready to escape the onerous responsibilities that came with running two watering holes. Managing Aberdeen left no time for wrestling with drinkers or staying on top of the books. But what good stories those years left in my memory. You could write a book just about those. They would come in on Saturday morning – the dockers – with their wives, having been paid on the Friday night and deposited the money with me behind the bar in the night safe. On a Friday night you felt like a millionaire. You didn’t know whether the cash in the safe or the till was yours or theirs. In the early days Cathy would count it on the carpet. On the Saturday morning the money would be away again when these men came to collect it. The record of these transactions was called the tick book.

A female regular by the name of Nan was especially vigilant in tracking the movements of her husband’s money. She had a tongue like a docker. ‘Do you think we’re all daft?’ she would say, fixing me in her sights.

‘What?’ I said, buying time.

‘Do you think we’re all daft? That tick book, I want to see it.’

‘Oh, you can’t see the tick book,’ I said, improvising. ‘It’s sacrosanct. The taxman wouldnae let you do that. The taxman examines it every week. You can’t see that.’

Nan turns to her man, subdued now, and says: ‘Is that right?’

‘Er, I’m not sure,’ says her man.

The storm had passed. ‘If I find out my man’s name’s in there I’m never coming back,’ Nan says.

These are lasting memories of a young life spent around people of great character and resilience. Tough people, too. Sometimes I would come home with a split head or black eyes. That was pub life. When it became too exuberant or fights broke out, it was necessary to jump in to restore order. You would try to separate the protagonists but often take one on the chin. Yet I look back and think what a great life it was. The characters; the comedy.

I always remember a man called Jimmy Westwater coming in, unable to breathe. Grey, he was. ‘Christ, are you all right?’ I asked. Jimmy had wrapped himself in Shantung silk to creep out of the docks without being caught. A whole bale of Shantung silk. But he’d wrapped himself so tightly in it, he could hardly draw breath.

Another Jimmy, who I employed, and who kept the place immaculate, turned up one night in a bow tie. One of my regulars was incredulous: ‘A bow tie in Govan? You must be joking.’ One Friday night I came back to find someone selling bags of birdseed by the bar. In that part of Glasgow, everyone kept pigeons.

‘What’s this?’ I asked.

‘Birdseed.’ Like it was the most obvious answer in the world.

An Irish lad called Martin Corrigan prided himself on his ability to meet any domestic need. Crockery, a canteen of cutlery, a fridge – anything you like. Another guy walked in and announced: ‘Want a pair of binoculars? I’m skint.’ Out came a beautiful pair of binoculars, wrapped in greaseproof paper. ‘A fiver,’ he says.

‘One condition,’ I said. ‘A fiver as long as you drink in here. Don’t go over to Baxter’s.’ He was a nice guy with a speech impediment. So I get the binoculars and he immediately spends £3 across the bar.

When I brought purchases home, Cathy would go crackers. I can remember coming back with a nice Italian vase that Cathy later saw in a shop for £10. The problem was that I had paid £25 for ours over the bar. One day I swaggered in with a new suede jacket that really looked the part.

‘How much?’ says Cathy.

‘Seven quid,’ I say, beaming.

So I hang it up. Two weeks later we are going to her sister’s for a wee party. On goes the jacket, and I’m standing in front of the mirror admiring the cut. You know how a man gives the two sleeves a tug to get it to sit just right? That’s what I did – and the two sleeves came right off in my hands. There I stood with a sleeveless jacket.

Cathy was rolling about while I was shouting: ‘I’ll kill him!’ There wasn’t even a lining in the jacket.

On a wall in my snooker room hangs a picture of Bill, my best mate. He was some lad, Billy. Couldn’t even make a cup of tea. Back at his house one day, after we had been out for a meal, I told him, ‘Get the kettle on.’ Off he went. But Billy was gone about 15 minutes. Where the hell was he? He was on the phone to Anna, his wife, asking: ‘What do you do with the tea?’

Anna left a steak pie in the oven one night, while Billy watched the movie, The Towering Inferno. Anna came back two hours later to find smoke spewing from the kitchen.

‘Christ, did you not turn the oven off? Look at the smoke,’ she puffed.

‘I thought it was coming from the telly,’ Billy cried. He’d thought it was a special effect from the burning tower.

Everyone congregated at Billy’s house. They were moths to his light. He wasn’t known as Billy, though. Everyone called him McKechnie. His two boys, Stephen and Darren, are a credit to him and Anna, and are still very close with my sons. Billy is no longer with us. But I still remember him for all the fun we shared.

I have a hardcore of friends from that time. Duncan Petersen, Tommy Hendry and Jim McMillan were at nursery with me from four years of age. Duncan was a plumber who worked for ICI at Grangemouth and retired very early. He has a nice wee place in Clearwater, Florida, and they like to travel. Tommy, who had some heart trouble, was an engin-eer, as was Jim. A fourth one, Angus Shaw, is looking after his ill wife. John Grant, who I’m also very close to, moved to South Africa in the 1960s. His wife and daughter run a wholesale business.

When I left Harmony Row as a lad, it created a big division between me and the Govan boys. They thought I was wrong to leave the team and go to Drumchapel Amateurs. Mick McGowan, who ran Harmony Row, never spoke to me again. He was intransigent. Mick ‘One-Eyed’ McGowan. He was an incredible enthusiast for Harmony Row and just blanked me when I left. But the Govan boys and I would still go dancing up to the age of 19 or 20. We all started with girlfriends around that time.

Then came the separation between us, the drift. I married Cathy and moved up to Simshill. They all married too. The friendships seemed to fall apart. Contact was intermittent. John and Duncan had played with me at Queen’s Park, in 1958–60. In management you have little time for anything beyond the demands of the job. At St Mirren I certainly didn’t. But our bonds were not completely severed. About two months before I left Aberdeen in 1986, Duncan phoned and said it was his 25th wedding anniversary in October. Would Cathy and I like to come? I told him we would love to. It was a turning point in my life. All the lads were there and it brought us back together. Our families were established; we were mature men. I moved to United the following month and we’ve remained close ever since.

When you get to that age, around 19 to 20, there is a gentle parting of the ways, but they all kept together. It was only me who had a different type of life. It was not avoidance in any way. It was just the way my life unfolded. I was running two pubs and was manager of St Mirren. Then came the Aberdeen job in 1978.

Those friendships sustained me at Manchester United. They would all come to our house in Cheshire for a buffet and a singsong and we’d put all the old records on. They were all good singers. By the time my turn came, the wine would have infused me with an exaggerated sense of my own crooning abilities. It would be neck and neck between me and Frank Sinatra. There would be no doubt in my mind that I could treat my audience to a fine rendition of ‘Moon River’. Two words in, I would open my eyes to find the room empty. ‘You come and eat my food and there you are watching telly in the next room while I’m singing,’ I would complain.

‘We’re no listening to that. It’s crap,’ came the reply. They are good solid people. Most have been married over 40 years. God, they give me stick. They pummel me. They get away with it because they are so like me; they are the same stock. They grew up with me. But they were also supportive. When they came down we tended to win. But if we lost a game they might say, sympathetically, ‘That was hard work.’ Not, ‘That was rubbish’, but ‘That was hard work.’

My friends in Aberdeen remain close. The thing I learned about Scotland is that the further north you go, the quieter people are. They take longer to forge friendships, but when they do those ties run deep. Gordon Campbell goes on holiday with us, my lawyer Les Dalgarno, Alan McRae, George Ramsay, Gordon Hutcheon.

As I became more entrenched in the job at United, my social life diminished. I stopped going out on a Saturday night. The football was exhausting for me. Getting away from the ground after a 3 p.m. kick-off, I wouldn’t return home until quarter to nine. That was the price of success: 76,000 people all going home at the same time. The urge to go out weakened. But I developed some strong friendships: Ahmet Kurcer, the manager of the Alderley Edge Hotel, Sotirios, Mimmo, Marius, Tim, Ron Wood, Peter Done, Pat Murphy and Pete Morgan, Ged Mason, the wonderful Harold Riley, and my staff, of course, who were loyal to me. James Mortimer and Willie Haughey were two old pals from my home town, there was Martin O’Connor and Charlie Stillitano in New York and Eckhard Krautzun in Germany, all good people. When we did summon up the energy, we had good nights out.

In my early years in Manchester I grew friendly with Mel Machin, who was manager of City, and who was fired not long after they beat us 5–1. The reason given, I seem to recall, was that Mel didn’t smile enough. I would have been sacked a long time ago had that logic applied at United. John Lyall, the manager of West Ham, was a rock to me in those days. I didn’t know all the players in England and wasn’t sure of the scouting department at United. I would phone John often and he would send me reports on players to supplement my own. I could trust him and confided in him a lot. As a way of telling me United weren’t playing well, he would say: ‘I don’t see Alex Ferguson in that team.’

Jock Wallace, the fiery former Rangers manager, also said to me in a hotel one night: ‘I don’t see Alex Ferguson in that team. You’d better get Alex Ferguson back in there.’ Those men volunteered their advice, knowing that friendship was at the base of their observations. I call those the best friendships. Bobby Robson was manager of England, so that was a different relationship at first, but we too became close. Lennie Lawrence was another friend from that time, and still is.

Bobby Robson and I re-established close contact at Eusébio’s testimonial in Portugal when he was coaching there with Porto and Sporting Lisbon. Eric Cantona made his debut in that game. Bobby came to our hotel and I will always remember him seeking out Steve Bruce to say: ‘Steve, I made a mistake with you. I should have given you an England cap and I want to apologise for that.’ In front of all the players.

So much of what I knew at the end of my career I learned in those early days, sometimes without realising the lessons were sinking in. I learned about human nature long before I headed south to United.

Other people don’t see the game or the world the way you do, and sometimes you have to adjust to that reality. Davie Campbell was a player I had at St Mirren. He could run like a deer but couldn’t trap a rabbit. I was into him at half-time when the door opened to reveal his father. ‘Davie, you’re doing brilliant son, well done!’ the dad announced, then disappeared.

We were at Cowdenbeath one day with East Stirling and made the mistake of not checking the weather. The pitch was brick hard. So we went into Cowdenbeath to buy 12 pairs of baseball boots. We had no rubber soles in those days. We were down three-nothing at half-time. In the second half I feel a tap on my shoulder from Billy Renton, a former team-mate of mine. He says: ‘Alex, I just want to introduce you to my son.’

I say: ‘For God’s sake, Billy, we’re getting beat three-nothing.’

That same day, Frank Connor, a lovely man with a hellish temper, watched a decision go against him and threw the bench on the pitch. I said: ‘Bloody hell, Frank, you’re winning three-nothing.’

‘It’s a disgrace, that,’ Frank fired back. These were the passions swirling all around me.

A story comes back to me of Jock Stein and his battles with Jimmy Johnstone, the brilliant player and legendary carouser. One afternoon, Jock took Jimmy off in a game as punishment for Jimmy not wanting to play in a European away game. As Jimmy came off he said: ‘You big one-legged bastard, you,’ and took a kick at the dug-out. Jimmy runs up the tunnel and big Jock gets after him. Jimmy locks himself in the dressing room.

‘Open that door,’ shouts Jock.

‘No, you’ll hurt me,’ replies Jimmy.

‘Open that door!’ repeats Jock. ‘I warn you.’

Jimmy opens the door and jumps straight into the bath, which is red hot.

Jock shouts: ‘Come out of there.’

‘No, I’m not coming out,’ says Jimmy. Outside, on the pitch, the game is still going on.

Football management is a never-ending sequence of challenges. So much of it is a study in the frailty of human beings. There was an occasion when a number of Scotland players, after a night of liquid entertainment, decided to jump in rowing boats. This ended with Jimmy Johnstone, wee Jinky, having the oars taken off him and the tide taking him out, while he was singing away. When the information got back to Celtic Park, Jock Stein was informed that Jinky had been rescued by the coastguard from a rowing boat in the Firth of Clyde. Jock joked: ‘Could he not have drowned? We’d have given him a testimonial, we’d have looked after Agnes, and I would still have my hair.’

Jock was hilarious. In our time together with Scotland, I recall us beating England 1–0 at Wembley in May 1985 and then flying out to Reykjavik to face Iceland, where we were feeling pretty pleased with ourselves. On the night of our arrival, the staff sat down to a banquet of prawns, salmon and caviar. Big Jock never drank, but I leaned on him to take one glass of white in celebration of our victory over the English.

In the game against Iceland, we scraped a 1–0 win. The performance was a disaster. And afterwards Big Jock turned to me and said: ‘See that? That’s you and your white wine.’

Despite having all this experience to draw on, I felt my way in the early years at Manchester United. Having a quick temper helped, because if I lost my rag my personality came through. Ryan Giggs has a temper, but a slow one. Mine was a useful tool. I just weighed right in. It helped me to assert my authority. It told the players and staff I was not to be messed about.

There are always people who want to take you on, defy you. When I started, even in my first days at East Stirling, I had a defining confrontation with the centre-forward, who was the son-in-law of one of the directors, Bob Shaw.

I was informed by one of my players, Jim Meakin, that his whole family went away for a weekend in September. It was a tradition.

‘What do you mean?’ I said.

‘You know, I’ll not be playing on Saturday,’ Jim says.

‘Well, I’ll tell you what,’ I said, ‘don’t play on Saturday – and then don’t bother coming back.’

So he played, and straight after drove down to join his family in Blackpool.

On the Monday I receive a phone call: ‘Boss, I’ve broken down.’ In Carlisle, I think it was. He must have thought I was stupid. Quick as a flash I said, ‘I can’t hear you very well, give me your number, I’ll call you back.’

Silence.

‘Don’t come back,’ I said.

Bob Shaw, the director, was deeply unhappy with me. This went on for weeks and weeks. The chairman was saying. ‘Alex, please, get Bob Shaw off my back, get Jim back playing.’

I said: ‘No, Willie, he’s finished. Are you telling me I can do my job with guys deciding when they’re going to go on holiday?’

‘I understand the problem, but is three weeks not enough?’ he said.

The next week he followed me into the toilets at Forfar, stood beside me, and groaned: ‘Please, Alex, if there’s any Christian understanding in your body.’

After a pause I said: ‘All right.’

And he kissed me. ‘What are you doing, you silly old sod,’ I said. ‘You’re kissing me in a public toilet.’

In October 1974, in the next stage of my apprenticeship, I went to work for St Mirren. First day, a photograph in the Paisley Express. In the print I noticed the captain making a gesture behind my back. The following Monday I called him in and said: ‘You’ve got a free transfer if you want it. There’s no place for you here. You’ll not be playing.

‘Why?’ he says.

‘For a start, doing a V-sign behind a manager doesn’t tell me you’re an experienced player, or that you’re a mature person. If I’m looking for a captain I’m looking for maturity. That was a childish schoolboy trick. You have to go.’

You have to make your mark. As Big Jock said to me about players: Never fall in love with them, because they’ll two-time you.

At Aberdeen I had to deal with all sorts of transgressions. I caught plenty out. Afterwards you kill yourself laughing at their reactions.

‘Me?’ they would say, with the most brilliantly wounded expression.

‘Aye, you.’

‘Oh, I went to see a mate.’

‘Oh did you? For three hours? And ended up pissed?’ Mark McGhee and Joe Harper would test me plenty. Then there was Frank McGarvey, at St Mirren. One Sunday in 1977 we took 15,000 fans to a cup game at Fir Park but lost 2–1. Motherwell kicked us off the park and I was reported to the SFA for saying the referee had not been strong enough.

That Sunday night my home phone rang. My mate John Donachie said down the line: ‘I didn’t want to tell you before the game because I knew you would go off your head, but I saw McGarvey in the pub, pissed, on Friday night.’ I phoned his house. His mother answered. ‘Is Frank in?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘he’s in town. Is there anything I can help you with?’

‘Can you ask him to phone me when he comes in. I’ll stay up. I’m not going to bed until I’ve spoken to him.’ At 11.45 p.m. the phone went. Pips sounded, so I knew it was a pay phone. ‘In the house,’ Frank said. ‘But that’s pips,’ I said. ‘Yeah, we’ve got a pay phone in our house,’ says Frank. That much was true, but I didn’t believe he was ringing from there.

‘Where were you on Friday night?’

‘I can’t remember,’ he says.

