Ferguson, Alex - Alex Ferguson My Autobiography

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.’