A week that has reminded me our beautiful game is also a very brutal business
LOYALTY in football works both ways – as I found out when Ryan Giggs rang this week to warn me that Salford City were poaching my manager.
I thought Giggsy was calling to arrange a game of small-court padel tennis, which we play occasionally, but this time he opened the conversation with, “You’re not going to like this…”
He said Salford wanted to speak to Alex Bruce, who had guided Macclesfield into the Northern Premier League play-off places and quarter-finals of the FA Trophy, two steps from Wembley.
Laughing, but disappointed, I replied: “First you take my place in the 1992 FA Youth Cup final team and now you’re taking my manager?”
Alex is a great guy and, in his position, 99 percent of people would have done the same thing.
I know how it works in football. About 20 years earlier, as a player, I had gone to the manager’s office and told Alex’s father, Steve, I wanted to leave Birmingham City because Blackburn were interested in signing me.
Football is the most beautiful game in the world, but it’s also the most ruthless, horrible industry.
If you have never worked in football before, you have no idea how brutal it can be.
It’s a dog-eat-dog business where players, coaches and managers need to be selfish to survive and to realise their ambitions. Survival is the name of the game. No hard feelings – as his director of football, I could not stand in Bruce’s way when he had the chance to join a league club in a full-time role as part of Karl Robinson’s coaching staff.
In many ways, Salford City are the club we aspire to be at Macclesfield. They came up through the non-league pyramid to reach the EFL mainstream, and had to deal with a lot of jealousy and envy along the way.
Our attendances are comparable, if not bigger, than Salford’s, but they operate three divisions higher than us and, after three years in existence since Macclesfield was reborn, the climb is getting steeper.
After letting Bruce go – and he leaves with our thanks for doing a great job – it meant we had to go and poach Michael Clegg from Warrington Rylands, currently two places above us in the league on half the budget, as our new manager.
Clegg brings with him assistants Nicky Hunt, the former Bolton defender, and Lewis Hardcastle, who had to retire as a player aged 22 because of a heart problem.
From the outside, some people probably think, ‘Here we go again, Macclesfield are throwing their weight around because they’ve got the money to do it’ – but nothing could be further from the truth.
We did not instigate this circuit of the merry-goround, but we had to accept it as the way football works.
For the record, Clegg becomes our sixth manager, and somehow it already feels like fate that we’ll meet his old club in the play-offs.
Of the others, Silkmen legend Danny Whitaker won us promotion in the first year and we let him go – that was my call and the worst feeling I have experienced in 34 years in the game.
Then David McNabb left by mutual consent because of work commitments, releasing Mark Duffy was my call and the other two – Neil Danns and Bruce – have gone on to coaching positions with EFL clubs.
Danns went to Tranmere, and on Wednesday night his son Jayden made his Premier League debut for Liverpool, a wonderful moment for the family.
That’s the happy side in football’s circle of life.
The unhappy side is when a Manchester United legend calls you up and it’s not about playing padel tennis.