Soccer
He was the force behind a quarter-century of Manchester United success. But while Sir Alex Ferguson is lauded as a hero of the club, his influence on their demise is equally telling. By Martin McKenzie-Murray.
Sir Alex Ferguson’s complicated legacy at Manchester United
The career of Britain’s greatest soccer manager, Sir Alex Ferguson, remarkably bridged two eras of the game. When Ferguson retired from Manchester United in 2013, he did so when his city’s rivals had been made competitive by their purchase by a petrostate. Chelsea were upheld by the wealth of Russian plutocracy, and the management of talent was undertaken by coaches with master’s degrees in physiotherapy and whose public statements were crafted by gilded PR firms.
There was a time, though, not long ago, when English clubs were run by a disproportionate number of Scottish autodidacts born of coalminers or shipbuilders – men with no formal coaching qualifications but possessed of implacable will. Such was Ferguson, who joined United in 1986.
“There weren’t any coaching badges as you have now,” Craig Johnston, the Australian who played for the great Liverpool teams of the 1980s, told me earlier this year. “These were just working-class blokes who came out of the mines … The likes of Bill Shankly and Jock Stein and Alex Ferguson came from there. They were strict disciplinarians and their managing was based on tough, hard men saying tough, hard things to other tough, hard men. And you had to deliver or die.”
In Ferguson’s 27 years with Manchester United, he won 13 league titles. In the 12 years since his retirement, United have had 10 managers for nil. They finished 15th in the league last year, and currently sit 14th.
Ferguson transformed United from domestic mediocrity to global behemoth, but – and hear me out here – it might be that this club hero and British knight also has something to do with the current malaise.
As manager, Alex Ferguson not only demanded loyalty but also was paranoid about its surveillance and unforgiving when he thought it deficient. He had the same mixture of granite will, paranoia and aggression one might find in a mob boss or energetic autocrat. Here’s Ferguson, from his 2013 autobiography, referring to former Liverpool manager Rafa Benítez. For maximum enjoyment, I recommend reading it in the voice of Tony Soprano and replacing “Benítez” with “that fat fuck, Phil Leotardo”: “The mistake he made was to turn our rivalry personal. Once you made it personal, you had no chance, because I could wait. I had success on my side. Benítez was striving for trophies while also taking me on. That was unwise.”
Ferguson never cared to disguise his feelings, knowing their explosive unpredictability had the tactical benefit of keeping people on their feet. There was never an individual ego in his squad he resiled from or flattered, and he made sure the whole world knew it.
Ferguson’s contempt for David Beckham’s vanity was well known before he accidentally left the England captain with a cut above one of his pretty eyes after kicking a discarded boot in the United changing room. If Beckham’s modern celebrity angered Ferguson with its suggestion of effeminacy, it also jeopardised his sense of control: Beckham had created his own cultural brand, one that existed independent of the sacred one of United, which Ferguson served as both Godfather and Machiavelli. Ferguson sold Beckham to Real Madrid in 2003.
“Control” is a word tellingly, if tediously, repeated in Ferguson’s 2013 autobiography. He distinguishes it from “power”, which is merely an instrument for maintaining it. So insistently is the word used that we might understand the concept of control to have acquired a kind of totemic status for him.
In the same book, Ferguson recalls a conversation with Tony Blair at a time when the then British prime minister’s deputy, Gordon Brown, was anxious to succeed him. He gently refutes Blair’s own recollection of their exchange. “My recollection is that Tony wasn’t specific about Gordon,” Ferguson writes. “His question was about superstars and how I dealt with them. My answer was: ‘The most important thing in my job is control. The minute they threaten your control, you have to get rid of them.’ ”
Ferguson’s ruthlessness – and his intolerance for any resistance – was applied evenly across all staff, from superstars to assistant coaches. His head was busy enough without having to fret about sulky individuals. To deal with them, he trusted his instincts above the fussiness of mediation. “If you have a worry about one of your staff, that tells you straight away there is a problem,” he writes. “It never made sense to me to go to bed every night worrying when you could do something to cut the problem away.”
Ferguson was notorious for his temper, but he also understood the value of withholding it. If there were blistering confrontations with players, there were also spells of silent treatment that freaked them out even more. In 2010, News of the World splashed with news that star striker Wayne Rooney had engaged sex workers during his wife Coleen’s first pregnancy. “I didn’t phone him the morning after the story broke,” Ferguson writes. “I know he would have wanted me to. That’s where my control was strong. He would have been looking for a phone call from me, an arm round his shoulder. To me that wasn’t the way to deal with it.”
Canny, and seemingly effective. “I needed to get his attention. Yet the best way to achieve that was by not saying anything to him – not offering consolation – to force him to think.”
