Ferguson, Alex - Alex Ferguson My Autobiography

They were comparable records. Yet Rafa had landed on his feet again.

sixteen

FROM the moment Manchester United became a Plc in 1990, I was certain the club would be bought and taken into private ownership. Rupert Murdoch’s BSkyB were the largest of the private bidders before Malcolm Glazer first took a stake in 2003. With our history and our aura, we were too big a prize to be ignored by individual investors. The only surprise to me, when the Glazer family moved in to take control, was that there had not been a host of wealthy suitors.

Once the Glazers had seized their opportunity, Andy Walsh of the United supporters’ group called me to say: ‘You have to resign.’ Andy’s a nice lad but there was no temptation for me to agree to that request. I was the manager, not a director. Nor was I one of the shareholders who had sold the club. The takeover was not down to me in any way.

‘We’ll all be behind you,’ Andy said. My reply was: ‘But what do you think would happen to all my staff?’ The moment I left, most of my assistants would have been out as well. Some had been with me for 20 years. The impact made on others when a manager changes his position is sometimes lost on those outside the circle.

It was a worrying time, I admit. One of my concerns was how much money we might have to invest in the team. But I had to be confident both in my own ability to spot good players and the structure of the organisation. The Glazers were buying a good solid club and they understood that from the start.

My first contact was a phone call from the father, Malcolm. Two weeks later his sons Joel and Avi came over to set out their position. They told me there would be no changes to the way the football side was run. In their view, the club was in good hands. I was a successful manager. They had no concerns. They were totally behind me. All the things I wanted to hear from them, I heard that day. I know there is always an element of window dressing. People tell you everything is fine, then make a million alterations. People lose their jobs; there are cutbacks because debts need to be repaid. But United stayed solid under the new ownership, irrespective of the borrowings people talked about and the interest payments incurred.

Over the years, several supporter groups challenged me to define my stance in relation to the club’s debts and my answer was always: ‘I’m the manager. I’m working for a club owned by people in America.’ That was my standpoint. I never thought it sensible to upset the management side of the club by adding to the debate on models of ownership. If the Glazers had taken a more confrontational path, then it might have been different – if, for example, they had instructed me to get rid of one of my coaches. Any changes that might have undermined my ability to run the club would have altered the whole dynamic, but there was never that kind of pressure. So do you throw down your tools because some supporters want you to walk away from a lifetime’s work?

When I first joined United, there was a group of supporters known as the Second Board. They would meet in the Grill Room and decide what they thought was wrong with Manchester United. Back then, when my position was more fragile, I was more attuned to the damage that might be done to my position should they turn against me. Other United managers before me had felt the same way. In my playing days at Rangers, a group of powerful fans travelled with the first team and were influential lobbyists. At United there was a larger array of supporters’ voices. In disgust at the Glazer takeover, some handed in their season tickets and started FC United of Manchester.

There is a price to pay when you support a football club, and the price is that you can’t win every game. You are not going to be a manager for a lifetime. United are lucky to have had two for half a century. With losing and winning games, the emotions rise and fall. Football naturally generates dissent. I remember us losing a game at Rangers and the supporters throwing bricks through the windows.

There was no reason, beyond my age, for the Glazers to consider a change of manager in the summer of 2005. I never considered that possibility, never felt under threat.

The tens of millions of pounds paid out in interest to service the loans did arouse protective feelings towards the club. I understood that, but at no stage did it translate into pressure to sell a player or excessive caution on the purchasing front. One of their strengths was their commercial department in London, which brought in dozens of sponsorships globally. We had Turkish airlines, telephone companies in Saudi Arabia, Hong Kong, Thailand, beer companies in the Far East. That sucked in tens of millions and helped service the debt. On the football side we generated huge earnings. The 76,000 crowds helped a great deal.

So at no stage was I held back by the Glazer ownership. Often we would lose interest in a player because the transfer fee or wage demands had become silly. Those decisions were taken by me and David Gill. There was no edict from above to spend only in line with the club’s debts.

Instead our galaxy went on expanding. From 2007 more foreign talent poured into Carrington from South America, Portugal and Bulgaria. No imported player in those years attracted more attention than Carlos Tévez, who was at the heart of a major controversy over the relegation of Sheffield United from the Premier League and was to end up in opposition to us at Manchester City, staring down from that provocative billboard in his sky-blue shirt, underneath the message: ‘Welcome to Manchester.’

The tale begins when Tévez was at West Ham and David Gill was receiving calls from his agent, Kia Joorabchian, saying the boy would love to play for Man United. We had heard that kind of story many times. It was almost routine for agents to call saying their client had a special feeling for our crest. My advice was that we should not involve ourselves in any complicated dealings with the Tévez camp. David agreed. It was clear that a consortium of people owned the player. But, to David, I also remarked: ‘He does make an impact in games with his energy and he has a decent scoring record. It would depend what the deal was.’

David told me he could acquire Tévez on loan for two years, for a fee. That was the way it turned out and Carlos did well for us in his first season. He scored a lot of important goals, against Lyon, Blackburn, Tottenham and Chelsea. There was a real enthusiasm and energy about him. He wasn’t blessed with great pace and wasn’t a great trainer. He would always like a wee break, saying his calf was sore. In the context of the way we prepared, that sometimes annoyed us. We wanted to see a genuine desire to train all the time. Top players have that. But Tévez compensated quite well with his enthusiasm in games.

In the 2008 European Cup final in Moscow, he played and scored in the penalty shoot-out against Chelsea. He was our first taker. In the game itself, I took Rooney off and left Tévez on because he was playing better than Wayne. What planted a doubt in my mind was that in his second season I signed Dimitar Berbatov, and the emphasis was on Berbatov and Rooney as our forward partnership.

Watching Dimitar at Tottenham, I felt he would make a difference because he had a certain composure and awareness that we lacked among our group of strikers. He displayed the ability of Cantona or Teddy Sheringham: not lightning quick, but he could lift his head and make a creative pass. I thought he could bring us up a level and extend our range of talents.

So Berbatov’s arrival relegated Tévez to more of a backup role. And around December in his second season, we started to feel he wasn’t doing especially well. The reason, I think, was that he’s the type of animal that needs to play all the time. If you’re not training intensively, which he wasn’t, you need to play regularly. During that winter, David Gill asked, ‘What do you want to do?’ I felt we ought to wait until later in the season to make a decision. ‘They want one now,’ David said.