‘Well, I’ll tell you. You were in the Waterloo bar. That’s where you were. You’re suspended for life. Don’t come back. You’re out of the Scotland Under-21s. I’m withdrawing you. You’ll never kick another ball in your life.’ And I put the phone down.

The next morning, his mother rang me. ‘My Frank doesn’t drink. You’ve got the wrong man.’ I told her: ‘I don’t think so. I know every mother thinks the sun shines out of their son’s backside, but you go back and ask him again.’

For three weeks I had him suspended for life and the players were all muttering about it.

A League decider against Clydebank was approaching and I told my assistant, big Davie Provan: ‘I need him back for this one.’ The club do was at the town hall in Paisley the week before the Clydebank game. I walked in there with Cathy, and suddenly Frank jumped out from behind one of the pillars, begging: ‘Just give me one more chance.’ This was a gift from heaven. There was me wondering how I could bring him back into the fold without losing face and he jumps out from behind a pillar. I told Cathy to walk in while I maintained my sternest tone with Frank: ‘I told you, you’re finished for life.’ Tony Fitzpatrick, who had been watching, steps forward: ‘Boss, give him another chance, I’ll make sure he behaves.’

‘Talk to me tomorrow morning,’ I barked. ‘This is not the right time.’ I enter the hall to join Cathy, triumphant. We won the Clydebank game 3–1, and Frank scored two.

With young people you have to try to impart a sense of responsibility. If they can add greater awareness to their energy and their talents they can be rewarded with great careers.

One asset I possessed when I started as a manager was that I could make a decision. I was never afraid of that, even as a schoolboy picking a team. I was instructing players even then: ‘You play here, you play there,’ I used to tell them then. Willie Cunningham, one of my early managers, would say: ‘You know, you’re a bloody nuisance.’ I would talk tactics at him and ask: ‘Are you sure you know what you’re doing?’

‘Nuisance, that’s what you are,’ he would answer.

The other players would sit there listening to my interventions and assume I was about to be killed for insubordination. But it was just that I could always make a decision. I don’t know where it comes from, but I know that as a boy I was an organiser, an instructor, a picker of teams. My father was an ordinary working man, very intelligent, but not a leader of any description, so I was not copying a parental example.

On the other hand there is a part of me, I know, that is solitary, cut off. At 15, playing for Glasgow schoolboys, I came home after scoring against Edinburgh schoolboys – the greatest day of my life – to be told by my father that a big club wanted to talk to me. My response surprised us both: ‘I just want to go out. I want to go to the pictures.’

‘What’s the matter with you?’ he said.

I wanted to separate myself. I don’t know why. To this day I don’t know why I did that. I had to be on my own. My father had been so proud and delighted and my mother was dancing, saying, ‘It’s so great, son.’ My gran was going off her head. Scoring against Edinburgh schoolboys was a big deal. Yet I had to escape into my own wee vacuum, you know?

From there to here is such a vast distance. When I started at Manchester United in 1986, Willie McFaul was the manager of Newcastle United. Manchester City had Jimmy Frizzell and George Graham was in charge at Arsenal. I like George: good man, great friend. When I was having problems with Martin Edwards over my contract, Sir Roland Smith was the chairman of the Plc. The Plc could cause complications at times. You would have to wait for issues to be addressed. One day Sir Roland suggested that Martin, Maurice Watkins, the club solicitor, and I should go over to the Isle of Man to sort out my new deal. George was on double my salary at Arsenal.

‘I’ll give you my contract, if you like,’ George said.

‘Are you sure you don’t mind?’ I said.

So over to the Isle of Man I went, with George’s contract. Martin was a good chairman for me. He was strong. The problem was, he thought every penny was his. He paid you what he wanted to pay you. Not just me – everyone.

When I showed him George’s contract, he wouldn’t believe it. ‘Phone David Dein,’ I suggested. So he did, and David Dein, the Arsenal chairman, denied that George was being paid the sum on the contract. It was a farce. George had given me his documentation, signed by David Dein. Had it not been for Maurice and Roland Smith I would have left the job that day. I was close to leaving anyway.

There was a moral there, as in all of my 39 years on the front line. You have to stand up for yourself. There is no other way.

three

ON the sofa that night of Christmas Day 2001, I had nodded off while watching television. In the kitchen a mutiny was brewing. The traditional assembly room of our family home was the scene for a discussion that would change each of our lives. The chief rebel came in and kicked my foot to wake me. In the frame of the door I could pick out three figures: all my sons, lined up for maximum solidarity.

‘We’ve just had a meeting,’ Cathy said. ‘We’ve decided. You’re not retiring.’ As I weighed this announcement I felt no urge to resist. ‘One, your health is good. Two, I’m not having you in the house. And three, you’re too young anyway.’ Cathy did all the early talking. But our sons were right behind her. The gang was united. ‘You’re being stupid, Dad,’ the boys told me. ‘Don’t do it. You’ve got a lot to offer. You can build a new team at Manchester United.’ That’ll teach me to nod off for five minutes. It ended with me working for 11 more years.

One of the reasons I had decided to stand down in the first place was in reaction to a remark Martin Edwards had made after the 1999 European Cup final in Barcelona. Martin had been asked whether there would be a role for me after I surrendered the manager’s job and had replied: ‘Well, we don’t want a Matt Busby situation.’ I wasn’t impressed by that answer. The two periods could not be compared. In my era, you needed to factor in the added complications brought on by agents, contracts, the mass media. No sensible person would want to be embroiled in those activities once he had finished serving his time as manager. There was not the slimmest chance I would want to be involved in the games themselves or the complexities of the football trade.

What else made me intend to retire in the first place? There was always a sense after that magical night in Barcelona that I had reached the pinnacle. Previously my teams had fallen short in the European Cup and I had always chased that end of the rainbow. Once you’ve achieved your life’s ambition, you ask yourself whether you can achieve such a high again. When Martin Edwards made his remark about avoiding the Matt Busby syndrome, my first thought was ‘Nonsense’. My second was: ‘Sixty is a good age to walk away.’

So three factors wormed away in my mind: the disappointment of Martin raising the Matt Busby spectre, the imponderable of whether I could win a second European Cup, and that number, 60, which assumed a haunting quality. I had been a manager from 32 years of age.

Reaching 60 can have a profound effect. You think you’re entering another room. At 50, a pivotal moment has arrived. Half a century. But you don’t feel 50. At 60, you say: ‘Christ, I feel 60. I’m 60!’ You come through that. You realise it’s a notional change, a numerical alteration. I don’t feel that way now about age. But back then, 60 was a psychological barrier in my head. It was an obstacle to me feeling young. It changed my sense of my own fitness, my health. Winning the European Cup enabled me to feel I had completed the set of dreams and could now step away fulfilled. That was the catalyst in my thinking. But when I saw Martin casting me as an annoying ghost on the shoulder of the new manager, I muttered to myself, ‘What a joke.’

It was a relief to me, of course, to perform a full U-turn, but I still had to argue the practicalities with Cathy and the boys.

‘I don’t think I can reverse it. I’ve told the club.’

Cathy said: ‘Well, don’t you think they should show you some respect in terms of allowing you to change your mind?’

‘They may have given it to someone by now,’ I said.

‘But with the job you’ve done – don’t you think they should give you the chance to go back on it?’ she persisted.

The next day I phoned Maurice Watkins who laughed when I told him about my U-turn. The head-hunters were due to meet a candidate to succeed me the following week. Sven-Göran Eriksson was to be the new United manager, I believe. That was my interpretation, anyway, though Maurice never confirmed it. ‘Why Eriksson?’ I asked him, later.

‘You may be wrong, you may be right,’ Maurice said.

I remember asking Paul Scholes one day: ‘Scholesy, what’s Eriksson got?’ but Scholesy could shed no light. Maurice’s next move was to make contact with Roland Smith, the then chairman of the Plc, whose response to me when we spoke was: ‘I told you. Didn’t I tell you how stupid you were? We need to sit down to discuss this.’

Roland was one of those wise old birds. He had lived a rich life, a complete life. All kinds of interesting experiences had passed his way and he could unfurl a marvellous array of stories. Roland told us a tale of Margaret Thatcher being at a dinner with the Queen. Her Majesty wanted the royal plane to be refurbished. Roland came rolling along and noticed the two of them with their backs to one another.

‘Roland,’ called the Queen, ‘will you tell this woman I need some work doing on my plane?’

‘Ma’am,’ said Roland, ‘I’ll attend to it right away.’

That’s what I needed him to say about my change of heart. I needed him to attend to it right away. My first point to Roland was that I needed a new contract. My existing deal would expire that summer. We needed to move fast.

The moment I made the announcement specifying the date of my departure, I knew I had made an error. Others knew it too. Bobby Robson had always said: ‘Don’t you dare retire.’ Bobby was a wonderful character. We were sitting in the house one afternoon when the phone went.

‘Alex, it’s Bobby here. Are you busy?’

‘Where are you?’ I said.

‘I’m in Wilmslow.’

‘Well come round,’ I told him.

‘I’m outside your door,’ he said.

Bobby was such a refreshing man. Even in his seventies he still wanted the Newcastle job back, after losing it early in the 2004–05 season. It was never in Bobby’s nature to embrace idleness, and he refused to accept the Newcastle post had suddenly moved beyond his capabilities. That defiance stayed with him to the end and showed how much he loved this game.

Once I had decided I would be standing down, I stopped planning. The minute I reversed that policy, I started plotting again. I told myself: ‘We need a new team.’ The energy came back. I started to feel that thrust about myself again. To the scouts I announced, ‘Let’s get cracking again.’ We were mobilising once more and it felt good.

I had no physical ailments or impediments that would have stopped me carrying on. In management you are fragile, sometimes. You wonder whether you are valued. I remember my friend Hugh McIlvanney’s Arena TV documentary trilogy on Stein, Shankly and Busby. A theme of Hugh’s study was that these men were too big for their clubs and each, in his own way, had been cut down to size. I remember big Jock saying to me about club owners and directors: ‘Remember, Alex, we are not them. We are not them. They run the club. We are their workers.’ Big Jock always felt that. It was us and them, the landowner and the serf.

What they did to Jock Stein at Celtic, apart from being distasteful, was ridiculous. They asked him to run the pools. Twenty-five trophies with Celtic, and they asked him to run the pools. Bill Shankly was never invited to join the Liverpool board and as a consequence a resentment grew in him. He even started to come to Manchester United games, or watch Tranmere Rovers. He appeared at our old training ground, The Cliff, as well as Everton’s.

No matter how good your CV, there are moments when you feel vulnerable, exposed; though in my last few years with David Gill, the base in which I operated was first-class. Our relationship was excellent. But there is a fear of failure in a manager the whole time, and you are on your own a lot. Sometimes you would give anything not to be alone with your thoughts. There were days when I would be in my office, in the afternoon, and no one would knock on my door because they assumed I was busy. Sometimes I’d hope for that rap on the door. I would want Mick Phelan or René Meulensteen to come in and say: ‘Do you fancy a cup of tea?’ I had to go and look for someone to talk to; enter their space. In management you have to face that isolation. You need contact. But they think you’re busy with important business and don’t want to go near you.

Until around 1 p.m. there would be a constant stream of people coming to see me. The youth academy guys, Ken Ramsden, the secretary, and first-team players, which was always gratifying because it meant they trusted you, often with family problems. I always adopted a positive approach to players confiding in me, even if it was to ask for a day off to deal with fatigue, or to address a contract problem.

If a player asked me for a day off, there had to be a good reason, because who would want to miss a training session at United? I would always say yes. I would trust them. Because if you said, ‘No – and why do you want one anyway?’ and they answered, ‘Because my grandmother has died,’ then you were in trouble. If there was a problem I would always want to help to find a solution.

I had people who were 100 per cent Alex Ferguson. Examples would be Les Kershaw, Jim Ryan and Dave Bushell. I brought Les in in 1987. He was one of my best-ever signings. I hired him on the recommendation of Bobby Charlton. Because I didn’t know the English scene that well, Bobby’s tips were invaluable. Les had worked at Bobby’s soccer schools and scouted for Crystal Palace. He had also worked with George Graham and Terry Venables. Bobby’s view was that Les would love to work for Manchester United. So I hooked him in. He was effervescent. So enthusiastic. Never stops talking. He would call me at 6.30 p.m. every Sunday night to update me with all the scouting reports. Cathy would come through after an hour to say, ‘Are you still on that phone?’

The moment you interrupted Les, he would accelerate. What a worker. He was a professor of chemistry at Manchester University. Dave Bushell was a headmaster who ran English schools Under-15s and I took him when Joe Brown retired. Jim Ryan was there from 1991. Mick Phelan was a player for me and became my valued assistant, apart from the spell when he left us in 1995 and rejoined in 2000 as a coach. Paul McGuinness was with me from when I joined the club. He was the son of former United player and manager Wilf McGuinness, and had been a player himself. I made him an academy coach.

Normally a manager brings an assistant and that assistant stays with him. United are a different proposition because my assistants acquired a high profile and became targets for other clubs. I lost my assistant, Archie Knox, to Rangers, two weeks before the 1991 European Cup Winners’ Cup final, and in Archie’s absence I took Brian Whitehouse to Rotterdam for the game and made sure all the backroom staff were involved.

Later I went scouting for a No. 2. Nobby Stiles said: ‘Why don’t you promote Brian Kidd?’ Brian knew the club and had transformed the local scouting network, bringing in a lot of his old pals, United men and schoolteachers who knew the local area. That was the best work Brian ever did. It was a terrific success. So I gave Brian the job. He did well in the sense that he became very friendly with the players and put on a good training session. He had been to Italy to watch the Serie A teams and brought a lot of that wisdom home.

When he left to go to Blackburn in 1998, I told him: ‘I hope you know what you’re doing.’ When a coach leaves, they always ask: ‘What do you think?’ With Archie I couldn’t get Martin Edwards to match the Rangers offer. As for Brian, I didn’t feel he was suited to management. Steve McClaren: management material, no doubt about that. What I told Steve was: you should make sure you get the right club, the right chairman. Essential. Always. West Ham and Southampton were the ones who wanted him at this stage.

From nowhere, Steve took a call from Steve Gibson, the chairman of Middlesbrough, and my advice was, ‘Absolutely no doubt, take it.’ Bryan Robson, though he had lost his job there, always spoke highly of Steve Gibson, who was young, fresh, and always willing to put his money in. They had a great training ground. ‘That’s your job,’ I told Steve.

Organised, strong and always looking for new ideas, Steve was made for management. He was effervescent and energetic with a good personality.

Carlos Queiroz, another of my No. 2s, was brilliant. Just brilliant. Outstanding. An intelligent, meticulous man. The recommendation to hire him came from Andy Roxburgh, at a time when we were beginning to look at more southern-hemisphere players and perhaps needed a coach from beyond the northern European nations, and one who could speak another language or two. Andy was quite clear. Carlos was outstanding. He had coached South Africa, so I called in Quinton Fortune one day for his opinion. ‘Fantastic,’ said Quinton. ‘To what level, do you think?’ ‘Any,’ said Quinton. ‘Well,’ I thought, ‘that will do me.’

When Carlos came over to England in 2002 to speak to us, I was waiting for him in my tracksuit. Carlos was immaculately dressed. He has that suaveness about him. He was so impressive that I offered him the job right away. He was the closest you could be to being the Manchester United manager without actually holding the title. He took responsibility for a lot of issues that he didn’t have to get involved in.

‘I need to talk to you.’ Carlos had rung me one day in 2003 as I was holidaying in the south of France. What could it be? Who was after him? ‘I just need to talk to you,’ he repeated.

So he flew into Nice and I took a taxi to Nice Airport, where we found a quiet corner.

‘I’ve been offered the Real Madrid job,’ he said.

‘I’m going to say two things to you. One, you can’t turn it down. Two, you’re leaving a really good club. You may not last more than a year at Real Madrid. You could be at Man United for a lifetime.’

‘I know,’ Carlos said. ‘I just feel it’s such a challenge.’

‘Carlos, I can’t talk you out of that one. Because if I do, and in a year’s time Real Madrid are winning the European Cup, you’ll be saying – I could have been there. But I’m just telling you, it’s a nightmare job.’

