How Solskjaer took the wheel
HOW UNITED LEARNT TO FLY NORWEGIAN
FFT meets staff, players and pals to learn why Man United’s super-sub is also a super-boss
In a matter of months, the mood at Old Trafford has been transformed with the Molde man at the wheel – players, coaches and pals explain why the Baby-faced Assassin was able to save the Red Devils’ season
Ole Gunnar Solskjaer had just been informed that he was Barclays Manager of the Month for January 2019 after six weeks in the job, the first United manager since Alex Ferguson seven years previous to do so. The Norwegian’s response was typical. “No, my team have won it.” When the Premier League asked for an image of him receiving the award, Solskjaer insisted on including his five assistants: Mick Phelan, Michael Carrick, Emiliano Alvarez, Mark Dempsey and Kieran Mckenna. That’s the picture Manchester United’s official website used, even if the mainstream media didn’t. United, Solskjaer maintained, was always about more than one individual. It didn’t always feel that way before he took over.
It’s Solskjaer’s way to downplay his impact and that self-deprecation has made him loved – so much so that the chants about him from the stands outnumber those for any player. But time-served United staff have never seen a manager pay so much attention to detail. They have been astounded that a man on a five-month caretaker’s contract asked so many questions about any area which he felt could improve the club. He asked players for their opinions on everything from the food to the travel. He asked them what could be done better and how he could help them. He asked about promising young players and coaches. Even when two fans who’d been drivers at the club 15 years ago requested to see Solskjaer, he spent an hour with them and gauged the mood among the supporters. But it was what he did with the players that has made all the difference since his arrival.
“He spoke to them player to player,” one senior club source tells Fourfourtwo. “If any player needed an arm around them – and some of them did – then they got it. His man management is exceptional.”
But don’t get the idea that Solskjaer is a soft touch. The dressing room has felt his anger at half-time all right, and it’s no Fergie hairdryer treatment. The club source revealed that after two or three minutes, he’s moved on “and he doesn’t kill anyone. His criticism is constructive. Then he looks forward in a positive manner, he always looks forward. The players like it, they like him and they also feel that they have freedom on the pitch.”
Midfielder Ander Herrera agrees. “Ole can be very direct with players at half-time, but never in a negative way,” he explains. “Even when he criticises us he uses the positive things that we’ve done. He only wants to see us improve. We’re happy with him.”
Ole is quiet on a day-to-day basis. Herrera says he doesn’t feel the need to attend every
training session, missing the odd one or two, “but he’s fine to leave them to Michael Carrick and Kieran Mckenna. They make a good team for the daily work. They get on well, personally and professionally.” And there are some other benefits to keeping some distance.
“We know that when Ole speaks to us, it’s because he has something important to tell us. That information goes straight into our heads because he’s not giving us information every single day.
“We also have Mike Phelan, who is like Ole and only gives information when he has to.”
In Solskjaer, Phelan and Carrick, United have three former players with more than 45 years combined service at the club who have seen United win everything, as well as the dismal post-ferguson decline.
They wanted the current players to know what a privilege it was for them to wear the red shirt. Solskjaer is big on that too, as you’d expect from an ex-united star, stressing that they should never let the fans down, that they must show him why they deserve to wear that shirt. He says it a lot. And it’s working wonders.
Off the pitch, Solskjaer is not just keeping things ticking over. He questions everything, wanting to know why things are now done a certain way when it wasn’t past practice. Much has changed since he left at the start of 2011, with five managers and many comings and goings at executive level. He isn’t willing to turn a blind eye when he thinks something is going on which isn’t the United way.
For one, some former players were wary of going to the club’s Carrington training ground. Perhaps they were right to be so since many of them had been critical of Jose Mourinho in the media, but when Rio Ferdinand asked if it was OK to bring his kids to the training ground, Solskjaer was incredulous that he’d even had to ask. Likewise Nemanja Vidic, a player who hadn’t been too critical and one now working as a Red Devils ambassador, was told that he should never ask to come back to the club he had served so well.
Other familiar faces are back at Old Trafford too, none more so than Mike Phelan, so long the yin to Ferguson’s yang. As well as being a coach and a former utility man prepared to play anywhere his manager asked, Phelan worked as a buffer between Ferguson and the commercial demands from the club. He still does that now, but suggestions of Ferguson pulling Solskjaer’s strings behind the scenes have been overplayed.
