Why I told Fergie to f *** off... and the day thugs threatened to cripple me
Rollicking revelations of ex-United (and City) star Andrei Kanchelskis
LAUGHTER echoes all the way from Kyrgyzstan as Andrei Kanchelskis relives one of his earliest encounters with Alex Ferguson at Manchester United.
‘Good morning Andrei, how’s it going?’ inquired Ferguson cheerily as he walked past his new Soviet signing in a corridor at the Cliff training ground in March 1991.
‘F*** off, you Scottish b ***** d!’ came the reply.
The look on Ferguson’s face and hysterical reaction of his new team-mates hiding around the corner told Kanchelskis that he had been the victim of a prank.
‘We used to do the same to the Brazilians when they came to Moscow. Teach them to tell policemen to f*** off,’ chuckles Kanchelskis in a video call from the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek.
‘I said this bad thing to Alex Ferguson. He was red-faced and said, “What?” Then he understood what had happened and everybody laughed.
‘George Scanlan was interpreter for me and Eric Cantona because he spoke Russian and French. He said, “Andrei, next time don’t say this”. Of course, I never did it again after that.’
There was a real camaraderie among Ferguson’s first great team at United, one that ended the club’s 26-year wait for the title in 1993 and landed the Double a year later. Without the restrictions on foreign players, who knows what more they could have achieved in Europe?
It brought together Cantona, Bryan Robson, Roy Keane, Paul Ince and Mark Hughes, with Ryan Giggs on one wing and Kanchelskis the other.
Look up the video of United’s title celebration at Steve Bruce’s house on May 2, 1993.
‘The Russian is on his way,’ announces Bruce, brandishing a big cigar, before Kanchelskis walks through the front door to a hero’s welcome, wearing the Versace gear that became his trademark in the dressing room at Old Trafford.
It is a bond that Kanchelskis suspects might be missing in the modern-day Manchester United. No sooner has he retold the story about insulting Ferguson than there is something more serious he wants to get off his chest.
‘When I played for United, the dressing room, the players, were held together, but I don’t understand what’s happening now. I think there are problems somewhere,’ says the 55-year-old.
‘Nobody spoke about money, we played for the football. Nice people, nice dressing room. Now, first of all for players it’s money, money, money. Like Alex Ferguson said, “Listen, Manchester United first, second money”.
‘When I signed for United in 1991, the contract was £120,000 a year. My salary at Shakhtar Donetsk was two times better. I could have stayed at Shakhtar with a big cigar earning two or maybe three times as much, but I moved for the football, not the money.
‘Now it’s different. The players are different. Everyone speaks about money. I don’t understand what’s happening in football now.
‘If you see in the past, everybody was working for these titles — the people cleaning the kitchen, the director, the secretary, the players, the kit man.
‘First of all, Man United is a big club and like a family. Some people playing for United now don’t remember that. There’s no family now, in my opinion.’ Kanchelskis did not even know which club he was joining as
he first landed in Manchester — United, City, Liverpool or Everton — although he went on to represent three of those four.
The buccaneering winger became a big favourite at Old Trafford, picking up seven winners’ medals in four full seasons, and was equally popular at Everton.
It was not all rosy. Kanchelskis felt Ferguson’s wrath on more than one occasion, even though he did not always know what his Scottish manager was saying. Sometimes, Scanlan would take the player into another room and shout at him in Russian just to get the point across.
On one occasion, Ferguson even threatened to sack him after he refused to play for the reserves.
When the end eventually came in the summer of 1995 — after United had lost the title to Blackburn and the FA Cup final to Everton — the perception was that Kanchelskis was surplus to requirements, along with Ince and Hughes, making way for the Class of ’92. David Beckham took his place on the right wing.
In fact, he asked to go as a result of a row with United physio Dave Fevre over a hernia diagnosis and pressure from his agent Grigory Essaoulenko, who stood to make a cut from his move to Everton.
IN his autobiography Russian Winters, written with Tim Rich, Kanchelskis scoffs at talk of mafia involvement behind his departure from United, although he acknowledges an incident in which Essaoulenko took it upon himself to give Ferguson a box containing £40,000 during a meeting at a Manchester Airport hotel. Ferguson, who confirmed the story in his autobiography and alleged Essaoulenko had threatened to harm United chairman Martin Edwards if Kanchelskis was not sold, wisely gave the money to the club, who handed it back.
There was never any suggestion of wrongdoing by Kanchelskis, of course, but it is one more chapter to add to a colourful career as a player and coach.
His book details how he left an increasingly lawless Soviet Union to move to Manchester as the Iron Curtain came down. The man who sold him to United, Shakhtar president Akhat Bragin, was killed by a bomb planted in a VIP area of the stadium in a mafia hit several years later.
When Kanchelskis moved to Fiorentina, a resident in his block of apartments was murdered by the mob, who left the body next to a Botticelli painting.
More recently he managed FC Ufa in Russia, where the club’s sporting director burst into the dressing room at half-time to threaten the players with a baseball bat.
And in November, Kanchelskis revealed four Chechnyan thugs threatened to cripple him if he did not agree to lower his £1.28m compensation payout after leaving Uzbekistan Super League club Navbahor Namangan.