Three months later, he was wanting to quit Madrid. I told him he couldn’t. I flew out to Spain to meet him at his apartment and we had lunch. My message was: you can’t quit, see it through, and rejoin me next year. That season I didn’t take an assistant because I was sure Carlos would come back. I co-opted Jim Ryan and Mick Phelan, two good men, but I didn’t want to dive in with an appointment, knowing Carlos might be returning. I had interviewed Martin Jol, a week or so before Carlos called to say it wasn’t working out in Madrid. Martin had been impressive and I was inclined to give him the job, but then came the call from Carlos, which obliged me to go back to Martin and say: ‘Look, I’m going to leave it for the time being.’ I couldn’t tell him why.

Assistant manager at Manchester United is a high-profile position. It’s a platform within the game. When Carlos left the second time in July 2008, his homeland was pulling on his heartstrings, so I could understand him wanting to go back to Portugal. But he was smashing, Carlos. He had most of the qualities to be the next Manchester United manager. He could be an emotional man. But of all the ones who worked alongside me, he was the best, no doubt about that. He was totally straight. He would walk in and tell you directly: I’m not happy with this, or that.

He was good for me. He was a Rottweiler. He’d stride into my office and tell me we needed to get something done. He would sketch things out on the board. ‘Right, OK, Carlos, yeah,’ I would say, thinking, ‘I’m busy here.’ But it’s a good quality to have, that urge to get things done.

The structure of the team was strong in the year I decided to rescind my retirement plans, though we had lost Peter Schmeichel and Denis Irwin. Now there was a player, Denis Irwin. We always called him eight out of ten Denis. So quick and nimble: quick-brained. Never let you down. There was never any bad publicity with him. I remember a game at Arsenal, when Denis allowed Dennis Bergkamp to score late in the match, and the press said: ‘Well, you’ll be disappointed with Denis,’ and I replied: ‘Aye, well, he’s been with me for eight or nine years and he’s never made a mistake. I think we can forgive him one.’

The biggest challenge was in the goalkeeping position. From the minute Schmeichel left to join Sporting Lisbon in 1999 – and having missed out on Van der Sar – I was throwing balls in the air, hoping one would land in the right place. Raimond van der Gouw was a terrific, steady goalkeeper, and a very loyal and conscientious trainer, but he wouldn’t have been the No. 1 choice. Mark Bosnich was, in my opinion, a terrible professional, which we should have known. Massimo Taibi just didn’t work out and he returned to Italy, where he rejuvenated his career. Fabien Barthez was a World Cup-winning goalkeeper, but it’s possible that the birth of his child back in France affected his concentration, because he was going back and forth a lot. He was a good lad, a fine shot-stopper and a good fielder of the ball. But when a keeper loses his concentration, he’s in trouble.

When the team thought I would be leaving, they slackened off. A constant tactic of mine was always to have my players on the edge, to keep them thinking it was always a matter of life and death. The must-win approach. I took my eye off the ball, thinking too far ahead, and wondering who would replace me. It’s human nature, in those circumstances, to relax a bit, and to say: ‘I’m not going to be here next year.’

United were so used to me being around it wasn’t clear what the next chapter was going to be. And it was a mistake. I knew that by the previous October in 2000. By that stage I was wanting the season to be over with. I couldn’t enjoy it. I cursed myself: ‘I’ve been stupid. Why did I even mention it?’ There wasn’t the same performance level on the pitch. I was starting to have doubts about my own future. Where would I go, what would I do? I knew I would miss the consuming nature of the United job.

The 2001–02 season was a fallow year for us. We finished third in the League and reached the semi-finals of the Champions League, losing to Bayer Leverkusen, but there were to be no trophies in the year of my U-turn. This after a run of three straight Premier League titles.

That summer we spent heavily on Ruud van Nistelrooy and Juan Sebastián Verón. Laurent Blanc came in, too, after I sold Jaap Stam – an error, as I have admitted many times since. My reasoning with Blanc, as I said at the time, was that we needed a player who would talk to and organise the younger players. The early part of that campaign was most memorable for Roy Keane throwing the ball at Alan Shearer (and being sent off) in the 4–3 defeat at Newcastle, and our incredible 5–3 victory at Spurs on 29 September 2001, in which Tottenham scored through Dean Richards, Les Ferdinand and Christian Ziege before we mounted one of the great comebacks.

It is such a vivid memory. As they traipsed into the dressing room, three goals down, the players were braced for a rollicking. Instead I sat down and said: ‘Right, I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. We’re going to score the first goal in this second half and see where it takes us. We get at them right away, and we get the first goal.’

Teddy Sheringham was the Tottenham captain and, as the teams emerged back into the corridor, I saw Teddy stop and say: ‘Now don’t let them get an early goal.’ I’ll always remember that. We scored in the first minute.

You could see Spurs deflate while we puffed ourselves up. There were 44 minutes left in the half. On we went and scored four more. Just incredible. Tottenham’s standing in the game imbued that victory with more lustre than a five-goal comeback at, say, Wimbledon. To beat a great football club in that manner has historical ramifications. Our dressing room afterwards was some place to be: players rolling their heads, not quite believing what they had done.

Teddy’s warning to the Tottenham team that day reflected our success in frightening opponents with well-timed retaliatory goals. There was an assumption (which we encouraged) that scoring against us was a provocative act that would invite terrible retribution. Most teams could never relax in front against us. They were always waiting for the counterpunch.

I tapped my watch in games to spook the other team, not encourage mine. If you want my summary of what it was to be Manchester United manager I would direct you to the last 15 minutes. Sometimes it would be quite uncanny, as if the ball were being sucked into the net. Often the players would seem to know it was going to be hoovered in there. The players would know they were going to get a goal. It didn’t always happen, but the team never stopped believing it could. That’s a great quality to have.

I always took risks. My plan was: don’t panic until the last 15 minutes, keep patient until the last quarter of an hour, then go gung-ho.

Against Wimbledon in the Cup one year, Peter Schmeichel went up to chase a goal and we left Denis Irwin on the halfway line against John Fashanu. Schmeichel was up there for two minutes. Wimbledon were kicking the ball up to Fashanu and wee Denis was nipping in front of him and sending it back into the box. Great entertainment. Schmeichel had a physical prowess. He and Barthez liked to play out. Barthez especially was a good player, though he thought he was better than he was. On tour in Thailand he kept on at me to let him play up front, so I relented for the second half. The other players kept battering the ball into the corners and Barthez would come back with his tongue hanging out after chasing the ball. He was knackered.

No team ever entered Old Trafford thinking United might be persuaded to give in. There was no comfort to be gained from thinking we could be demoralised. Leading 1–0 or 2–1, the opposition manager would know he faced a final 15 minutes in which we would go hell for leather. That fear factor was always there. By going for the throat and shoving bodies into the box, we would pose the question: can you handle it? On top of our own frantic endeavours, we would be testing the character of the defending team. And they knew it. Any flaw would widen into a crack. It didn’t always work. But when it did, you got the joy that came with a late conquest. It was always worth the gamble. It was rare for us to be hit on the break while we chased a game. We lost at Liverpool once when Luke Chadwick chased back and got sent off. Everyone else was in the box. Against us, teams would have so many players back defending that it would be hard for them break out.

At half-time at Spurs we had looked buried. But as I said at the end of that season: ‘In a crisis you’re better just calming people down.’ We scored five times to win the game, with Verón and David Beckham scoring the last two. Around that time, however, we were having goalkeeping problems. In October, Fabien Barthez committed two howlers. We also lost 2–1 at home to Bolton and 3–1 at Liverpool, where Fabien came for a punch and missed. At Arsenal on 25 November, our French keeper passed straight to Thierry Henry, who scored, and then raced out for a ball that he failed to gather. Henry again: 3–1.

December 2001 started no better, when we lost 3–0 at home to Chelsea, our fifth League defeat in 14 games. Things improved from there. Ole Gunnar Solskjaer struck up a good relationship with Van Nistelrooy (Andy Cole was to leave for Blackburn in January), and we went top of the table early in the New Year of 2002. In the 2–1 win over Blackburn, Van Nistelrooy scored for the tenth time in a row, and by the end of January we were top of the League by four points.

Then came my announcement, in February 2002. I would not be standing down after all.

Once the retirement issue was cleared up, our form picked up dramatically. We won 13 of 15 games. I was desperate to make it to Glasgow for the 2002 Champions League final. I was so sure we would get there that I had scouted the hotels in the city. I tried to play it down but the urge to lead the team out at Hampden Park obsessed me.

In the semi-final against Bayer Leverkusen, we had three shots cleared off the line in the second game and went out on away goals after drawing the tie 3–3 on aggregate. Michael Ballack and Oliver Neuville had scored at Old Trafford. Also in the Leverkusen side was a young Dimitar Berbatov, who was later to join us from Spurs.

But at least I still had my job. On New Year’s Day, for my birthday, we had all been to the Alderley Edge Hotel – the whole family. It was the first time for a while we had all been together. Mark, who was usually in London, was there, along with Darren, Jason and Cathy. All the conspirators round a table.

When the players heard the news I would be staying on after all, I braced myself for the barbed comments that would come my way. I couldn’t have made an announcement of that magnitude without paying a high price on the banter front.

Ryan Giggs was the most skilful in his mockery. ‘Oh, no, I can’t believe this,’ Ryan said. ‘I’ve just signed a new contract.’

four

AS the new season dawned in 2002, I was bursting with fresh energy. It felt like day one in a whole new job. All the doubt brought on by my intended retirement had cleared and I was ready to refresh the squad after our first season without a trophy since 1998. Those phases of seismic change excited me. I knew there were solid foundations on which to build a new team of winners.

There had been a golden period, from 1995 to 2001, when we had won the League five times out of six and secured the first of my two Champions League trophies. At the start of that six-year spell, we had promoted our homegrown lads to the first XI. David Beckham, Gary Neville and Paul Scholes became regulars, despite a 3–1 defeat by Aston Villa that prompted Alan Hansen to say on television: ‘You can’t win anything with kids.’

After that hat-trick of League titles we made an error in letting Jaap Stam go. I thought £16.5 million was a good price and I believed he had slipped back in his game since his Achilles operation. But it was a mistake on my part. This is my chance to nail once and for all the myth that his contentious autobiography had anything to do with my decision to sell him, even though I called him in about the book right away. It accused us of tapping him up, of approaching him directly without PSV’s permission.

‘What were you thinking of?’ I asked. But it played absolutely no part in my decision. Not long after that, an agent told me that a representative of Roma were trying to make contact. They were offering £12 million for Jaap. Not interested, I said. The next week we received an approach from Lazio. I had no interest until the offer reached £16.5 million. By that time Jaap was 30 and we were concerned about his recovery from the Achilles injury. Anyway, it proved a disastrous episode. Having to tell him in a petrol station was agony, because I knew he was a really decent man who loved playing for the club, and who was adored by the fans. It was one of my senior moments. I had tried to get hold of him at the training ground two days before deadline day. By the time I reached him on his mobile, he was already on his way home. An equidistant point was a petrol station, off the motorway, so that’s where our meeting took place.

I knew I could get Laurent Blanc, on a free. I had always admired Laurent Blanc and should have acquired him many years earlier. He was so composed and so good at gliding out from the back with the ball. I thought his experience could help John O’Shea and Wes Brown to develop. It was such a misjudgment on my part to let Jaap go – he ended up playing against us, aged 36, in the semi-finals of the Champions League.

Centre-backs were always a big part of my managerial planning and Rio Ferdinand was the big buy in that summer of 2002, when we really should have reached the Champions League final in my home town of Glasgow. To me that would have been special, playing in my birth place against Real Madrid, the place where I saw my first-ever European final, Real beating Eintracht Frankfurt 7–3. I was in the schoolboy enclosure that day because I played for Queen’s Park at the time, which entitled me to walk in the front door and head for that part of the ground. I left three minutes before the end of the game to get a bus home, because I was working in the morning, and of course missed all the celebrations at the end, which were unusual in football around that time. Real performed a big parade with the cup and were dancing about the park. I missed out. The next morning, with the papers laid out, I studied the photographs and thought: ‘Damn, I missed seeing all that.’

Hampden Park was packed with 128,000 souls. To beat the huge exodus from big games, we would run miles away from the ground: sprint away from Hampden towards the terminus, and take a bus from there. It was a three- or four-mile run to the station, but at least we were on the bus. The queues at the ground would be miles long. Miles long. Dads would pull up in lorries and you would give them sixpence each and pile onto the wagon. That was another route in and out. But it would have been unforgettable to get to Hampden for that 2002 final, which Real Madrid won 2–1, to send a Manchester United side out onto that sacred turf.

Carlos Queiroz joining as my assistant was another major initiative that year. Arsenal had won the Double the previous season and Roy Keane had been sent home from the 2002 World Cup, so there was plenty to occupy my mind as we set off on another journey. When Roy was sent off after tangling with Jason McAteer at Sunderland, I dispatched him for a hip operation, which removed him from the picture for four months. Soon after we struck a bad run of form, losing at home to Bolton and away at Leeds. We managed only two wins from our first six games and were ninth in the table when I took a minor gamble and sent a number of players away for surgery in the hope that they would return to energise us in the second half of our campaign.

In September 2002, though, the knives were out for me. The nature of the job is that the public will attack you when things seem to be going wrong. Plus, I’ve never been beholden to the press and couldn’t count on them for support. I never socialised much with them, didn’t give them stories or mark their cards, with the exception – occasionally – of Bob Cass, of the Mail on Sunday. So they had no reason to love me or support me through hard times. Other managers were more skilled at cultivating relationships with the press. It maybe bought them a bit more time, but not indefinitely. Results determine whether the guillotine stays up or falls.

Media pressure is usually where it starts. Whenever there was a bad spell I would see the line: ‘Your time’s up, Fergie; it’s time to go.’ The old line about shelf-life. You can laugh at it, but you mustn’t get yourself in a tizzy, because hysteria is the nature of the beast. There have been so many favourable headlines about me over the years, because the press could hardly avoid writing them, given the success we had, but to be called a genius you also need to accept that you are probably also going to be called a fool.

Matt Busby used to say: ‘Why read them when you have a bad result? I never did.’ And he lived in an era when the press wasn’t as pervasive as it is today. Matt would always ride the waves of praise and condemnation without bothering too much about either.

What we did at all times, in success and adversity, was make sure the training ground was sacrosanct. The work there, the concentration, and the standards we maintained never dropped. Eventually that consistency of effort will show itself on a Saturday. That way, when a United player has a couple of bad results, he will hate it. It becomes intolerable to him. Even the best players sometimes lose confidence. Even Cantona had bouts of self-doubt. But if the culture around the training ground was right, the players knew they could fall back on the group and the expertise of our staff.

The only player I ever coached who was totally unaffected by his mistakes was David Beckham. He could have the worst game possible and still not believe that he had under-performed in any way. He would dismiss you, tell you you were wrong. He was incredibly protective of himself. Whether that was developed by the people around him, I don’t know. But he would never concede he’d had a bad game, and never accept he’d made a mistake.

You had to admire that. In a way it was a great quality. No matter how many mistakes he would make (in my eyes, not his), he would always want the ball. His confidence never suffered. Otherwise, dips of that kind are innate to all footballers, and plenty of managers. Public scrutiny penetrates the body armour, whether from the public, press or fans.

The nadir was reached in November, with the last derby game at Maine Road: a 3–1 victory for City, memorable for a mistake by Gary Neville, who dawdled with the ball and was dispossessed by Shaun Goater for City’s second goal. Afterwards I questioned the spirit of my players, a nuclear option I seldom employed. The dressing room is a horrible place to be when you lose a derby. Before the game, Keith Pinner, my old friend and a diehard City fan, had said: ‘As it’s the last derby game at Maine Road, will you come up for a drink afterwards?’

Amused by the audacity of this request, I said: ‘If we win, aye.’

So after we’d lost 3–1, I was getting on the bus when my phone went. Pinner on the line.

‘Where are you?’ he said. ‘Are you not coming up?’

‘Go away,’ I replied, or words to that effect. ‘I never want to see you in my life.’

‘Bad loser, are you?’ laughed Pinner. Up I went for a drink.

At the end of that season Gary Neville observed: ‘That was a big crossroads for us. I thought the fans would turn on us that day.’

Sometimes a manager has to be honest with the supporters, over and beyond the players. They are not stupid. As long as you don’t criticise individual players in public, admonishing the team is fine, not a problem. We can all share in the blame: the manager, his staff, the players. Expressed properly, criticism can be an acceptance of collective responsibility.