Fergie, back in rude health, also now feels the training ground is open to him, and Ole is pleased he can always speak to the man he considers to be the greatest gaffer still alive. He would be foolish not to, although these conversations don’t take place daily.
Solskjaer will often speak to Ferguson beneath the main stand after a match, in between his interviews with rights holders and meeting the written press. That’s when he’s finished posing for the endless selfies he never refuses with fans.
Unlike previous United bosses, he has no issues doing press conferences and speaking to the media. After one reporter thanked him for starting one press conference at 9.30am since it allowed him to drop his daughter off at school, Solskjaer changed the start time. Previously, briefings had been an hour earlier because Solskjaer, like Ferguson, likes to start early. When the 46-year-old speaks he does so in a relaxed style, as the man benefitting from a clean slate.
MOLDE WERE A NEARLY TEAM WITH A CULTURE OF FINISHING SECOND – SOLSKJAER RENOVATED THE WHOLE CLUB AND BUILT A MINI MAN UNITED
The mood at the club is now unrecognisable from that immediately before his return, but things had to change drastically as it wasn’t just Mourinho’s stock that had fallen. Fans were running out of patience with Paul Pogba, brought in as the man around whom the new United would be built. Pogba was so hacked off with the Portuguese and the club that his Twitter profile showed no evidence that he played for Manchester United.
For former defender Wes Brown, now back living in Manchester and attending United games, the palpable negativity and dejection was all too familiar. “The manager was not getting the best out of the players and I could relate to that situation,” he says. “I’d been at Sunderland when things weren’t going well. It can be a negative cycle and the longer it goes on, the worse it gets. I would have loved it to work out for Mourinho, but it clearly wasn’t.”
Before Solskjaer parachuted in, Manchester United were a mess. Mourinho took much of the blame for being out of the title race before the season had got going, but United’s form started its slide during a wretched 2018. It began after Jose signed a new contract in January 2018, which most fans welcomed. Then came Champions League elimination in two dreadful last 16 matches against Sevilla, with Mourinho telling a fan he felt pressured to play Pogba by the club. The Frenchman showed his frustration and would probably have joined Barcelona had they not already spent so much money on Philippe Coutinho.
Despite all this, United finished 2nd last season, which Mourinho rates as one of his greatest achievements, but the campaign played out with poor away displays against Brighton and West Ham before United fell tamely to Chelsea in May’s FA Cup final. The hangover continued into a pre-season which Mourinho turned into a PR disaster.
In Michigan last July, before Liverpool beat a depleted United side 4-1 in front of 101,000 fans, a smiling, singing Jurgen Klopp mixed with hardcore Liverpool supporters who had crossed the Atlantic the night before the game. That contrasted with Mourinho, who rejected any media beyond those he was contractually obliged to undertake.
When he did get in front of the press at Ann Arbor, he publicly said that he wouldn’t pay to watch this United team. More than 50,000 fans had paid top dollar to do just that.
Mourinho was fighting battles across several fronts. On a personal level, Old Trafford staff found him amenable and he did things people didn’t see, like visiting the family of a fan who had died in Switzerland in August 2018. He was the first United manager to speak to a fanzine in over 15 years, too – and was in superb form when he spoke.
Mourinho could have cut back and done the minimum three interviews with rights holders, but he regularly did over and above what was expected. Yet his general reluctance was down to his belief in a media conspiracy against him, one orchestrated from London after his time in charge of Chelsea.
Yet Mourinho had his own way of working, and once staff were used to that they were fine with him and considered him a nice guy – not a view shared by all the players, probably because he was the one who delivered home truths about their failings.
Jose set the tone during pre-season and it was a negative one for such an expensively assembled squad of players. Nemanja Matic, a key player, required treatment. Mourinho insisted that he travelled to Los Angeles for the pre-season camp, then Matic was sent across America for treatment a few days later. The Red Devils missed an in-form Matic early on in the campaign.
The request to recruit Harry Maguire late in the transfer window, when he’d previously not identified the Leicester defender as a target, irritated the club. Not least as Mourinho had overseen the acquisitions of two £30 million centre-backs in Victor Lindelof and Eric Bailly. The Foxes didn’t need to sell one of England’s World Cup heroes and said no.
Mourinho kicked off the current season with a star-studded squad of footballers who were so afraid of making a mistake that they played within themselves. They felt the manager was focusing on the opponent’s threats first before highlighting their own strengths.