I wondered this week how Ferguson might have handled Jack Grealish, the talented England midfielder who is on loan to Everton from Manchester City. Bought by the country’s best side in 2021 for a historic £100 million, Grealish subsequently lost form, favour and confidence. Rakish and affably candid, Grealish also enjoys a drink – something his City manager implied was a reason for his disfavour, or at least his susceptibility to injury.
Anyway, if it was assumed that Grealish – now 30 – was in decline, he has enjoyed something of a renaissance at Everton this season. The English Premier League’s Player of the Month for August, he told The Athletic recently he felt “love” from his new club’s manager, David Moyes. “You know, I’m quite vulnerable off the pitch and I wanted to go somewhere to just feel the love again and just wake up and play with a smile on my face again,” he said.
At his best, Grealish is a player of joyous improvisation – someone whose delight in the game and his own talent is obvious. But he needs love, he says, and I wonder how Ferguson would have managed him and if he would have thought the word “love” might be more appropriately replaced with “indulgence”.
A cliché of sport is that records speak for themselves, and no one in British soccer has one to rival Ferguson’s. This much is true, unless one wants to quibble over his number of European Championships. Success on the scale of Ferguson’s has a way of making us credulous about all claims made about their virtue and judgement.
Ferguson prides himself on, and is publicly celebrated for, the bluntness of his speech and the thickness of his skin. But about his role in the contemporary malaise of United – and the current, rapacious ownership of the Glazer family – he has long been conspicuously shy or irritably defensive.
As he’s declared in several autobiographies, Sir Alex’s interests off the field include the American Civil War, JFK’s assassination, fine wine and racehorses. After all, one “needs escapes from the pressures of football”. It must have been nightmarish then when one of these “escapes” entangled United, humiliated Ferguson and altered the club’s future.
In the early 2000s, Ferguson befriended J. P. McManus and John Magnier – then Ireland’s two wealthiest men – through their collective interest in the track. Their shared passion, though, quickly became a web of mutual professional interests. Ferguson agreed to put the thoroughbred racehorse Rock of Gibraltar in his name, though no money changed hands. Ferguson was gifting his imprimatur to their horse – offering to serve as its mascot. “Rocky” soon became a phenomenon and internationally famous.
Meanwhile, Ferguson had persuaded the two to invest in Manchester United. They did so in 2000, with a stake of 6.7 per cent, which three years later had increased to just shy of 30 per cent – making them the largest shareholders behind Rupert Murdoch’s BSkyB.
Ferguson’s interest in “Rocky” was committed by word only – a gentleman’s agreement that would soon be bitterly parsed in litigation. Ferguson understood that the lending of his name to the horse entitled him to a percentage of the studding rights – worth hundreds of millions of pounds. Magnier and McManus said he was badly mistaken – they’d agreed on Ferguson receiving only a cut of Rocky’s winnings.
In an act that both astonished and appalled United’s board, its high-profile manager sued two of its major shareholders. Compounding the board’s anger was the fact Ferguson had received legal advice that his suit was weak – something their own independent advice soon echoed.
In pursuing a misguided sense of justice, Ferguson ignored his own injunction to his players: that no man is bigger than the club. In doing so, he had also engaged two notoriously ruthless men with vaster resources than he. The Irishmen had their public relations company plant unflattering stories in the media and set private investigators upon Ferguson’s son’s involvement in brokering player transfers. Then a mysterious party employed actors to play shareholders at the club’s 2003 annual general meeting and ask forensically pointed questions of Ferguson.
To this messy intrigue can be added the bitter confrontation between Ferguson and his captain, Roy Keane, who advised his manager against suing. Keane was fierce and not easily intimidated. He told Ferguson he couldn’t win this battle and that to try was selfish.
Keane would soon leave United; Ferguson was humiliated by the suit and settled with a public statement declaring he had mistaken their agreement. Crucially for the club, the Irish partners would sell their stake in United to the American Glazer family in 2005, which almost doubled their shareholdings. Within months, their stake was 98 per cent – secured almost entirely by bank loans against the club’s assets.
Where previously Manchester United were debt free, now they were anchored by it. As the Glazer family accepted their dividends each year, the servicing of the debt substantially reduced the money the club had to spend on players. Their famed stadium, Old Trafford, has not been touched for a quarter of a century now and leaks when it rains. Today, the club’s debt is more than £1 billion.
The Glazers enjoyed then, as they enjoy now, Ferguson’s support – if not the support of the red half of Manchester, a city in which they’ve rarely shown their faces. Nor would their fully leveraged buyout of the club – in which the entirety of the cost is backed by loans – find government support today: such purchases of clubs were outlawed in 2023.
Sir Alex Ferguson’s record is, of course, extraordinary – but its aura mutes discussion about his influence on what followed. Ferguson was famously intolerant of conceitedness, yet his own helped change United’s history. The genius of the man might be more complicated than his bestselling memoirs admit.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on October 4, 2025 as "Mission: control".
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