Under the pressure of bad results, we changed the way we played. We moved the ball forward more and quicker rather than concentrating on possession ratios. With Roy Keane present, keeping the ball was never a problem. I said so from the minute he came to the club: ‘He never gives the ball away, this guy,’ I told the staff and players. Ball retention is a religion at Man United. But possession without penetration is a waste of time. We were starting to lack that real penetration. With a player like Van Nistelrooy in our forward line we needed to supply him quickly. Early passes, in from wide, or between defenders. That’s where the change had to come.

We tried Diego Forlán off the front, but we had been playing a lot with Verón, Scholes and Keane in midfield. Verón was free and Scholesy could go into the box. Beckham wide right, Giggs wide left. We had fantastic talents there. Our goal-scoring weapons were the right ones. Van Nistelrooy was relentless in his goal-scoring. Beckham would always get you around ten; Scholes, above that.

Phil Neville was excelling in central midfield as well. Phil was a dream. He and Nicky Butt were perfect allies for me. All they wanted was to play for Man United. They never wanted to leave. The time to let that type of player go is when you see that you’re hurting them more than helping them by using them as substitutes or understudies.

Those players end up trapped between extreme loyalty and a kind of sadness at not being involved more in first-team games. That’s hard for any man. Phil played a great role where we needed stabilisation. He had great discipline. He was one of those players to whom you could say: ‘Phil, I want you to run up that hill, then come back and cut down that tree.’

And he would say, ‘Right, boss, where’s the chainsaw?’

I had a few like that. Phil would do anything for the team. He would only think of the team. For the most part, if he were to play a limited part in the successful functioning of the side, he would find a way to be happy with that. In the end, though, Gary came to talk to me, to see how I felt about Phil’s diminishing role.

‘I don’t know what to do, he’s such a great lad,’ I told Gary.

‘That’s the problem,’ Gary said. ‘He doesn’t want to come to you.’ Phil lacked Gary’s directness, you see.

I invited Phil out to the house for a talk. He came with his wife Julie. At first I didn’t notice her in the car. ‘Cathy, go and bring Julie in,’ I said. But when Cathy got out there, Julie began crying. ‘We don’t want to leave Man United,’ she was saying. ‘We love being at the club.’ Cathy took her a cup of tea, but she wouldn’t come into the house. I think she was worried she might break down and embarrass her husband.

My point to Phil was that I was doing him more harm than good with the way I was using him. He agreed. He told me he needed to move on. I left him to work out how he would approach that with his wife.

When they had left, Cathy said: ‘You’re not going to let him go, are you? You can’t let people like that go.’

‘Cathy,’ I said, ‘it’s for his own good. Do you not understand? It’s killing me more than it’s killing him.’

I let him go cheaply, for £3.6 million. He was worth double that, because he could play five positions for you – in either of the full-back positions or all across the midfield. He even played centre-half for Everton, when Phil Jagielka and Joseph Yobo were injured.

Letting Nicky Butt go was similarly traumatic, although Nicky had no problem standing up for himself. Nicky was a cheeky sod. Gorton boy. Great lad. He would fight your shadow, would Nicky.

He would come in and say: ‘Why am I not playing?’

That was Nicky. I loved that. And I would say, ‘Nicky, you’re not playing because I think Scholes and Keane are better than you.’ Sometimes, away from home, I would put him in ahead of Scholesy. In the Champions League semi-final at Juventus, for example, I played Butt instead of Scholes. Scholes and Keane were on two bookings and I couldn’t afford to risk them both missing the final, though in the event both missed out through suspension. I brought Scholes on for Butt when Nicky picked up an injury – and Paul was booked. In the end I sold Nicky to Bobby Robson at Newcastle for £2 million. What a great buy that was.

The clouds began to clear in 2002 with the 5–3 win over Newcastle at the end of November. Diego Forlán, who had taken 27 games to score his first goal for us – a penalty against Maccabi Haifa – was a factor in our 2–1 win at Liverpool, after Jamie Carragher had headed the ball back to Jerzy Dudek and Forlán had nipped in to score. We then beat Arsenal 2–0 and Chelsea 2–1, with Forlán again scoring the decisive goal. On the training ground that winter, we worked intensively on our defensive shape.

In February 2003 we lost an FA Cup fifth-round tie 2–0 at home to Arsenal. It was the game in which Ryan Giggs missed an open goal, lifting the ball over the bar with his right foot, when the net was undefended. ‘Well, Giggsy,’ I told him, ‘you’ve scored the best-ever goal in the FA Cup, and now you’ve added the best-ever miss.’ He had all the time in the world. He could have walked the ball into the net.

That game, which sent me into a fury, was to have more serious implications for my relationship with another graduate of the 1992 FA Youth Cup winning side. A butterfly plaster was involved, but it couldn’t heal the wound. The boot I kicked in anger just happened to fly straight at David Beckham’s eyebrow.

After losing the Carling Cup final to Liverpool, we ran into another major rival from that period. By the end of my time as manager, Leeds United were nowhere to be seen on the list of threats, but in the spring of 2003 they were a menace, although we won that match 2–1. I should say a few words about our rivalry with Leeds, which was disturbingly intense.

When I first arrived in Manchester I knew about the derby games with City and the clashes with United’s Merseyside rivals, Everton and Liverpool. I knew nothing of the animosity between United and Leeds. In the old first division, Archie Knox and I went to see Crystal Palace beat Leeds.

It was 0–0 at half-time. The second half was all Leeds. With 20 minutes to go, Leeds had a penalty turned down and the crowd were going crackers. A Leeds fan began shouting at me: ‘You, you Manc bastard.’

‘What’s that all about, Archie?’ I said.

‘No idea,’ Archie replied.

So I looked for a steward. The directors’ box at Leeds is small and the fans are all around you. Palace went to the other end and scored. That’s when the crowd really lost it. Archie wanted us to leave but I insisted we stay. Palace scored again, and that’s when our new friend hit me in the back with a Bovril cup. The abuse was astonishing. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ I said to Archie.

The next day I was speaking to our kit man at the time, Norman Davies. He said: ‘I told you about Leeds. It’s pure hatred.’

‘Where does that come from?’

‘The sixties,’ Norman said.

Leeds used to have a commissionaire called Jack who would come on the bus as we arrived at Elland Road and announce, like the town crier, ‘On behalf of the directors, players and supporters of Leeds United, welcome to Elland Road,’ and I would mutter: ‘That’ll be right.’

Some of the fans would have their kids on their shoulders, radiating the most incredible hatred. In the semi-final of the League Cup at Leeds in 1991, they did give us a bit of a battering in the second half, but Lee Sharpe had broken away, at 0–0, with two minutes to go, to score. It looked 10 yards offside. I was on the pitch, Eric Harrison was in the dug-out. A lot of people think Eric looks like me. One Leeds supporter certainly did, because he whacked Eric. Absolutely panned him. The guy thought he was hitting me. On came the fans. Pandemonium. And yet there was something about the hostile atmosphere at Elland Road that I quite liked.

In the Peter Ridsdale years, when Leeds were ‘living the dream’, as the chairman later put it, I sensed the club was built on sand. When I heard what kind of wages they were paying, my alarm bells rang. When we sold them Lee Sharpe, I believe they doubled Lee’s wages, on a 35,000 crowd.

But they constructed a useful team. Alan Smith, Harry Kewell, David Batty. Back in 1992, they won the League with one of the most average teams ever to win the title, but they were as committed as it’s possible to be. And they were superbly managed by Howard Wilkinson. A decade later, we would hear about the boy from Derby joining them, Seth Johnson, and him discussing with his agent what they were going to ask for. The story goes that the sum they came up with was £25,000. Leeds’ offer was apparently £35,000 a week, climbing to £40–45,000.

Clubs don’t learn these lessons. The emotions of the game trap you.

I remember a local Manchester businessman coming to me and saying: ‘I’m thinking of buying Birmingham City, what do you think?’

I said, ‘If you’ve got a hundred million pounds to risk, go ahead.’

‘No, no,’ he said, ‘they’re only eleven million in debt.’

‘But have you seen the stadium?’ I replied. ‘You’ll need a new stadium, for maybe sixty million, and then forty million to get them into the Premier League.’

People try to apply to football the usual principles of business. But it’s not a lathe, it’s not a milling machine, it’s a collection of human beings. That’s the difference.

We faced some seismic fixtures before that season’s end. A 4–0 home win over Liverpool – Sami Hyypiä was sent off in the fifth minute for stopping Van Nistelrooy’s run on goal – led us into a Champions League tie against Real Madrid. In the first of our games against Madrid, Van Nistelrooy was our only scorer. Luis Figo and Raul, twice, left us facing a 3–1 deficit in the home leg, for which I left Beckham on the bench. This was an epic game, watched, the story goes, by Roman Abramovich, who was inspired by our 4–3 win, and the hat-trick by Brazilian striker Ronaldo, to seek his own involvement in the great global drama by buying Chelsea.

Though we had been nine points off the lead at one stage, we raced eight points clear with a 4–1 win over Charlton in May 2003, in which a Van Nistelrooy hat-trick lifted him to 43 goals for the season. On the penultimate weekend, Arsenal needed to beat Leeds at Highbury to have any chance of catching us, but Mark Viduka helped us out with a late goal for our Yorkshire rivals. In our 2–1 win at Everton, David Beckham scored from a free kick in his last game for us. We were champions again for the eighth time in 11 seasons. The players danced and sang: ‘We’ve got our trophy back.’

We regained the League but said farewell to Beckham.

five

FROM the moment he first laid boot on ball, David Beckham displayed an unbreakable urge to make the best of himself and his talent. He and I left the main stage in the same summer, with him still prominent in European football and opportunities galore ahead of him. He went out at Paris St-Germain much as I did at United: on his own terms.

Sometimes you have to take something away from someone for them to see how much they loved it. When Beckham moved to America to join LA Galaxy, I believe he began to realise he had surrendered a part of his career. He worked incredibly hard to return to the level he had been at in his prime, and showed more enthusiasm for the hard graft of the game than he did at the end of his time with us.

David didn’t have many choices at the point of his transfer from Real Madrid to Major League Soccer in 2007. I imagine he also had his eyes on Hollywood and the impact it would have on the next phase of his career. There was no footballing reason for him to go to America. He was giving up top-level club football as well as the international game, although he fought his way back into the England squad. That proves my point about the disappointment at the heart of his career in its later stages. He drew on a huge resilience factor to regain his prominence at the elite level.

Because I saw him grow up, along with Giggs and Scholes, David was more like a son to me. He joined United as a young London lad in July 1991. Within a year he was part of the so-called Class of ’92, winning the FA Youth Cup with Nicky Butt, Gary Neville and Ryan Giggs. He made 394 appearances for the first team and scored 85 times, including one from the halfway line, against Wimbledon, the goal that really announced him to the world.

When I left the United dug-out in May 2013, Giggs and Scholes were still with us, but by then it had been ten years since David had left for Spain. On Wednesday 18 June 2003 we told the Stock Exchange he would be joining Real Madrid for a fee of £24.5 million. David was 28. The news flashed around the world. It was one of those global moments for our club.

I hold no rancour towards David at all. I like him. I think he’s a wonderful boy. But you should never surrender what you’re good at.

David was the only player I managed who chose to be famous, who made it his mission to be known outside the game. Wayne Rooney was on the radar of an industry that would have liked to change him. His profile was established in his teenage years. He had offers that would make your mind boggle. He was making twice outside of football what we were paying him. The corporate world would love to have taken over Giggsy, but that was never his style.

In his final season with us, we were aware that David’s work-rate was dropping and we had heard rumours of a flirtation between Real Madrid and David’s camp. The main issue was that his application level had dropped from its traditionally stratospheric level.

The confrontation between us that caused so much excitement around the game was an FA Cup fifth-round tie against Arsenal at Old Trafford in February 2003, which we lost 2–0.

David’s offence in that particular game was that he neglected to track back for the second Arsenal goal, scored by Sylvain Wiltord. He merely jogged. The boy just kept on running away from him. At the end I got on to him. As usual, with David at that time, he was dismissive of my criticism. It’s possible that he was starting to think he no longer needed to track back and chase, which were the very qualities that had made him what he was.

He was around 12 feet from me. Between us on the floor lay a row of boots. David swore. I moved towards him, and as I approached I kicked a boot. It hit him right above the eye. Of course he rose to have a go at me and the players stopped him. ‘Sit down,’ I said. ‘You’ve let your team down. You can argue as much as you like.’

I called him in the next day to go through the video and he still would not accept his mistake. As he sat listening to me, he didn’t say a word. Not a word.

‘Do you understand what we’re talking about, why we got on to you?’ I asked.

He didn’t even answer me.

The next day the story was in the press. In public an Alice band highlighted the damage inflicted by the boot. It was in those days that I told the board David had to go. My message would have been familiar to board members who knew me. The minute a Manchester United player thought he was bigger than the manager, he had to go. I used to say, ‘The moment the manager loses his authority, you don’t have a club. The players will be running it, and then you’re in trouble.’

David thought he was bigger than Alex Ferguson. There is no doubt about that in my mind. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Alex Ferguson or Pete the Plumber. The name of the manager is irrelevant. The authority is what counts. You cannot have a player taking over the dressing room. Many tried. The focus of authority at Manchester United is the manager’s office. That was the death knell for him.

Then, of course, after finishing top of our Champions League group, we were drawn against Real Madrid. In Spain, for the first leg, David seemed especially keen to shake hands with Roberto Carlos, the Madrid left-back. The following Saturday, after our 3–1 defeat at the Bernabéu, he withdrew from the game against Newcastle, saying he wasn’t fit. I played Solskjaer, who was magnificent in a 6–2 win, and he stayed in the side.

David’s form, quite simply, wasn’t good enough for me to pull Solskjaer out of a winning team for the Old Trafford leg against Real. During a round of head tennis before the return game, I pulled David aside and told him, ‘Look, I’m going to start with Ole.’ He huffed and walked away.

There was a terrific hullaboo that night, with David coming on as sub for Verón in the 63rd minute and giving what looked like a farewell to the Old Trafford crowd. He scored from a free kick and struck the winner in the 85th minute. We won 4–3, but Ronaldo’s wonderful hat-trick and the defeat in Spain sent us out of the competition.

David was looking for the sympathy vote from the fans. But there is no doubt there had been a direct attack on me. The move to Real Madrid was clearly accelerating. From what we could gather, there had been dialogue between his agent and Real Madrid. The first contact we had was probably in the middle of May, after our season had ended. Our chief executive, Peter Kenyon, called to say: ‘Real Madrid have been on the phone.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘we expected that.’ We were looking for £25 million. I went to France on holiday and Peter called my mobile, while I was in a restaurant, having dinner with Jim Sheridan, the film director, who had an apartment over the place where we were eating. I needed a private phone.

‘Come up to my apartment, use mine,’ said Jim. So that’s how it was done. ‘He doesn’t go unless we get the twenty-five,’ I told Peter. I believe it was £18 million down, with add-ons, that we eventually received.

David hadn’t disappeared from the team altogether. We won the title with a 4–1 win against Charlton at Old Trafford on 3 May 2003. He scored in that game and again at Everton on 11 May as our season ended with a 2–1 win. A free kick from 20 yards was not a bad way for him to depart on a day when our defence was hounded by a young local talent called Wayne Rooney. David had played his part in our victorious League campaign, so there was no reason to leave him out at Goodison Park.

Maybe he wasn’t mature enough at that time to handle everything that was going on in his life. Today, he seems to manage things better. He is more certain of his position in life, more in control. But it was reaching the stage back then when I felt uncomfortable with the celebrity aspect of his life.

An example: arriving at the training ground at 3 p.m. before a trip to Leicester City, I noticed the press lined up on the road into Carrington. There must have been 20 photographers.

‘What’s going on?’ I demanded. I was told, ‘Apparently Beckham is revealing his new haircut tomorrow.’

David turned up with a beanie hat on. At dinner that night he was still wearing it. ‘David, take your beanie hat off, you’re in a restaurant,’ I said. He refused. ‘Don’t be so stupid,’ I persisted. ‘Take it off.’ But he wouldn’t.

So I was raging. There was no way I could fine him for it. Plenty of players had worn baseball caps on the way to games and so on, but none had been so defiant about keeping one on during a team meal.

The next day, the players were going out for the pre-match warm-up and David had his beanie hat on. ‘David,’ I said, ‘you’re not going out with that beanie hat on. You’ll not be playing. I’ll take you out of the team right now.’