Not being Jose Mourinho was the biggest edge Ole had in his first month back at a club he’d served with distinction as a player between 1996-2007, winning six Premier League titles and the Champions League, and as manager of the reserves until 2011.
The subsequent honeymoon period has been a long one. Solskjaer is different from Mourinho. He believes instinct is important and he fills his players with confidence, telling them that it’s acceptable to make mistakes. Players loved it when he told the full-backs he wanted them high and wide. They also love it that he doesn’t over-celebrate any victory – the comeback at Paris Saint-germain excepted, understandable given it was among the most incredible wins in the club’s storied history – and doesn’t make himself the centre of attention, instead moving quickly onto the next game.
“We’ve also kept the focus on every single game that we’ve played,” says Herrera, one of many players who has seen an uplift in form. “As soon as we think we’re an amazing team, we’re going to start losing. We know that we have to be at our best in every single game.”
United’s players like having a coaching team that Solskjaer actually listens to. Gary Neville has his own take on that, shared with FFT from a bench inside the Parc de Princes before the Champions League last 16 second leg.
“There’s a very interesting dynamic on the Manchester United bench now,” he says. “Ole stands in a group of three, four of five. I said this to Bryan Robson and he said Ole listens to all his staff. That’s good when you’re winning, but when you’re losing I wonder if there can be too many voices.”
The unity between the players and coaches is clear and contrasted with Mourinho, who’d often stand alone by the side of the pitch, with regular visits from long-time assistant Rui Faria. When Faria departed at the end of last season, Mourinho lost his main foil, but he was always the big name on the big salary. He didn’t even want the names of any of his staff to be listed on the club’s website. It was all about him.
Yet Mourinho is one of the most successful coaches in world football, a man idolised in his native Portugal. Solskjaer was a risky, rookie replacement. Gary Neville has no doubts why he was appointed.
“Ole got the job because he was a safe pair of hands,” says Neville. “He was trusted and reliable. He could be manipulated in that he wouldn’t have caused any problems had he been let go with thanks at the end of the season. He was brought in from Molde for all the right reasons.”
United are looking for a sporting director, someone to work alongside the manager and executive vice chairman Ed Woodward. Mourinho, unsurprisingly, wasn’t a fan of this idea, but Woodward and Solskjaer get on well.
“They have to bring in a sporting director,” adds Neville. “They have to support Ole with the right people around him recruitment-wise. If they don’t bring the right players in, then Ole is dead. The best managers in the
SOLSKJAER WILL OFTEN SPEAK WITH FERGUSON BENEATH THE MAIN STAND AFTER A MATCH
world have been at this club over the last few years, and they’ve failed in part because the recruitment has been poor. Recruitment, the medical department and the sport science department all need to be right.”
Names like Zinedine Zidane or Massimiliano Allegri came up when Mourinho looked on the way out. Solskjaer, meanwhile, was managing Norwegian side Molde, a little forgotten about, a little failed in the eyes of the British public after his stint at Cardiff in 2014.
Neville doesn’t think his difficulties in Cardiff were a disaster, though. “It was the best thing that happened to Ole as it will have prepared him for this,” says the former full-back.
“If he hadn’t had that, Manchester United would have been very difficult for him. It went so badly wrong and he was written off, but it was better for him to make the mistakes there and even for him to be sacked, because you’re more employable after being sacked in football than before. People don’t think that in England, and they’re wrong.
“Jupp Heynckes was sacked twice during his career and ended up winning the treble with Bayern Munich. In England, if you get sacked as a young manager you soon get written off. People said Ole wouldn’t make it after getting relegated at Cardiff, but he’s back – albeit with some good fortune.”
After calling time on his Old Trafford career and playing a testimonial against Espanyol in 2008, he managed the reserves but that proved the glass ceiling. He was never going to be promoted like Pep Guardiola at Barça, because Ferguson was going nowhere.
Players liked Solskjaer, and coaches liked him too. A small band of supporters were a little put out when he didn’t hand out free match tickets like some of his predecessors, but Ole – correctly – said it wasn’t the United manager’s job to do that.
He left United for Molde in November 2010 and what he did there is instructive.
“Molde was seen as a nearly team,” explains former Norway team-mate Jan Aage Fjortoft. “They had a culture of finishing 2nd (usually behind Rosenborg) but he renovated the whole club. He built Molde like a mini Man United. He recruited well and got some of the best young Norwegian players. Molde played an offensive style of football. Ole’s agent, Jim Solbakken, has been with him a long time and he helped.”