Throughout it all there is a nagging regret that he left United too soon. His feelings for the club and Ferguson are clear during our hour
‘The best club in England are Man United. Second, Liverpool. Maybe Arsenal are third and City fourth’
long chat. ‘I love Manchester United. In my heart it’s still the best club in Europe,’ says Kanchelskis. ‘Maybe I will come to the new Everton stadium, it depends on my future. Of course, I will go to Old Trafford and visit Sir Alex. I will bring him a present of black caviar, because he loves it.’ It is 30 years since the highlight of Kanchelskis’s career in England, the November night at a raucous Old Trafford in 1994 when United crushed City 5-0, their biggest win in the Manchester derby, and he got on the end of three Cantona assists for a hat-trick. It was the first in this fixture for
‘I didn’t move directly to Man City from United, like Tevez did. In my opinion that’s terrible. Some fans would have killed me’
34 years and the last for another 28 years until, incredibly, Erling Haaland and Phil Foden both scored hat-tricks in the same game when City won 6-3 in October 2022. ‘Is it 30 years ago? Oh my God, I’m so old!’ exclaims Kanchelskis. ‘Everybody remembers this derby in 1994 and the result. It was a great game, absolutely brilliant. ‘It wasn’t like Man City now, but a derby is a derby. After the game everybody said, “Thank you very much, Andrei”, and signed the ball. ‘I’ve still got it in my apartment in Moscow with my other trophies and medals. ‘City are a very big team now but not the best club. The best club are Man United. Second, Liverpool. Maybe Arsenal are third and City fourth. Sunday is a big derby, especially for Man United because they aren’t favourites now and City are the best team in the Premier League at the moment.’
After Kanchelskis became Everton’s record signing, the most expensive Russian player in world football at Fiorentina and broke the Scottish transfer record at Rangers, he returned to Manchester on loan at City in 2001, a decade after joining United.
He is one of only 14 players to represent both clubs at first-team level in the post-war era. Half of them moved between United and City, with Carlos Tevez being the most controversial of all.
‘I didn’t move directly to Man City from United like Tevez. In my opinion, that’s terrible,’ says Kanchelskis, who was also the first man to score in the Manchester, Merseyside and Glasgow derbies.
‘If I’d moved directly from United to City, some fans would have killed me. This is a bad move.
‘Why did I go to City? The truth is because Joe Royle was coaching there and I remembered him from Everton, a great coach, great personality and great man. I needed some practice and I wanted to play 90 minutes because I had a problem with the coach at Rangers, Dick Advocaat.
‘Thank you to Joe Royle and to the fans because they didn’t boo me because I was from United. I played 11 games and tried to help City stay in the Premier League.’
As it happened, City went down. The last of his appearances came at Old Trafford in a derby made infamous for Roy Keane’s red card lunge at Alfie Haaland.
‘When I moved to Man City they weren’t a big team,’ recalls Kanchelskis, who remembers captain Steve Howey lying in bed surrounded by empty beer bottles on a pre-season trip to Marbella.
‘There were some problems. Some people don’t understand what happened and said I was a bad man to move. No guys, listen, I didn’t move directly between Man United and Man City.
‘It was difficult times because when we went to Old Trafford the fans whistled and booed me when I touched the ball and I didn’t understand why. Now it’s OK, I understand everything.’
After working in Russia, Latvia, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, Kanchelskis was appointed United manager in December. That is Muras United of Kyrgyzstan.
‘Muras United and Manchester United, it sounds a little bit similar, yes?’ he smiles.
‘We get 3,000 fans, not like 75,000 at Old Trafford. But step by step, we’re hoping to get better. Everybody in the world likes football. Now we’re having a discussion about the Manchester derby.
‘Every coach dreams of working in the Premier League because it’s the best league in the world. It’s my dream as well.’
Kanchelskis was born and raised in the city of Kirovograd, which adopted its Ukrainian name of Kropyvnytskyi in 2016.
His Lithuanian father Antanas died of a heart attack when he was 17. His Ukrainian mother Yevgenia still lives in the city, south of Kyiv.
Kanchelskis remembers gunfire on the streets when the Soviet Union collapsed. In recent months, Kropyvnytskyi has come under attack from Russian forces.
He learned to fire and strip a Kalashnikov rifle at school, but cut his national service from two years to three months because he played for Dynamo Kyiv, who had links to the KGB.
Describing himself as ‘a Soviet kind of guy’, Kanchelskis scored the last goal in Soviet team history against Cyprus in 1991 before representing the CIS (Confederation of Independent States) at Euro ’92. When he joined United and chose Russia over Lithuania and Ukraine, he got death threats.
So there is a weariness when he is asked about the current conflict in his homeland.
‘My mind is football, not politics. Sport and politics don’t go together,’ he says. ‘My mother lives in Ukraine, my sister lives in Israel, I live in Moscow, it’s no matter.
‘This is very sad. It’s a long story about my situation, my decision. I was born in the USSR, I lived in the USSR and I played for the USSR. It’s no problem for me to go to Ukraine, England or Russia.
‘In my team now, there are some Russian players and Ukrainian players. There are no problems.
‘It’s like United players being from Ireland, Scotland, England, Russia and France. It’s football and everybody plays together.
‘Now I’m in Kyrgyzstan. I’ve got a new life and job, a new book. I’m coaching a new team and I’m very happy. I’m enjoying life.’