He went berserk. Took it off. Bald head, completely shaved. I said, ‘Is that what this was all about? A shaved head that nobody was to see?’ The plan was that he would keep the beanie hat on and take it off just before kick-off. At that time I was starting to despair of him. I could see him being swallowed up by the media or publicity agents.

David was at a great club. He had a fine career. He gave me 12 to 15 goals a season, worked his balls off. That was taken away from him. And with that being taken away from him, he lost the chance to become an absolute top-dog player. For my money, after the change, he never attained the level where you would say: that is an absolute top player.

The process began when he was around 22 or 23. He started to make decisions that rendered it hard for him to develop into a really great footballer. That was the disappointment for me. There was no animosity between us, just disappointment, for me. Dejection. I would look at him and think: ‘What are you doing, son?’

When he joined us, he was this wee, starry-eyed kid. Football mad. At 16 he was never out of the gymnasium and couldn’t stop practising. He loved the game; he was living the dream. Then he wanted to give it all up for a new career, a new lifestyle, for stardom.

From one perspective it would be churlish of me to say he made the wrong decision, in the sense that he’s a very wealthy man. He’s become an icon. People react to his style changes. They copy them. But I’m a football man, and I don’t think you give up football for anything. You can have hobbies. I have horses; Michael Owen had horses; Scholes had horses. One or two players liked art. I had a lovely painting in my office that Kieran Richardson did. What you don’t do is surrender the nuts and bolts of football.

A year prior to leaving us, of course, David had taken part in the 2002 World Cup in Japan and South Korea, weeks after breaking his metatarsal in the Champions League tie at Old Trafford in the spring of 2002. That was quite a drama.

Although David sustained the same metatarsal injury that was to afflict Wayne Rooney four years later, there was a difference in the recovery process. David was a naturally fit type of guy. Wayne needed more work to bring him back to sharpness. So I calculated that David might be fit enough for the World Cup, and said so openly at the time.

In the event, when England arrived in Japan, he might still have been carrying the remnants of his injury. It’s hard to tell with some players, because in their desperation to play in a World Cup, they tell you they are fine. From the evidence of the tournament, David couldn’t have been all right. The proof that physical frailty was still preying on his mind could be seen when he jumped over a tackle near the touchline in a sequence of play that led to Brazil’s equaliser in the quarter-final in Shizuoka.

I was surprised at how physically off the pace he seemed, because he was such a fit boy. So he couldn’t have been fit, either physically or mentally. People accused me, because I’m Scottish, of not wanting England to do well. If England played Scotland today, bloody right, I wouldn’t want England to do well. But I had more players in my teams who were representing England than any other country, and always wanted them to shine.

When you have a player of Beckham’s profile (and I had another later, in Rooney), there is a convergence of medical staff always wanting to interfere. England’s medical staff would want to come to the training ground. Often I felt that this was an insult to us. I wondered whether my Scottishness was a factor, a reason not to trust me.

Before the 2006 World Cup, when Rooney joined up late with England’s squad in Germany, England were texting us virtually every day, asking how he was, as if we couldn’t look after him ourselves. The panic was wild. They were petrified. In 2006 I was 100 per cent correct. Wayne Rooney should not have played in that tournament. He was not ready.

He should never have been called to Baden-Baden where England were based. It was unfair to him, to the rest of the players and to the supporters. Wayne was the great hope of that team, of course, which added to the pressure to overlook reality. With David I was confident he would turn up in good shape because I knew his record and had seen all the statistics. He was easily the fittest player at Old Trafford. In pre-season training, in the bleep tests, he was streets ahead of everyone. We told England we were sure David would be fit in time.

The obsession with David’s recovery was predictable. An oxygen tent found its way to Carrington. We had good results from that device on Roy Keane’s hamstring injury before a European game. Bones are a different matter. The cure is rest. It’s time. A metatarsal is a six- to seven-week injury.

In the 2002 World Cup, England failed to make much of an impact. Against Brazil, they were outplayed by ten men. In the first group game, they played long ball against Sweden, who knew the English game, and so were hardly likely to be caught off-guard by direct play.

It’s an indictment of England teams at youth level that so many have fallen back on this outdated tactic. Too many played long ball. On one occasion we made a point of monitoring Tom Cleverley in the U-21s against Greece, and our scouts reported that England played one up, with two wide – Cleverley being one of the wide players – and Tom didn’t get a kick. Chris Smalling played and kept launching the ball forward. This is the area where England were always likely to be caught out. Because they don’t have enough technical and coaching ability, the years from 9 to 16 are thrown away.

So how do they compensate? The boys compete, physically. Great attitude, they have. Sleeves up. But they don’t produce a player. They are never going to win a World Cup with that system, that mentality. Brazil would produce young players who could take the ball in any position, at any angle. They are fluid in their movements. They are football-minded people, because they are accustomed to it from five or six years of age.

David worked extremely hard on the technical side of his game. He was also a wonderful networker. Even when he was left out of the GB Olympic squad in the summer of 2012, it was his camp that released the news, rather than the FA. The quotes were all magnanimous. But I’m sure he was as sick as a pig.

I remember Mel Machin saying to me: ‘Giggs and Beckham – they’re world-class players, and yet you get them to go from box to box as well. How do you do that?’ I could only reply that they were gifted not only with natural talent but the stamina to carry them up and down the pitch. We had something special with those two.

It changed with David because he wanted it to change. His eye was off the ball. A shame, because he could still have been at Manchester United when I left. He would have been one of the greatest Man United legends. The only thing making him a legend at LA Galaxy and beyond was his iconic status. At some point in his life, he may feel the urge to say: I made a mistake.

But let me also pay tribute to him. His powers of perseverance are amazing, as he showed when joining Paris St-Germain in January 2013. At United he was always the fittest boy in the building. That helped him carry on playing to the age of 37. The stamina he built into himself from childhood survived.

The MLS is not a Mickey Mouse league. It’s actually quite an athletic league. I watched Beckham in the final of the MLS Cup and noticed how well he did, tracking back, putting in a shift. Nor did he disgrace himself at Milan during his loan period there. At PSG he played for an hour in the quarter-finals of the European Cup. He wasn’t in the game much, but he carried out his duties well. He worked hard and hit a few good passes early in the game.

I asked myself, ‘How does he do it?’

Stamina was the first answer. But David also discovered a desire to confound everybody. And he could still hit a fine cross, a good cross-field ball, which are traits he never lost. They were ingrained in what he was as an athlete. To play in the later rounds of the Champions League at nearly 38 was quite an achievement after five years in America. He was back in the mix. You can only praise him for that.

One or two people asked me whether I would take him back after he left LA. With him at 37, there was no point going down that road. There was a publicity element for PSG in signing him on a six-month deal. David, however, ignored that part of it. As far as he was concerned, he was still a great player. Giggs, Scholes and I discussed this one day. As I said, he had this talent for blocking out bad performances. I would give him stick and he would go off in a huff, probably thinking, ‘That manager’s off his head, I was good today.’

In LA, he probably thought Hollywood was his next step in life. There was a purpose and a plan in him going to Los Angeles, I think. That aside, you have to admire his tenacity. He amazed me and he amazed everyone at Manchester United. Whatever he pursues in life, he just keeps on going.

six

RIO Ferdinand’s eight-month suspension was a shock that reverberated to the core of Manchester United, and my indignation endures to this day. My issue is not with the rules on dope testing, but with how the process unfolded on the day Rio was meant to provide a routine sample at our training ground.

On 23 September 2003, a drug-testing team from UK Sport arrived at Carrington to take random samples from four of our players, whose names were picked out of a hat. What started as a routine training day was to have huge ramifications for Rio, his family, Manchester United and England. Rio, who was one of those selected, left Carrington without providing a sample, and by the time we managed to get hold of him, the drug testers had left for the day. He took the test the following day, 24 September, but was told he was in breach of the ‘strict liability’ rule on dope tests and would be charged.

The outcome was that Rio was banned from 20 January to 2 September 2004 and fined £50,000. Aside from all the Man United games he missed, it also meant he was ineligible for the 2004 European Championship in Portugal. His removal by the FA from the England squad to play Turkey in October 2003 almost caused a strike by the England players.

On the fateful morning in September, the testers were having a cup of tea and, in my judgment, didn’t do their job. They didn’t go looking for Rio. My view of it is that the testers should go to the pitch and stand there until the player finishes training, then follow him to the dressing room. Round about that time, testers went to Wrexham Football Club and ended up testing my son Darren and two other players. They stayed on the pitch, escorted them to the changing area and extracted the necessary urine sample. Why did that not happen with Rio at Carrington?

We knew the testers were at our training centre because Mike Stone, the doctor, told us the drug people were on the premises. Mike had a cup of tea with them while the message was sent down to the affected players in the dressing room. Rio was given the message, no doubt about that, but if you think of Rio’s laidback nature, it was no surprise that he failed to hook up with people who were nowhere to be seen.

He was not a drug taker. Rio Ferdinand was not a drug taker. We would have known. It shows in their eyes. And he never missed a training session. Drug takers are all over the place. They become inconsistent. Rio would never be a drug taker because his sense of responsibility as to who he is in sport is too big. Rio is an intelligent guy but easy-going. He made a mistake, but so did the drug people. They didn’t take the steps that would have averted the crisis that ensued. They should have been on that training field, waiting to take him in for his test.

I was aware that a serious breach of the drug-testing rules had been committed but I still found it hard to believe that Rio would end up with such a brutal punishment. The tendency is to treat players the way you would your children, and not believe them to be guilty of any allegation that originated outside the family.

Maurice Watkins, our solicitor, was quite confident we could win our case, on the grounds that the officials had not physically taken Rio away for the test. In my opinion, an example was often made of Manchester United. Eric Cantona was the first major case when in 1995 he was sentenced to two weeks’ imprisonment and banned from playing for nine months for his kung-fu kick at a spectator (his prison sentence was later commuted to 120 hours’ community service). Then, in 2008, Patrice Evra was disciplined by the FA after a confrontation with a groundsman at Stamford Bridge. Patrice picked up a four-match ban for a skirmish on the pitch – when everyone had gone home – with a groundsman. People assumed Man United received special treatment. The reverse was often true.

After a lot of legal toing and froing, Rio’s hearing was held by an FA disciplinary commission at Bolton’s Reebok Stadium in December 2003 and lasted 18 hours. It was 86 days after the missed test. I was among those who gave evidence on Rio’s behalf. But the three-man panel found Rio guilty of misconduct. Maurice Watkins called the sentence ‘savage and unprecedented’ and David Gill said Rio had been made ‘a scapegoat’. Gordon Taylor of the PFA called it ‘draconian’.

I spoke to Rio’s mother right away because the poor woman was in bits. We could feel devastated by the loss of an important player, but it is the mother who will carry the real weight of such a punishment. Janice was crying down the phone as I told her that our high opinion of Rio would not be affected by the events of the last four months. We knew he was innocent, we knew he had been careless and we knew he had been punished too severely.

At that stage we were considering an appeal, but it was obvious we had no chance of winning. I could never understand that a missed drug test was treated as seriously as a failed one. If you admit to being a drug taker, you are rehabilitated. We felt that the player was telling the truth, whereas the system assumed he was not. Nor did we like the fact that information seemed to be leaking to the press from the FA. In our view the confidentiality principle was being breached.

I told the hearing at Bolton that Rio would be in my team to play Spurs that weekend, regardless of the outcome. He played alongside Mikaël Silvestre in a 2–1 win at White Hart Lane. In his last game for eight months, Rio started in our 1–0 defeat at Wolves on 17 January 2004, but came off injured after 50 minutes. Wes Brown took his place. Kenny Miller scored the only goal of the game.

I felt stricken to have lost him for so long. Our relationship started, in a sense, long before I made him the most expensive signing in English football. I was very friendly with Mel Machin, who called me from Bournemouth in 1997 to say he had a boy on loan from West Ham. ‘Go and buy him,’ Mel said.

‘What’s his name?’

‘Rio Ferdinand.’

I knew that name from England youth teams. Mel was insistent. Mel, of course, was close to Harry Redknapp, then manager of West Ham, where Rio had been nurtured, so I was sure his judgment was based on solid information. I raised the subject of this young Bournemouth loanee with Martin Edwards. We had him watched at Bournemouth and made a note of his attributes: graceful, balanced, first touch like a centre-forward. Then we checked his background. Martin called the West Ham chairman, Terry Brown, who said: ‘Give us a million plus David Beckham.’ In other words: he’s not for sale.

At that time, Jaap Stam and Ronny Johnsen were ensconced in the heart of our defence and Wes Brown was emerging as a young centre-half of promise. In the event, Rio was transferred to Leeds for £18 million. In his first game for our Yorkshire rivals, he played in a back three against Leicester City and was annihilated. Watching that match I felt a surge of relief, which I laugh about now. Thank God we didn’t buy him. He was all over the place. But, needless to say, he developed exceptionally well.

Centre-backs were the foundation of my Manchester United sides. Always centre-backs. I looked for stability and consistency. Take Steve Bruce and Gary Pallister: until I found those two we were without a prayer. Paul McGrath was constantly injured; Kevin Moran always had split heads. He was like a punch-drunk boxer by the time I became his manager. I went to a game in Norway, where Ron Yeats was present in his capacity as chief scout for Liverpool.

‘I saw your old player at Blackburn last week. Kevin Moran,’ said Ron over a drink. I asked: ‘How did he do?’

Answer: ‘He lasted about 15 minutes. Got taken off with a split head.’

‘Not unusual, that,’ I said.

Graeme Hogg, meanwhile, had not reached the standard we required. So I always told my chairmen, ‘We need centre-backs who will play every week. They give you the steadiness and consistency and continuity.’ That led us to Bruce and Pallister, who played forever and never seemed to be injured. I remember one Friday before we played Liverpool, Bruce hobbling around The Cliff rubbing his hamstring and saying, ‘Don’t pick your team yet.’ He had injured it the previous weekend. I liked to set out my team on the Friday so we could practise set pieces and so on. ‘What are you on about?’ I said.

‘I’ll be all right,’ says Steve.

‘Don’t be so stupid,’ I say.

So he starts running around The Cliff. He jogs round the pitch twice. ‘I’m all right,’ he says. He’s only facing Ian Rush and John Aldridge for Liverpool. Meanwhile he can’t stop rubbing his hamstring. Bruce played right through that game. He and Pally were marvellous. Stam brought us the same toughness and reliability. Look, too, at the partnership between Ferdinand and Vidić. Brilliant, solid, nothing given away. Consider Manchester United teams from that whole era and the centre-backs were always a feature.

So buying Ferdinand in July 2002 conformed to my sacred team-building policy of strength in the middle. We paid a lot, but when you spread that kind of transfer fee for a centre-half over 10 or 12 years, it starts to look like a bargain. You can fritter away plenty of money on contenders who simply aren’t good enough. Better to spend more on a single player of unquestionable class.

We paid £3.75 million for Roy Keane, which was a transfer record at the time, but we had 11 years out of Roy. In my time at United I sold a lot of players people might not be familiar with: young reserve players and so on. On a cruise round the west of Scotland at the end of my last season, I worked out that I had spent an average of less than £5 million a season over my time at Man United.

I told Rio straight away when he joined, ‘You’re a big, casual sod.’

He said: ‘I can’t help it.’

‘You’ll need to help it. Because it’ll cost you goals, and I’ll be on your back,’ I said.

And he was casual. Sometimes he would glide along in second or third gear, then take off like a sports car. I had never seen a big lad of 6 feet 2 inches possess such an impressive change of pace. With time his concentration improved, and the expectations he placed on himself rose, along with the degree of responsibility he was willing to take on in the team and around the club. He became the complete footballer.

When you acquire a young player, you don’t get the complete package on purchase day. There’s work to be done. If Rio was going to switch off in a game it would be against one of the lesser teams that he didn’t regard as a major threat. The bigger the game, the more he liked it.

With Gary Neville beginning to pick up injuries, and Vidić and Evra settling in, Rio and Edwin van der Sar became the defensive fulcrum of the team in the second half of that decade. I played Rio once in the centre of midfield, in 2006 against Blackburn Rovers, and he got himself sent off. Robbie Savage was the victim of the tackle that put Rio back in the changing room.