Solbakken, who met Solskjaer in 1991 when they trained for the same Clausenengen team in their hometown of Kristiansund, has gone on to become Norway’s most influential agent and, according to Fjortoft, “helped to give Ole a good overview of the best players in Norway. Not only that, he’s got a good team around him with a talent scout, John Vik, who has an overview of all young players in Norway. For a young Norwegian, never underestimate the attraction of playing for Ole Gunnar.”
He would need that to work since it was hard to convince the top players to play outside of Oslo or Trondheim.
Solskjaer’s remodelling meant Molde won the Tippeligaen title for the first time in 2011 and again in 2012, the year he was granted permission to speak to Aston Villa. He decided to remain in Norway where his wife Silje and their three children were happy and settled. That was the biggest hurdle to him becoming United boss, as they stayed in Norway while he lived initially in a hotel before moving to buzzy Hale and Bowdon, close to Altrincham.
Several first-team players now live there and the proximity to the training ground helps. When he was a player the Solskjaers resided further east in Cheshire, close to Ferguson.
Ole said he would only leave Molde for a big club with a big setup, so it was something of a surprise when he accepted the Cardiff job in January 2014, despite Ferguson sharing his doubts and Bluebirds owner Vincent Tan not being seen as the most stable in football.
Solskjaer was charged with keeping them in the Premier League, and went straight to the players he’d known in England at Old Trafford.
“He texted me before he got the job and said he thought I would enjoy playing at Cardiff,” recalls Brazilian full-back Fabio da Silva, now at Nantes. “I didn’t want to go and join a team in a relegation battle, because I’d been in one on loan at QPR. It’s not fun, so I told him I’d be free the next summer. Ole then turned up at my house in Bowdon. I liked him and his ideas so much that he left my house with me saying, ‘I will do everything I can to help you.’ I wanted to play for him, to make him happy. It was impossible for me to turn him down.” Fabio joined Cardiff on a three-year contract. “He wanted to play dominant football like he’d done at United, but – and it took me years to learn this – you can’t,” adds the Brazilian. “We didn’t have the same players at Cardiff. Sometimes you must accept that other teams have better players and that your best results may come from counter-attacks.”
Cardiff came bottom of the Premier League in 2013-14, and Solskjaer was about to learn the hard way what happens when you lose.
“I saw him suffering and it upset me,” says Fabio. “Players took advantage of him. He tried to give us a rest after a defeat. He would say he knew how we felt and gave us two days off, to forget and come back charged up to fight again. Some players questioned having two days off after a defeat, but they would have questioned whatever he did because that’s what footballers do when the team is losing. I’m sure Ole learned so much there.”
While he was at Cardiff, this writer phoned Solskjaer. Rodrigo Possebon, a Brazilian who’d played under Solskjaer at United, wanted to play for him again. Possebon didn’t have his number and asked if I could call him. It was an unusual request, but I’d written Solskjaer’s website with him in 2000 and spent a day with him at Carrington going through his life. Before that, a diehard United fan asked if I’d get him to sign a print of him scoring at the Camp Nou in 1999 and scribble on it, ‘Who put the ball in the Germans’ net?’
Ole wasn’t keen (‘disrespectful’) and, instead wrote ‘Dear John, I hope this goal gave you as much pleasure as it gave me.’
I didn’t have his number by 2014 and called Cardiff’s switchboard. Ole took the call.
“I’m still reading all your articles, especially when I want to sleep,” he laughed, “and I’m building a mini Man United. But it’s not the time to bring Rodrigo here – it’s better for him that I don’t.” That was an honest statement from a man who knew his time was up.
Solskjaer was sacked in September 2014 after a poor start to the Championship season, and Fabio admits Ole needed to leave, saying: “The Championship was no league for him. He needs to be at a team which plays football.”
As Wes Brown, who played against his Cardiff side for Sunderland, puts it succinctly, “He was trying things that weren’t going to come off.”
Fabio’s wife Barbara remembers a sincere man. “He was very honest with us even when he didn’t need to be,” she says. “I felt that he had our family in his mind and not just Fabio, as he knew families with young children can’t just move around easily.”
The full-back stayed in South Wales for two and a half years and enjoyed it, but Solskjaer returned to Norway under the accusation that he should never have gone to Cardiff.
In October 2015, Ole returned to the Molde dugout. There’s an old football adage that you should never go back, which the Norwegian only partly proved wrong.
