HERE’S WHAT FERGIE DID NEXT ...
If you thought he’d take retirement easy, United’s greatest boss puts on his shoes every morning (rather than his slippers) so he’s ready to work
Arandom encounter with Sir alex Ferguson at a stadium in the foothills of France’s massif Central revealed how the world had changed utterly for the man who is approaching the fifth anniversary of his retirement.
It was Saint-Etienne’s Stade Geoffroy-Guichard, about a year back. manchester United arrived with an emphatic first-leg advantage in the Europa League round of 32 and as Ferguson joked about the British writers consuming all the French food on offer, it seemed like the old days, before he put the barricades up.
He grinned and disappeared into the lift with executive vice-chairman Ed Woodward and a few others, no longer carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders.
He still follows United to the most obscure places, fulfils occasional ambassadorial duties and managed stars of the 2008 Champions Leaguewinning side in michael Carrick’s testimonial last year. But encounters with the team’s players are fleeting now.
marcos rojo happened to buy a house in Ferguson’s road, in the Cheshire town of Wilmslow. He was unsure how the one-time manager might react when, with family over from argentina and United playing the next day, fireworks were set off after midnight. They say Ferguson saw the funny side. It would have been very different five years ago.
There are times when you feel the 76-year-old’s wisdom and sense of perspective is still sorely needed around the club. Just a minute’s conversation with Jose mourinho, for example, might have persuaded the manager to banish thoughts of that 12-minute soliloquy he gave last Friday. mourinho wound up deconstructing the very notion of a manchester United ‘heritage’. Ferguson would never have given journalists that gold dust, or that satisfaction.
The disastrous 10-month tenure of david moyes accelerated his break with the past. He anointed moyes and had that particular chapter in United’s history taken a different course, the kingmaker would have retained an entitlement — as wise counsellor and visionary — to remain involved. Yet with moyes gone and Louis van Gaal — a manager of Ferguson’s own generation and standing — installed, Ferguson receded much further into the background. His counsel was sought less often. Woodward took his own road far more.
Yet he was as fascinated as ever to know the ins and outs of the domain he had occupied for 26 years. There would still be occasional calls to old allies at old Trafford, to chew the fat. But his great ally david Gill left within weeks of him so the most significant thread to the past was almost immediately cut.
There is evidence that putting the club behind him has felt like a bereavement at times. In the summer of 2013, as moyes and Woodward engaged in a desperately vexed search for new players, Ferguson found himself playing kalooki — a Jamaican form of rummy — with his brother-in-law, on a family holiday in the mediterranean.
When the new season began, he found the directors’ lounge at old Trafford was a different world. It was the noise of the fans which surprised him most. ‘When I had been managing, I had usually been able to block out the sound from the stands and it rarely registered with me,’ he reflected.
Ferguson has never forgotten suspecting there were whispers about him when he arrived in 1986. The chill of paranoia would consume him every time he saw two directors talking at old Trafford. ‘It’s amazing how that anxiety can transmit itself to become guilt,’ Ferguson said in his little remembered book,
Six Years at United. So these are all reasons why he has sought a life beyond the club. and why his work for UEFa — where executive committee member Gill will be followed by United communications director Phil Townsend, who takes up the top media role this summer — has been increasingly important to him. He chairs the annual elite coaches’ forums in Geneva for European football’s governing body, meeting technical director Ioan Lupescu, as well as managers such as Gerard Houllier and roy Hodgson. and his work for the Champions and Europa League technical study groups provides an insight into his fascination with the development of the game.
‘The counter-attack has become more prominent today; the condition of pitches is superb; and also the protection of footballers has become more prevalent,’ Ferguson said in an interview with a UEFa journalist last may. ‘So a lot of these things add up to a far better spectacle. In my time at United, it was “as long as you win”; if it was 4-3, oK, or 5-4, oK.’
He also provided a detailed technical assessment on the Europa League final, in which United defeated ajax in Stockholm. He was struck by the absence of holding by defenders in the area. ‘There was no blocking, no pulling jerseys,’ he reflected. ‘Hopefully this was an example of the way the game should be played.’ But the old Ferguson philosophy was alive and well in the way he noted ajax’s potential to exploit the quality of their wide players against mourinho’s team — which they failed to do. ‘If you’ve got two wide players, penetration from midfield on a diagonal ball is very useful,’ he said. ‘I would have thought ajax in the second half would have done that.’
Football has by no means been his only preoccupation in retirement. Before calling it a day, he would often summon the memory of his father, alexander, who retired on his 65th birthday and was dead a year later. an 80-year-old Bernie Ecclestone’s assertion that people retire to die always struck a chord. He was always determined to be busy. It is an article of faith for him now that he puts on shoes — not his slippers — after breakfast. In the management book,
Leading, which Ferguson wrote with michael moritz, he detailed how his ownership of a number of horses had occupied him. He described ‘going through the sales catalogue, trying to understand bloodlines and pedigree of horses. Every now and then, when one of these horses turns into a winner, we have made some decent money — although this is the exception. I don’t kid myself.’
The view from the racing world is that by confining himself only to a share of various horses — reckoned to be up to 20 at one stage — through blue-chip syndicates, or in partnership with friends such as Ged mason, a manchester businessman, he was distancing himself from the obsessive standards he applied on the football field.
When collaborating on the book with moritz, Ferguson had just watched The Brothers, Stephen Kinzer’s account of the dulles brothers, US Secretary of State and head of the CIa in the 1950s. american history always was a source of fascination.
Yet it’s hard to avoid the sense that his great club’s fortunes, and what he might do to restore its place as a European powerhouse, still consumes him most. Spiralling transfer fees make his annual complaints about the lack of ‘value’ in the market look dated. But his philosophy is as relevant as ever. ‘You have a duty and a responsibility to entertain,’ he told UEFa. ‘We have to always remember that there’s a public to be entertained.’