This may surprise some, but Pallister was as good a footballer as Rio. Oddly, he was quicker, too, but he was no fan of running. Pally was anti-work, and I say that affectionately. He used to say that the less he did, the better he felt. He was the world’s worst trainer. I was always after him. In the first 15 minutes he would stagger out of our penalty area after an opposition attack, gasping for air. I would say to Brian Kidd: ‘Look at that Pally – he’s dying!’ I confess I used to slaughter him.

Picking him up one night for a club dinner, I entered his house to find a giant bottle of Coca-Cola on his fireside table and a big bag of sweets: Crunchies, Rolos, Mars Bars. I said to Mary, his wife, ‘What about this?’

‘I don’t know how many times I tell him, boss, he doesn’t listen,’ Mary said.

So we hear footsteps on the stairs and Pally descends to see me studying this vast stash of kiddie food. ‘Why do you buy all that stuff, Mary?’ he says to his wife. So I fire back: ‘You big lazy so-and-so, I’m fining you for that!’

Gary was no Adonis but he was a seriously good player with a sweet nature. A lovely lad. Like Rio, he could pass a ball and was quick when he wanted to be. In his last season with us, he sustained a cut on his eyebrow and was howling, complaining that it was the first time he had been cut in his life. It didn’t go with his image. Pally thought he was Cary Grant.

I wasn’t consciously looking for a centre-back who could carry the ball out of defence, or send an incisive pass like Franz Beckenbauer. Pace, and the ability to read the game, are non-negotiables at the top in modern football. Rio had both, which is why I signed him. Not only could he defend, but he could bring the ball out. So although defending came first with me, it was encouraging to know my new centre-back could also start moves from the back, which became the norm later, with Barcelona and others.

At points in Rio’s career, it was fair to say that his life expanded in more directions than we were happy with. I told him I was fed up with reading about him at dinners and launches. ‘You know the thing about football? It catches you. What happens on the football field tells everybody,’ I told him. When you start to decline, it happens quickly. At a small club you can get away with it. But at Manchester United there were 76,000 pairs of eyes on us and you could never kid them. I told Rio that if any of these distractions reduced his effectiveness as a footballer, he would not be with us much longer because I would not be picking him.

But he responded well to those warnings. We devised a system in which his agent was obliged to tell us everything he was doing, which gave us greater control. There was a music company, a film, a TV production company and a magazine that took him to America to interview P Diddy. ‘Give me a break, Rio,’ I said when I heard he was going to meet that star of the American rap scene. ‘Is he going to make you a better centre-half?’

Rio was not alone in exploring other outlets. It all stemmed from the celebrity status of the modern footballer. Some look to expand it. Beckham was one, and Rio became another. David’s success in that respect was miraculous.

Not all Rio’s outside work was celebrity driven. His work for UNICEF in Africa was terrific. You can never dismiss the impact a Rio Ferdinand could make on the life of a black child in Africa. Our message was simply that he had to balance fame with a need to remember what made him successful in the first place. Some won’t do that. Some can’t.

We also thought Rio was always preparing for his life after football, which was not unreasonable. I did much the same by taking my coaching badges. That took me four years. So I also prepared for the second half of my life, after playing, but not by meeting P Diddy. There is that moment when a player asks himself what he is going to do, because stopping is such a void. One minute you’re playing in European finals, FA Cup finals, winning championships, then it all fades to nothing. How to cope with that is a challenge all footballers face. Fame offers no immunity from the emotional comedown. The second half is not as exciting, so how do you re-create it? How do you replace the thrill of sitting in that dressing room ten minutes before the kick-off of a game that is going to determine who wins the League?

By the end of my time, Rio had developed back problems. We picked out the goal we conceded to City’s Craig Bellamy in the Manchester derby of 2009 as an example of him working under a physical handicap. Two years previously he would have taken the ball off Bellamy and thrown him aside. Another was the Fernando Torres goal at Liverpool, when Torres beat him for speed and leaned on him one-on-one in the penalty box in front of the Kop.

We analysed that with him in a DVD review. Rio stepped up to play Torres offside and a year previously would have recovered from that error to dispossess him. But in this instance he was fighting to get back to deal with the threat and Torres shouldered him out of the road and blasted it into the net. Nobody did that to Rio. It told you the back injury was not only causing him pain, but also adversely affecting his balance.

Rio always cruised. He never had to fight to run. After the long lay-off that caused him to miss most of the winter, he came back brilliantly in training, and excelled against City in the semi-final second leg in 2009 at Old Trafford after almost three months out.

In his autumn years I had to tell him to change his game to take account of age and what it does to all of us. The years catch up with you. I told him, publicly and privately, that he needed to step back a yard or two to give himself a chance against strikers. Five years previously it had been lollipop stuff. With his change of pace he’d rob a centre-forward just when the striker thought he was in business. He could no longer do that. He needed to be on the scene before the crime could happen.

He was fine with my analysis. He wasn’t insulted. I was simply explaining the changes in his body. And he had a great season in 2011–12, marred only, for him, by his omission from the England Euro 2012 squad. When Roy Hodgson asked my opinion about whether Rio could work with John Terry I replied, ‘Ask him. Ask Rio about their relationship,’ because I couldn’t really give him an answer.

Another minor incident with him was when he refused to wear a Kick It Out T-shirt in 2012–13 after I thought we had all agreed to publicly back the campaign. It was a lack of communication. When he decided to boycott the Kick It Out T-shirt, Rio should have come to me, because he knew it was on the cards for us all to wear them. I know he had an issue over Anton, his brother, and John Terry but I didn’t anticipate it spilling over in that way. Terry, of course, was punished by the FA for using racially abusive language against Anton in a game between QPR and Chelsea at Loftus Road.

I was in my office when Mark Halsey came in to tell me Rio was not wearing the Kick It Out jersey. I found Albert, our kit man, and instructed him to tell Rio to put the garment on.

The word came back that Rio would not be putting it on.

When I confronted him he said nothing, but after the game came in to explain that he felt the PFA were not doing enough to fight racism. My position was that by not wearing the T-shirt, he wasn’t supporting the anti-racism cause. If he had a problem with the PFA he should, I felt, take that up with them. I thought it was divisive not to wear the T-shirt.

My view on racism is that I really don’t comprehend how anyone could hate anyone else on the basis of their colour.

seven

A WIND of change was coming. But it was not here yet. From the summer of 2003 to May 2006 was one of my least fertile spells. We won the FA Cup in 2004 and the League Cup two years later, but Arsenal and Chelsea were the League’s title-winning outfits in that period.

Before Cristiano Ronaldo and Wayne Rooney could become the core of our 2008 Champions League winning side, there was a rocky road when we attempted to implant experienced players, many of whom failed to make the expected impact. David Beckham had left for Real Madrid and Verón was to leave for Chelsea. Barthez was replaced in goal by Tim Howard, and Kléberson, Eric Djemba-Djemba and David Bellion were among the new faces. Ronaldinho might have been, too, had he not said yes, then no, to our offer.

You can’t dodge the truth about those years. We rushed down the path of buying in proven players – who we thought would match our standards right away. Kléberson, for example, was a World Cup winner with Brazil and was only 24. Verón was an established player with a worldwide reputation. Djemba-Djemba had been playing at a decent level in France. They were easy or obvious signings, a fact that worried me. I don’t like easy signings. I like having to fight for a player on the grounds that a battle to extricate him means you’re acquiring something valuable. I liked it when the selling club were desperate to hang on to their man. But the players we bought around then were easy to recruit.

It felt as if we were signing every goalkeeper in the country. Mark Bosnich was a prime example. The Bosnich buy stemmed from Peter Schmeichel announcing in the autumn of his final season that he would be retiring, which caught us on the hop. We jumped into decisions.

We met Bosnich in January, despite reports filtering through to us about his conduct off the pitch. I sent someone down to watch him in training. He was doing nothing in the sessions that convinced me he was the right man for Manchester United. So I changed tack and went for Edwin van der Sar instead, spoke to his agent and then to Martin Edwards, who told me, ‘Alex, I’m sorry, I’ve shaken hands with Bosnich.’

That was a blow. Martin had shaken Mark’s hand and would not go back on his word, which I respect. But it was a bad piece of business. Bosnich was a problem. His training and fitness levels were below what we needed. We pushed him to a higher tier and felt we did quite well with him. He was terrific in our victory over Palmeiras in the Intercontinental Cup, in which he ought to have been man of the match, ahead of Giggs. Not much later, we played down at Wimbledon in February, and Bosnich was tucking into everything: sandwiches, soups, steaks. He was going through the menu, eating like a horse.

I told him: ‘For Christ’s sake, Mark, we’ve got the weight off you, why are you tucking into all that stuff?’

‘I’m starving, gaffer,’ he said.

We arrived back in Manchester, and Mark was on a mobile phone to a Chinese restaurant to order a takeaway. ‘Is there no end to you?’ I asked him. ‘Think what you’re doing.’ I just couldn’t make an impact on him.

You don’t recover easily from losing a Peter Schmeichel. He was the best goalkeeper in the world, and his presence, his personality, were suddenly no longer there. We should have replaced him with Van der Sar. His agent had told me, ‘You’ll need to be busy, because he’s talking to Juventus,’ but we missed the boat. I had to return to Edwin’s agent and tell him we had already agreed to take someone else and that I would have to withdraw my interest.

I should have taken him as well, as a second purchase. We’d have soon found out about Bosnich and Edwin would have played from the end of the Schmeichel era pretty much to my last years in charge. I wouldn’t have needed to spend money on Massimo Taibi or Barthez, who was a good goalkeeper, but had problems back in France.

Later we saw that Van der Sar’s qualities were in the same league as those of Schmeichel. There was little between them, talent-wise. Schmeichel pulled off saves he wasn’t entitled to make. There were moments of wonder. ‘Jesus, how did he do that?’ I would ask. He had such spring, such athleticism. With Van der Sar I would point to his composure, his calmness, his use of the ball, his organisational ability. It was a different style of goalkeeping but still invaluable. It affected people around him in a good way.

Schmeichel, by contrast, had a love–hate relationship with Steve Bruce and Gary Pallister. He would come out screaming and bawling at them and Brucey would say, ‘Get back in your goal, you big German tart.’ Schmeichel hated that. ‘I’m not German,’ he would hiss. They were great buddies off the field, though. On it, Schmeichel was a volatile individual.

In the dressing room, Van der Sar was very emphatic about performances. He had a strong voice, a Dutch voice. ‘No messing about here!’ he would bark. Schmeichel would impose his voice on the team as well. I was lucky to have the two best goalkeepers of those three decades. An honourable mention would have to go to Peter Shilton, and to Gianluigi Buffon; but to me, Schmeichel and Van der Sar were the best from 1990–2010.

There is more to the art than the goalkeeping. It’s a question of the personality you bring to the job. Not only do keepers have to deal with the business of making saves, they must cope with the process of making errors. You need a big character at Manchester United to handle the aftermath of a high-profile mistake. I had scouted Schmeichel half a dozen times. Alan Hodgkinson, the goalkeeping coach, had told me: ‘He’s a certainty. Take him.’

At first I was ambivalent about bringing foreign goalkeepers into the English game. One of Schmeichel’s early games was against Wimbledon. The ‘Crazy Gang’ were blitzing him, dropping bombs on top of him and elbowing him. Schmeichel was going crazy, shouting for the officials to help him. ‘Referee, referee!’

I watched this scene unfold and thought, ‘He’s got no chance.’ The ref couldn’t get back up the pitch and away from the conflict zone quickly enough. In another of his early matches, Peter came out for a cross at the back post and missed it by about two days. Lee Chapman knocked it in. So he did make mistakes while he was adjusting to the game in this country, and people were saying, ‘What have we got here?’ But he also had an incredible physique, he covered the goal and he was brave. His distribution of the ball was marvellous. All those qualities came to his assistance in those torrid early days.

Van der Sar oversaw a lot of change in our defence. Schmeichel stood behind the same back four just about every week. Parker, Bruce, Pallister, Irwin. They played virtually every game. Van der Sar had to get used to different centre-backs, new full-backs. There was flux. In those circumstances it’s a great credit to him that he was able to organise that part of the team so well.

This was a time when Peter Kenyon was our chief executive in charge of transfer dealings. Arsenal’s Patrick Vieira was one we liked a lot. I asked Peter to phone Arsenal to inquire about Vieira. He told me he had. One day later I mentioned it to David Dein and he looked at me as if I had horns on my head. There was no recognition of what I was talking about. One of them was playing his cards close to his chest and, to this day, I have no idea which one it was.

Time and again I had agents phoning me to say, ‘My man would love to play for Manchester United.’ I never doubted the claim. But I also knew they would have loved to play for Arsenal, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich and all the other elite teams. Players obviously like to get to the big clubs. The agent gets more out of it, too. It was in that phase of playing the market that we fixed our gaze on Verón.

The team was altering. It’s not an easy thing for a manager to see change coming from a long way down the road. The old back four broke up fastest. When these sudden changes strike, you realise you don’t necessarily have the backup. Later I made it my policy to plan much further ahead.

Verón was a superb footballer with immense stamina. I confess I found working with Argentinian footballers quite difficult. There was deep patriotism towards Argentina. They always had the flag round them. I had no problem with that, but the ones I managed didn’t try particularly hard to speak English. With Verón it was just, ‘Mister.’

But what a good footballer. His intelligence in the game and his engine were first-rate. The problem? We couldn’t find a position in which to play him. If we played him in the centre of midfield he would end up at centre-forward, or wide right, or wide left. He just hunted the ball. We found it increasingly hard to fit him, Scholes and Keane into a midfield.

Although he played some terrific games for us, you couldn’t see the shape of the team forming. You couldn’t see the positional stability that you look for normally. Beckham had left us, Ryan was getting older, as were Roy and Paul, and we were looking for that freshness to give us the impetus to evolve a bit. Although there were spectacular contributions, Verón just couldn’t play in our team. He was an individual. He was the sort who, if you played red v. yellow on the training ground, Verón would play for both teams. He just played everywhere. He went wherever he liked. If I managed him for a hundred years I wouldn’t know where to play him. He was the wild card, the joker. Somebody once said to me: ‘Have you ever thought of playing him in a sitting position, holding, in front of the two centre-backs?’ I replied, ‘Are you dreaming? I can’t get him to stay in any other position, why would he stay in that one?’ Apparently he had played there for Lazio and been magnificent. But he was a free bird, flying everywhere.

There were moments when he would take you to the heavens. In one pre-season game he beat a couple of men on the by-line and knocked it in for Van Nistelrooy to score. He hit a pass for Beckham with the outside of his foot, and no back lift, and it bent away round the defence. Beckham ran on to it and lobbed the goalkeeper. In moments he could be sublime. Talent-wise there was absolutely nothing wrong with him. He had two fine feet, he could run, his control was magnificent, his vision was brilliant – he just couldn’t fit into the team. The English game was not a barrier to him. He was brave. He always had the balls to play.

There was talk during his time with us of Verón falling out with other players, but I don’t think he did, partly because he never spoke to anyone. He was alone in the dressing room. He didn’t speak the language. He wasn’t antisocial; he just wasn’t a communicator.

I’d come in for work: ‘Morning, Seba.’

‘Morning, mister.’ And that was it. You couldn’t drag anything from him. I do remember a fall-out with Roy Keane, after a European tie. That became a bit ugly. There was another with Gabriel Heinze at Portsmouth. Heinze was ready to fight him. But no, he was not a disruptive influence.

We were trying to alter the way we played in Europe. Two years after the 1999 European Cup win, we went to play Anderlecht in Belgium and PSV in Eindhoven and we were battered. Only on the counter-attack. We played the traditional United way, 4–4–2, and were thumped. I told the players and staff that if we could not keep the ball better and stay solid in midfield, we were going to suffer more that way because opponents had sussed us out. So we switched to playing three in the centre of the park. Verón was part of that development.

Managing change, which I had to do so often over that decade, I came up against many players I admired. I tried so hard, for example, to get Paolo Di Canio. The deal was all done. We had made an offer that he had accepted, but then he came back saying he wanted more. We couldn’t agree to the new demand. But he was the sort of player Manchester United should have: one who can put bums on seats and get people off them, too. I had players like that for the whole time I was there.

Then there was Ronaldinho, another who slipped the hook. I agreed a deal to bring him to Old Trafford. Carlos was there and would vouch for that. The attempt to buy Ronaldinho reflected the fact that United have always sported talismanic players. I was always hunting for that kind of talent. My line of reasoning was, ‘We’re getting twenty-five million pounds for Beckham, and we’re getting Ronaldinho for nineteen million. For God’s sake, wake up. It was a steal.’