“There were big expectations that he could repeat the success from his first spell,” says Jan Aage Fjortoft. “He had a few setbacks and didn’t quite copy it, but he adjusted back to life in a small town and at a smaller club.
“Charles Darwin said it wasn’t the strongest who survives but the ones who adjust, and Ole Gunnar adjusts.”
On December 16, 2018, Mourinho was sacked after a 3-1 loss at Liverpool, one Herrera counts as his worst moment at United. “It wasn’t the result – you can always lose – but the way we lost,” he says. “We let our fans down.”
The Portuguese was a dead man walking. In United’s team hotel – the aptly named Titanic – the night before the game against Liverpool, his coaches were surprised when they weren’t informed the manager had held one-on-one meetings with his players.
Solskjaer’s unexpected appointment had an immediate impact, even before a ball had been kicked. He attended a staff Christmas party as soon as he arrived back in Manchester, where younger members serenaded Ole with, ‘Who put the ball in the Germans’ net?’ before he said a few words on the stage at Lancashire Cricket Club. He’d been told by Ed Woodward to get people smiling again. It was no problem. No song has been sung more than ‘Ole’s at the wheel’ to The Stone Roses’ Waterfall, though that song did start out as ‘Jose’s at the wheel’.
His first game was against his former club in the Welsh capital. This writer stood outside the away end for two hours before the match as jubilant fans bounced into Cardiff City Stadium singing songs about Solskjaer. He had that hero identity, something the fans could latch onto.
United triumphed 5-1, the first time in the post-ferguson era that they’d scored five goals in a league game. The buzz that started that day didn’t stop. The Red Devils embarked on a club-record nine away victories on the spin, also winning at Newcastle, Tottenham, Arsenal, Leicester, Fulham, Chelsea, Crystal Palace and Paris Saint-germain.
But will he be able to cut it when things are not quite so rosy?
“He had a tough side as a player, he was very determined, and he’ll need it to make some big decisions as a manager,” says Neville. “When you get sacked as he did at Cardiff, he knows that it’s him or them.”
“He can be determined and stubborn,” adds Fjortoft. “He would be really straight with the media in Norway and refused anything which went close to his private life.”
Neville felt Spurs boss Mauricio Pochettino should have been the next Manchester United manager, “because of his track record at the top level, but Ole has done so well that it has to be him. He’s thrown a huge spanner in the works. There will be mutiny among fans if it’s not Solskjaer now.”
Neville and Solskjaer sat next to each other in the dressing room at Carrington, and former training ground The Cliff, for years.
“And I did my A licence with him – and Ryan Giggs. He had a willingness to learn and do his badges before he’d stopped playing, which is always a good sign. He was willing to start at the very bottom and learn the ropes with the reserve teams at United.
“He had his own ideas. I can remember him telling me that he wanted to play 4-2-2-2 and I said, ‘What the fuck are you on about – you mean 4-4-2 with wingers tucked in?’ Yet a lot of clubs now play that system or similar to it.
“Ole thought about the game all the time, and because the game has evolved away from the dictator manager who barks and shouts, you have to be more of a thinker and someone who manages players.”
“He’s a quiet assassin,” smiles Wes Brown. “You saw him with Rob Lee [when Ole hacked down the Newcastle midfielder who was clean through on goal and got sent off]. If he needed to do something for the team, he would do it. He was a tough player. Being a great sub also helps him to manage players who don’t start every game. No one wants to be on the bench.”
Solskjaer came off the bench a record 150 times for United from 1996-2007. He started 216 games and scored 126 goals, with Ole’s Treble-winning strike in Barcelona, 20 years ago next month, the greatest in the club’s history. The Norwegian’s stock couldn’t be higher, but expectations are huge.
In a short time, Solskjaer has united the team and the club but there’s still much work to do, on the personal as well as professional side, that the world will judge. The Solskjaers will need to give serious thought about moving back to Manchester, somewhere where their children were born and enjoyed a happy family life. At present, they fly over to see Ole and sometimes watch a game.
It’s implausible that Ole won’t be at United’s wheel come the start of next season, though. And it’s remarkable that everyone at the club and in the stands now want that.
He may have started out as stop-gap, a sop to supporters who were starting to get bored and demoralised away from attending games, but Solskjaer has gone about his business with a keen intelligence and steely determination few who didn’t know him would have foreseen.
“GETTING SACKED AT CARDIFF WAS THE BEST THING THAT COULD HAVE HAPPENED TO HIM” – GARY NEVILLE