On the way home from our trip to America, we stopped in Newfoundland to refuel, at a tiny outpost. Only a single hut marked the landscape. As we waited for the refuelling, the cabin crew opened the door to let fresh air in and a small boy was standing at the fence, alone with a United flag. We weren’t allowed to disembark. We could stand on the steps but not the tarmac, so all we could do was wave to this little United fan, pressed against a fence in the middle of nowhere.

Returning to Europe, for a stop in Portugal, we sold Verón, who had told Quinton Fortune he would be joining Chelsea. I wouldn’t let him go for less than £15 million. Chelsea offered £9 million. I said, ‘No way, he’s not going for nine million.’ But in Portugal, Kenyon told me, ‘I’ve agreed the deal – fifteen million.’ Then came the game against Sporting Lisbon and Ronaldo v. John O’Shea. I can still hear myself shouting at John, ‘Get close to him, Sheasy.’

‘I can’t,’ came the plaintive reply.

One month later David Gill rang and said, ‘What about this, Kenyon is off to Chelsea.’ David took over and was fantastic – a big improvement. Peter Kenyon, I felt, tried to take on too much and was consequently unable to deliver on some of the most important tasks. The expertise you need in a chief executive role is a talent for completing missions.

When David Gill moved into the hot seat, I suspect he was uncertain about his function. David was an accountant by trade. My advice was, ‘On the back of Peter Kenyon, don’t take on too much. Delegate.’ Without doubt he was the best administrator or chief executive I ever dealt with. First class. Straight as a die. Very approachable. Kept his feet on the ground and knew the value of the game. Understood it, too. Martin Edwards also had a good knowledge of the game, but there were no complications with David. He might tell you something you didn’t like, but he would not shirk from saying it. That was the only way to be.

Although Martin supported me at the most important times, I was always underpaid until David took charge. There is no substitute for being appreciated at work. To be told you are doing a fine job is all very well, as far as it goes, but there has to be monetary recognition.

Dealing with changes in ownership is immensely difficult for club directors. After a takeover the whole picture changes. Do they fancy you? Do they want a new manager, a new chief executive? The Glazer buy-up was the toughest period for David. The media focus was intense. The debt issue was never out of the news. But David’s accountancy qualifications gave him an advantage in that respect.

My vision of the club was as a place where young talent could develop. To sustain that aim we needed to preserve the foundation of Giggs, Scholes and Neville. And Roy Keane. We had enough backbone to enable us to shop around for potential. Van der Sar was another foundation player. He was one of my best-ever signings.

The search for the new Bryan Robson had led us to Keane. Eric Djemba-Djemba struck us as potentially another top central midfielder. I went to see him playing in France and he did really well. He understood the game, nipped attacks in the bud very well and was available for 4 million euros. I was at that game to see the Rennes goalkeeper too: Petr Ĉech, who was 18 or 19. I told myself he was too young for us.

Sometimes you lost one player but gained another of similar merit. We missed out on Paul Gascoigne, for example, but landed Paul Ince. We didn’t persuade Alan Shearer to join us but we did sign Eric Cantona.

The balls are always in the air. You have a range of targets and compensate from the list when one gets away. The unifying aim was to develop whichever player we ended up with. Cantona was in his mid-twenties, but our normal target area would be younger than that. Rooney and Ronaldo came as teenagers. After 2006 or so, we redoubled our efforts to avoid falling into the old trap of seeing a team grow old together. We refocused on that. With Andy Cole, Dwight Yorke and Teddy Sheringham, there was either a falling off in performance levels or an advance in years. In those circumstances, the demands on the scouting network intensify. The heat is on the talent-spotters. You are saying to them all the time, ‘Come on, what have you seen out there?’

The Kléberson signing came after he had excelled for Brazil at the 2002 World Cup. He was still playing in his homeland when we signed him. But he was an example of the risks associated with making a purchase in a hurry. What we were looking for was someone to take over eventually from Keane, which is how Vieira had entered the picture. He would have been ideal. He was used to the English game, an imposing figure; a leader. One sign of a great player is that the opposing fans sing songs against him. Opposing fans always sang songs against Patrick Vieira. That tells you they feared him. Alan Shearer was another. Always on the wrong end of chants from the opposition.

Kléberson was a talented player. But he exemplifies my point about careful examination of background and character. We acquired him too easily. It made me uncomfortable. When the boy arrived, we discovered he had married a 16-year-old girl. He was 23. She brought all her family over. In pre-season training in Portugal at Vale do Lobo, only the players were meant to come to breakfast before training. Kléberson brought his father-in-law. He seemed to have no authority in that area. Lovely lad, but he lacked the confidence to learn English.

In games he displayed terrific stamina and a high degree of skill but was unable to impose his personality. Perhaps the way Brazil had used him was not the way we wanted to employ him. With his country he sat in front of the back four to help Roberto Carlos and Cafú bomb on from full-back.

When there is a sudden rush to solve problems, mistakes are made. We were at our best when we worked from a plan, over years, and studied players, compiled detailed information. We knew all about Cristiano Ronaldo before we signed him. We tried to get Rooney at 14, and tried again at 16. Finally we cracked it when he was 17. You could plan for Rooney. He was an obvious target for us. That was Manchester United’s scouting at its very best. The Veróns and the Klébersons were improvised. Not panic buys, but rushed.

Djemba-Djemba, another smashing lad, was hammered by the press for not being a signature signing. They always liked the marquee names and took a much dimmer view of players with a lower recognition rating. They loved Verón, at first. They were lukewarm about Kléberson and Djemba-Djemba. David Bellion was young and we felt we could develop him. He was lightning quick, a charming boy, a Christian, but also very shy. He had been at Sunderland and had come on as a sub against us. Tore us apart. We made a move for him when his contract was up. Had we looked into his background more, we’d have known he was diffident. We sold him to Nice for 1 million euros, and he moved from there to Bordeaux, which brought us an additional fee. The Bellion transfer was not one you could classify as an attempt to lay a foundation stone for a new side. He was an add-on who was available at a good price.

The turning point in this whole chapter was capturing Ronaldo and Rooney, which gave us the signature signings we needed: talismanic, match-winning players, in line with our tradition. Patrice Evra and Nemanja Vidić, in January 2006, were to be other stellar acquisitions. The first point in our notes on Vidić was his courage, his determination. He could tackle, head the ball clear. We were looking at a typical English centre-back. Vida hadn’t played since the end of the season in Moscow, in November. In his first game for us, against Blackburn, he was breathing out of his backside. He needed a pre-season. That was the gist of it.

At left-back, in Denis Irwin’s old position, we had Heinze briefly but then moved on to Evra, who was used as a wing-back at Monaco, where he featured in the Champions League final against Porto.

With full-backs it’s like searching for a rare bird. When we first saw Evra, he was playing as a wing-back, but he had the speed and was young enough to switch to full-back in our system. We knew plenty about his attacking capabilities. He was quick, had superb technique and a strong personality. Very strong. Heinze was another matter. Ruthless, would kick his granny. But an absolute winner who could also play centre-back. In both cases we were successful.

As all United fans will remember, Evra’s debut came in the Manchester derby at Eastlands and was a total disaster. You could see him thinking, ‘Why am I here?’ Eventually he settled and developed. Heinze, on the other hand, had a mercenary streak and I always had the sense he was scanning the horizon for his next deal. After one year he wanted to leave. We were playing Villarreal, and stationed in a lovely complex outside Valencia, when his agent came to see me to say he wanted to move.

Things were never the same after that. The following day he injured his cruciate. We did everything possible to accommodate him. He was allowed to pursue his rehabilitation in Spain. He was there for six months and came back for a single game. We did our best. But at the end of December he came back wanting away, wanting new terms, a new contract. When he returned fully from injury, he went to see David Gill with his agent and we agreed we would be better off without him. We agreed to let him go for £9 million. They went straight to Liverpool, who said they would take him.

Gabriel was told, with no ambiguity, that historically Manchester United do not sell players to Liverpool, and vice versa. Heinze’s advisers then tried to make a legal issue of it, which led to a meeting in London, in which the Premier League sided with us.

During that process, the chairman of Crystal Palace contacted David Gill to say someone representing Heinze had asked them to buy him so they could later sell him on to Liverpool. We used that information as part of our evidence. The judgment came down in our favour and eventually we offloaded him to Real Madrid. These guys move around. Heinze had been at two Spanish clubs already before he went to PSG, from where he came to us.

Alan Smith was another addition from that time, in May 2004, for £7 million. Leeds were in financial trouble by then and word came through to David Gill that Alan could be bought for around £5 million. I had always liked Alan. He was what I called an attitude player, with a good character. He could play a few positions: wide right, midfield, centre-forward. He was a Mark Hughes-type player: not a great goal-scorer but useful to the team. We later sold him to Newcastle for £6 million. Alan did a fair job for us and put in some smashing performances. His leg-break at Liverpool in 2006 was one of the most horrific I’ve seen. I’ll always remember rushing to see him as he lay on the Liverpool treatment table – Liverpool’s doctor was exemplary, I should say – while they injected him to stop the onset of trauma.

His foot was pointing in all sorts of directions. Bobby Charlton, who was with me, winced. And he had been through the Munich air disaster. Alan, on the other hand, was unperturbed. He was sitting there emotionless. It was a horror of an accident. Alan’s reaction told me that some men’s pain thresholds are higher than others’. Jabs terrify me. I’m hopeless with needles. In my pub-keeping days in Glasgow, during a keg-change one Sunday morning, I was releasing a spear to let the air out when a rat jumped on my shoulder. I leapt back and the spear of the keg sank into my cheek. You can still see the skin graft. I drove the two miles to the hospital, afraid to touch it. The nurse whipped it out and I fainted as soon as they put the needle in me. The nurse said: ‘This is the big centre-forward of Rangers Football Club and he’s fainting.’ I was dying there. Alan was sitting with one of the worst injuries I’ve ever seen and not a bit of stir in him. That’s what Alan was: a supremely brave lad.

He was a good, honest professional, too. What he lacked was the real top quality you need to excel at the biggest clubs. When we were offered the money by Newcastle, we had to let him go.

Our final use of him was as a defensive midfielder. He tackled well but didn’t read the game like an authentic holding player. He was a midfield player who could tackle, wherever the ball was. In his centre-forward days, centre-backs seldom had an easy time with Alan. But the whole process of replacing Roy required us to find a player who could sit in good areas of the pitch, the way Owen Hargreaves did for a while. Alan wasn’t that type, but he was a good, honest player who loved playing for us. It took me a long time to persuade him that I couldn’t guarantee him a game. The team had moved on.

Louis Saha was another major signing, from Fulham in January 2004, but persistent injuries counted against him, and us. We watched him a couple of times at Metz but the scouting reports gave no indication that he would be a target for the biggest clubs. He turned up at Fulham, and every time he played against us he gave us a ‘doing’. In an FA Cup tie at Craven Cottage, he turned Wes Brown on the halfway line, flew at our goal, cut it back and Fulham scored. From then on we watched him all the time, and by January were ready to make our move.

Dealing with Mohammed Fayed, Fulham’s owner, was a complicated process. Word came back that a figure had been agreed and we were told: ‘This is the best you’re going to get.’ It was a middle position: £12 million.

Of all the centre-forwards we employed, when you talk about their talents (two-footed, good in the air, spring, speed, power), Saha would be one of the best. He posed a perpetual threat. But then came the injuries. Louis, who lived about 50 yards from me, and was a lovely lad, had to be 150 per cent to play. It was agony for us. And it wasn’t a case of him being out for weeks; it tended to be months. The reason for selling him was that no matter how talented he was, I could never plan around him, could never say, ‘This is my team for the next two or three years.’ Saha was young enough to be viewed in that way, as a cornerstone player, but the uncertainty caused by his constant non-availability rendered it impossible to look far down the line.

It became so vexing to him that he considered retiring. ‘You’re a young man, you don’t give in because of an injury, you’ve just got to work to get back. This can’t last forever,’ I told him.

He was assailed by guilt. He thought he was letting us down. He would send me apologetic texts to that effect. I tried to impress on him that he had been unlucky, and that unlucky players could be found throughout footballing history. Viv Anderson was one. When we were assessing Viv’s playing record at Arsenal, we noticed that in four years he missed four games. Suspension, every time. Viv came to us and was never fit. We gave him a free transfer to Sheffield Wednesday and he played there for three years and hardly missed a game. I used to give him stick about that. I’d say, ‘I don’t think you wanted to play for me.’ He’s a big United fan and was desperate to shine for us, but was halted by persistent knee trouble.

Louis knew his injuries were hampering his form, and that’s where the guilt complex began biting away at him. Carlos devised a two-week programme for him to enable him to be fully ready in a fortnight. This was tailored work, which he did on his own. We explained that to him, and he embraced it – shooting, turning, and generally throwing himself into these preparatory exercises. He was flying. Friday, the day before the game, and Saha walks off, saying he had felt something in his hamstring. We were never going to conquer that physical sensitivity, so we reached a deal with Everton in 2008.

Everton copied our approach and tried to raise Louis to a level where he would be confident of playing. It might have helped him to be away from the pressure of Manchester United. He was a fantastic centre-forward, though. In the 2009–10 season, I thought France would be mad not to take him to the World Cup.

A constant in our discussions about young players – in terms of whether they could handle the demands of the Old Trafford crowd and the short patience span of the media – was temperament. Would they grow or shrink in a United shirt? We knew the make-up of every young homegrown player who came into the United starting XI, from the training ground, from reserve team football.

You can’t leave your character in the dressing room. It has to come out of that room, down the tunnel and onto that pitch.

In the 2003–04 season we finished third in the League behind the Invincibles of Arsenal, but finished off with a 3–0 win over Millwall in the FA Cup final in Cardiff. Ronaldo was majestic in that match, scoring our first goal with a header before Van Nistelrooy added two more, one from the penalty spot.

The year had been overshadowed by the death of Jimmy Davis in a road accident. Jimmy, 21, was one of those bright, breezy individuals. He had a chance too. He would have had a career in the game. We had loaned him to Watford. On the way to an academy game at our place that Saturday morning, I heard that Watford’s game that afternoon had been postponed. There were no details given. Then I was told, at the academy game, of Jimmy’s death in a road accident.

He was a tenacious wee lad, very popular. A large number from the club attended his funeral. Two years later, at a wedding, I felt a creeping sense of déjà vu. As the photographs were being taken outside, the minister came over to me and said, ‘Would you like to come round and see Jimmy’s grave?’ I hadn’t made the connection, and it chilled me to the core. It was so sad. He would not be forgotten by Manchester United.

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CRISTIANO Ronaldo was the most gifted player I managed. He surpassed all the other great ones I coached at United. And I had many. The only ones who could be placed near him would be a couple of the home-produced players, Paul Scholes and Ryan Giggs, because they contributed so prodigiously to Manchester United for two decades. That longevity, consistency and those behaviour patterns were quite exceptional.

We lost our wizard, Cristiano, to Real Madrid, in the end, but we looked back at his time with us with pride and gratitude. In six seasons with us, from 2003 to 2009, he scored 118 times in 292 games and won the Champions League, three Premier League titles, one FA Cup and two League Cups. He scored in the 2008 Champions League final, against Chelsea in Moscow, and kicked a ball for us for the final time 12 months later, in the final against Barcelona in Rome.

In between we watched a special talent bloom on our training pitches at Carrington and in our first XI, which passed through a lean spell in the middle years of the decade. We helped Ronaldo to be the player he was and he helped us recapture the excitement and self-expression of Manchester United teams.

Madrid paid £80 million in cash for him, and do you know why? It was a way for Florentino Pérez, their president, to say to the world, ‘We are Real Madrid, we are the biggest of the lot.’ It was a clever move by them and a declaration of their intent to chase the game’s most famous players.

Ramón Calderón, Pérez’s predecessor, had claimed the previous year that Cristiano would one day be a Real Madrid player. I knew full well that if they produced the £80 million, he would have to go. We could not block his fervent wish to return to Iberia and wear the famous white shirt of Di Stefano or Zidane. The reality of managing Ronaldo, as of other talents who came to Manchester United as teenagers, was that you could oversee the early years fairly comfortably, because they were not yet global idols, they were on the way up. At the point they became mega-stars, as Ronaldo did, you asked yourself a question that Carlos Queiroz and I discussed all the time: ‘How long are we going to be able to keep Cristiano Ronaldo?’

Carlos was as accurate as it was possible to be. He said: ‘Alex, if you get five years out of him, you’ve struck gold. There’s no precedent for a Portuguese player going to another country at seventeen years old and staying five years.’ The fact that we had him for six was a bonus. In that period we won a European Cup and three League titles with him. I consider that a pretty good return.

When the possibility of him leaving edged towards being a probability, I reached a gentleman’s agreement with him. I went to Carlos’s house in Portugal to find the boy expressing an urge to go to Real Madrid, and told him: ‘You can’t go this year, not after the way Calderón has approached this issue.’ I said, ‘I know you want to go to Real Madrid. But I’d rather shoot you than sell you to that guy now. If you perform, don’t mess us about, and someone comes and offers us a world record fee, then we will let you go.’ I had already conveyed that message to his agent Jorge Mendes.

I did well to calm him down. I told him that the reason I was refusing to sell him that year was because of Calderón. I said, ‘If I do that, all my honour’s gone, everything’s gone for me, and I don’t care if you have to sit in the stands. I know it won’t come to that, but I just have to tell you I will not let you leave this year.’

I reported this conversation to David Gill, who passed it through to the Glazers. I’m sure it found its way back to Real Madrid as well. At that point we were petrified that the details of our agreement might creep out. We warned Cristiano to that effect. I don’t believe he would have told Real Madrid. His agent Jorge Mendes is, I should say, the best agent I dealt with, without a doubt. He was responsible, looked after his players to an incredible extent and was very fair with clubs. My feeling was that he was anxious about Cristiano going to Spain for the obvious reason that Real might just swallow him up. Different agents, different people. I think he feared losing him.

What I always thought about Ronaldo was that, even if he was having a dire game, he would always create three chances. Every game. Look at all the matches. In the mountain of video evidence, you could not find one instance where he failed to create at least three chances. He possessed an unbelievable talent. I can place everything on that list: training performances, strength, courage, skill with either foot, heading ability.

In the early days, there is no doubt that he acted a bit. His earliest lessons were in a theatrical footballing culture. Injustice was never far from the judgments formed around him. But he changed. One aspect frequently ignored by his critics was the speed he moved at. You only need to tap a player going that fast and there is a tendency for him to go over. Human balance isn’t refined enough to protect the runner from tipping over at an unnaturally fast speed. A wee prod into the side of the leg or an elbow into the body can disturb the equilibrium. The failure to appreciate that speed-to-balance factor was unfair.

In the early days, I accept, he showboated a lot, and Carlos worked hard on that part of his repertoire. He would say to Cristiano all the time, ‘You’re only a great player when people outside the club start recognising you as such. It’s not enough to be a great player to us at Manchester United. When you start delivering the passes, delivering the crosses, at the right time, people won’t be able to read you. That’s when the great players emerge.’

Opponents knew what to expect of him. They knew he was going to hold on to the ball. If you looked at his goal in the semi-final against Arsenal, you see the transition. We struck on the counter-attack, Ronaldo back-heeled it into Ji-Sung Park and we were up at the other end within nine seconds. It took nine seconds to put the ball in the back of the net.

That was the transformation from the wee show-off who was desperate to convince everyone how good he was. Yes, that’s really what it was: the need that so many gifted players have to prove just how blessed they are. And nobody could kick him out of that. No matter how many tackles or fouls he absorbed, his whole being expressed defiance: ‘You’re not going to kick me out of this game. I’m Ronaldo.’ He had that wonderful courage and confidence in his ability. He elevated himself, in my mind, and in those of the other United players, to a point where those around him were in awe of his talent.

The players were good with him in training. They helped him learn. At first when he was tackled at Carrington he would let out a terrible scream. ‘Aaggh!’ The players would give him pelters. He soon learned not to make that kind of racket. His intelligence helped. He was a very smart boy. Once he realised the players would not be a willing audience for his screaming and amateur dramatics in training, he stopped. Over time it erased itself from his game. In his last season he overreacted a couple of times to earn himself a foul, but no more than anyone else. He was granted a penalty kick against Bolton in 2008 that was never a penalty kick. Equally he hadn’t tried to earn that advantage. It was just a bad mistake by the referee. The defender stretched to win the ball, intercepted it cleanly and Ronaldo went over. It was embarrassing, not from Ronaldo’s point of view, but for Rob Styles, the match official.

Despite everyone saying they could have signed him (Real Madrid and Arsenal made that claim), we had an alliance with Sporting Lisbon, his first club in Portugal. We were sending coaches over there and they were dispatching them in the opposite direction. When Carlos joined us in 2002, he told me, ‘There’s a young boy at Sporting and we need to keep an eye on him.’

‘Which one?’ I asked. Because there were two or three.

‘Ronaldo,’ he said. We knew all about him. At that stage Cristiano had been playing centre-forward. Carlos said we would need to act because this boy was special, so we sent Jim Ryan to watch Sporting Lisbon train as part of our reciprocal deal. Jim returned and said, ‘Wow, I’ve seen a player. I think he’s a winger, but he’s been playing centre-forward in the youth team. I wouldn’t be waiting too long. At seventeen someone will gamble.’

So we threw the boy wonder’s name into a conversation with Sporting. The response was that they wanted to keep him for two more years. I suggested a deal that would keep him at Sporting for that length of time before we took him to England. At this point, though, we had not spoken to the agent or the player. It was purely a club-to-club discussion.

That summer Carlos left, to coach Real Madrid, and we went to America on tour. Peter Kenyon left, Juan Sebastián Verón left. Part of our arrangement was that we would play against Sporting Lisbon in their new stadium, which had been built for the 2004 European Championship.

So over we went. John O’Shea was right-back. People persist in saying Gary Neville was in that unenviable position. But it was John O’Shea. The first pass Ronaldo took prompted me to howl: ‘For Christ’s sake, John, get tight to him!’

John shrugged his shoulders. A look of pain and bewilderment was creeping across his face. The other players in the dug-out were saying: ‘Bloody hell, boss, he’s some player, him.’

I said: ‘It’s all right. I’ve got him sorted.’ As if the deal had been done ten years ago. I told Albert, our kit man: ‘Get up to that directors’ box and get Kenyon down at half-time.’ I told Peter, ‘We’re not leaving this ground until we’ve got that boy signed.’

‘Is he that good?’ Kenyon asked.

‘John O’Shea’s ended up with migraine!’ I said. ‘Get him signed.’

Kenyon spoke to the Lisbon people and asked their permission to speak to Cristiano. They warned us that Real Madrid had offered £8 million for him.

‘Offer them nine, then,’ I said.

Ronaldo was downstairs in a small room, with his agent, where we told him how much we would love to sign him for Manchester United. In front of Jorge Mendes I said, ‘You won’t play every week, I’m telling you that now, but you’ll become a first-team player. There’s no doubt in my mind about that. You’re seventeen years of age, it’ll take time for you to adjust. We’ll look after you.’

A private plane was hired for him, his mother, his sister, Jorge Mendes and his lawyer to come over the next day. We needed to get that deal done. Speed of action was paramount. I used to scout myself, on a Saturday morning in Glasgow, and I would always say to the men I employed in that capacity: ‘It must be great when you can spot someone you know is going to be the business.’

One night I was watching a movie, White Fang, the Jack London book about going down to Klondike in search of gold. That’s what it must be like for a scout. You’re standing watching a game on a Saturday morning and you see a George Best, a Ryan Giggs or a Bobby Charlton. That’s what I felt that day in Lisbon. A revelation.

That was the biggest surge of excitement, of anticipation, I experienced in football management. The next best was from Paul Gascoigne, for a different reason. Newcastle had been fighting relegation and Gascoigne had been out injured. We were at St James’ Park on the Easter Monday. I played Norman Whiteside and Remi Moses in the centre of the park. It was hardly a midfield of choirboys. You wouldn’t dance round that duo. Well, Gascoigne nutmegged Moses right in front of where I was sitting in the dug-out, and then patted him on the head. I flew out of that dug-out, shouting, ‘Get that so-and-so …’

Whiteside and Moses tried to impress on Gascoigne that he had just made a serious error of judgment. A little re-education was in order. But Gascoigne just skipped all round them.

We tried our best to sign him that summer. But Newcastle sold him to Tottenham instead. When you have that experience, of seeing this talent right before your eyes, you know you’re experiencing one of those moments you search for every hour in management. And that sense of discovery rushed me into trying to tie up a deal for Gascoigne that very day.

With Ronaldo, in contrast, Kenyon did manage to complete the deal. I sensed that Sporting might have been happy not to have sold him to a Spanish club. The deal was concluded quite swiftly, with add-ons that took it up to about £12 million, with the sole condition that, should we ever sell him, Sporting would have the option of taking him back. A couple of days before we sold him to Real Madrid, we had to tell Sporting that they could have him back, but it would cost them £80 million. Not surprisingly, no cheque was forthcoming.

As Cristiano started his new life in Cheshire, his mother and sister came with him. That was good. His mother was very protective, as you would expect, and was a good, straight-talking woman, with no airs or graces. She was highly maternal. I explained to Ronaldo that Lyn and Barry Moorhouse would look after them with things for the house, bank accounts and so on. We got them some dwellings, tucked away, near Alderley Edge, and they settled in quickly.

We had returned from America, after the Sporting Lisbon game, in a plane belonging to the Dallas Cowboys, who had rented it to us for the summer. Ferdinand, Giggs, Scholes and Neville enthused about Ronaldo all the way home: ‘Get him signed, get him signed.’

So Ronaldo came into the training ground knowing that our players knew all about him and had a sense of how good he was. I think that helped.

His first appearance was against Bolton at home on 16 August 2003, where he started on the bench. The Bolton defenders ended up in knots. The right-back rattled him straight away in the centre of the park, took the ball off him, but Cristiano got straight back up and demanded another pass. Right away. ‘He’s got the balls, anyway,’ I thought.

The next minute he was pulled down and won a penalty. Van Nistelrooy missed it. Then, of his own volition, Ronaldo moved out to the right-hand side and hit two superb crosses in. One was met by Scholes, who passed to Van Nistelrooy; his shot was parried by the keeper and Giggs tapped the ball in for the second goal. The crowd on that side of the ground responded as if a Messiah had materialised right before their eyes. The Old Trafford crowd build up heroes quickly. They see someone who gets their rears off seats and take to them right away. Ronaldo had the biggest impact on Manchester United fans of any player since Eric Cantona. He could never have matched the idolatry that came with Cantona, because Eric had all this defiant charisma, but his talent was instantly apparent.

The goal Ronaldo scored on the break in the Champions League semi-final at Arsenal in 2009 confirmed his majesty as a counter-attacker. The ball moved from Park to Rooney to Ronaldo with devastating speed. I always said to him: ‘When you’re going through on goal, lengthen your stride.’ By lengthening your stride you slow yourself down and your timing is enhanced. When you’re still sprinting, you have less coordination in your body, but when you slow your mechanics down you give the brain a better chance. He did that. You watch him.

In the spring before the 2004 FA Cup final in Cardiff, where we beat Millwall 3–0, Walter Smith, who had joined me as assistant manager in March, asked me about the various talent levels of all our players.

‘What about Ronaldo,’ he said, ‘is he that good?’

I told him: ‘Oh yes, unbelievable. Even in the air. He’s a magnificent header of the ball.’

Later, Walter said, tentatively: ‘You keep telling me this Ronaldo is a magnificent header of the ball. I see him heading the ball in training but never in a game.’

That Saturday, against Birmingham, Ronaldo scored with a superb header. I turned to Walter. ‘I know, I know,’ he said.

I had watched Millwall beat Sunderland in the semi-final and told my staff: ‘That Tim Cahill’s not bad, you know.’ Good leap for a little lad. No great talent on the ball, but he was a constant nuisance. A pest. You could have bought him then for a million. He would have scored a lot of goals in a good team. Dennis Wise was especially combative in that match. But there have been plenty of nasty little players like him down the years, the sort who prompt you to think: ‘I wish to Christ I was still playing.’ There will be plenty who would have said that about Dennis Wise. He would never have survived in the old days, I’m certain of that.

If you’re cute enough in the modern game, you can get away with a kind of underhand physicality. Wise would be good at leaving his foot in, arriving a fraction late. He played his game well. In the modern game it is hard to pick out genuinely thuggish players: those who step out to cause hurt. It hardly mattered, because Ronaldo destroyed Millwall that day.

The one political drama we had with Ronaldo was, of course, the 2006 World Cup, when he winked at the Portugal bench after Wayne Rooney had stamped on Ricardo Carvalho. This raised the brief possibility that the two men would fall out to such an extent that they would never be able to play together again. What saved the day for Ronaldo was Rooney, who was terrific. On holiday, I texted Rooney and asked him to call me. He suggested the two of them granting an interview together to show there was no bad blood.

The next day I ran it past Mick Phelan, who thought it might look a bit prompted and artificial. I decided he was right. But the generosity of Rooney was what impressed Ronaldo, who thought it might be impossible for him to go back to Manchester. He felt he had burned his boats and that the press would kill him. Rooney called him a couple of times to reassure him. It wasn’t the first time two United team-mates had clashed in the international arena. I’ll take you back to Scotland v. England in 1965, and Nobby Stiles’ first game for his country. Denis Law is standing in the Scotland line and Nobby shuffles over to him and says, ‘All the best, Denis.’ Nobby idolised Denis, who says, ‘Eff off, you English so-and-so, you.’ So Nobby is left there, stunned.

Yes, Ronaldo did run to the referee to help get Rooney in trouble, which is common in the modern game. But Ronaldo was thinking only of one thing – winning that game for his country. He wasn’t thinking about playing for Man United the following season. That was a World Cup game. And he did regret it. When we visited him it was clear he understood the implications. The wink was misinterpreted. The manager had told him to stay out of trouble, so the wink was not to convey pleasure to the bench at his own role in Rooney’s sending-off. I believed him when he told me he was not saying, with that gesture: ‘I sorted him out, I got him sent off.’

We met at a villa in Portugal and had lunch. Jorge Mendes was present. Rooney calling him had helped to change Ronaldo’s mind and put him at ease. I told Cristiano, ‘You’re one of the bravest players to come to Manchester United, but walking away isn’t courage.’ I quoted the Beckham situation in 1998: ‘It was exactly the same as this. They were hanging effigies of him outside pubs in London. He was the devil incarnate. But he had the balls to fight it.’

Beckham’s first game after that incident had been against West Ham – the worst possible place to go after such a drama with England – and he was terrific. ‘You’ve got to get through it,’ I told Ronaldo. The next game in London for Ronaldo was at Charlton on a Wednesday night. To begin with I watched from the directors’ box, where there was a local guy screaming unbelievable abuse: ‘You Portuguese bastard’ was one of the politer epithets. Five minutes before half-time, Ronaldo received the ball, danced round about four players and hit the underside of the bar with a shot. That guy didn’t rise from his seat again. It deflated him. Perhaps he thought that his screaming had motivated him.

Ronaldo was fine, had a good start to the season and was getting on well with Rooney. These young lads will have their clashes. Rooney was going to be sent off anyway, but equally Ronaldo’s intervention was unhelpful. I was so relieved that the incident passed and we were able to keep him in the side that was to go on and win the 2008 Champions League final in Moscow.

In the summer of 2012, I attended a Q &A hosted by the BBC’s Dan Walker, with Peter Schmeichel and Sam Allardyce. A guy asked: ‘Who’s the better player, Ronaldo or Messi?’ My reply was: ‘Well, Ronaldo’s got a better physique than Messi, he’s better in the air, he’s got two feet and he’s quicker. Messi has something magical about him when the ball touches his feet. It’s as if it’s landed on a bed of feathers. His low sense of gravity is devastating.’

Schmeichel thought Ronaldo could play in a bad team while Messi could not. That was a fair point. But Messi would still produce great moments with the ball on his toes. Peter’s point was that Messi depended on Xavi and Iniesta directing the ball to him. Ronaldo is much the same in the sense that you need to keep feeding him. In all the times I’m asked I find it impossible to definitely say which is the better player because to relegate either to second place would feel wrong.

Almost as important to me as his brilliant displays in our colours was that we stayed close after he left for Madrid. Our bond survived our parting: a happy outcome in a game of transitory relationships.

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