Leading: Learning from Life and My Years at Manchester United Read online

  When I became a manager, one of my duties was to instil discipline. At St Mirren, the team was composed of part-time players but, nonetheless, we all travelled on the same bus to away games. One player decided to drive himself to East Fife one Saturday. I tore into him in the dressing room before the game for being too big for his boots and I told him he wouldn’t be part of the team that day. Then I realised I didn’t have a spare player to replace him with, so that piece of discipline went out the window.

  When I got to Aberdeen, which is a more sedate place than Glasgow, I realised that I would need to inject a bit of Glaswegian ferocity and discipline into the team. I didn’t spare the horses. I was aggressive and demanding and I suspect not everyone enjoyed it, but it made the players into men and increased their profiles.

  At Aberdeen there were three players who, in my opinion, were a nuisance. They just did not take training seriously enough. So I would make them work out again each afternoon, dumped them into the reserve team and sent them to play in freezing places like Peterhead on Tuesday and Wednesday nights. Eventually, I just got rid of them all.

  Discipline might also have been instilled, decades ago, by the fact that teams rarely seemed to change. It’s hard to believe (especially when you see the seven substitutes sitting on the bench during Premier League games) that substitutes were only first allowed in the mid-1960s. When I was a boy a team barely changed for the entire season, and even now I can name the Raith Rovers team from the early 1950s. There was also a large element of economic necessity about staying in the team to ensure you got your bonus money.

  From time to time, in my younger days, I was too much of a disciplinarian and did things that I regretted. For example, after Aberdeen returned home from Sweden with the European Cup Winners’ Cup in 1983, we had a parade which ended at our stadium, Pittodrie, which was packed to the gills. All the fans wanted to see the players carry the trophy around the field and Mark McGhee, Aberdeen’s centre-forward, was eager to show them the trophy. However, I thought he had been celebrating too much and so I tore into him and forbade him from carrying the trophy. Then his mother arrived in the dressing room and, of course, that made me feel rotten. So the next morning I phoned McGhee and apologised and asked him to accompany me down to the harbour where he and I showed the trophy to the fans who had travelled by boat back from Gothenburg. I was not eager to repeat incidents like that.

  The issue of discipline accompanied me throughout my career. In the conversations I had with Martin Edwards before accepting Manchester United’s offer to join them in November 1986, he alluded to the habit of some of the players to drink too much. He mentioned that one of the reasons United had been interested in me was that I had built a reputation as a manager who was known for maintaining discipline and not tolerating poor behaviour.

  When I got to United there was a lax attitude towards lots of things, including the clothes the players wore when travelling to games. They used to wear the tracksuits of whatever clothing company was sponsoring them–Reebok, Puma, adidas. It was a royal mess. I immediately insisted that they travel in flannels, the club blazer and tie. When Fabien Barthez joined us in 2000 as a goalkeeper from Monaco, he had to adjust to our clothing regimen. He did this by changing clothes on the bus on the way to games. After the game he would return his jacket, trousers, shirt and tie to Albert Morgan, our kit man, who would take care of them until Fabien was required to again appear as a representative of our club. Eric Cantona breached the dress code on one occasion when there was a big civic reception in the town hall for the team and he appeared wearing a suede jacket which had long fringes and a picture of an American Indian chief on the back. The next day he swore to me–and I believed him–that he had thought it was going to be a casual occasion, which is how it would have been treated in France.

  Players give a manager plenty of opportunities to crack the whip, so it’s best to pick and choose the moments. You don’t have to mete out punishment very often for everyone to get the message. For example, I never thought it useful to fine players if they were late for training. Around Manchester, especially in the winter, the roads quickly get clogged if there is an accident or maintenance works. Players would sometimes get stuck in traffic jams and arrive late. If it happened once or twice I didn’t care. However, if someone was a repeated late offender, I’d suggest to him that he leave his house ten minutes earlier and would point out to him that, by being late, he was letting his team-mates down. No team player wants to do that. I only remember fining one player for tardy appearances at the training ground and that was the goalkeeper, Mark Bosnich, who was repeatedly late.

  I wasn’t afraid of crossing into what some of the players might have considered their private territory–hairstyles and jewellery. I never understood why players would want to have long hair when they spend so much effort trying to be as fit and quick as possible. Anything, even a few extra locks of hair, just didn’t seem sensible. I had my first issue with a player on this topic when Karel Poborský came to Manchester from Slavia Prague in 1996, looking as though he was going to play for Led Zeppelin rather than United. I did manage to persuade him to trim his locks but, even so, they were always too long for my taste. There were other players who would be wearing necklaces carrying crosses that seemed heavier than those the pilgrims carry up the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem. I banned all those. However, there wasn’t much I could do about tattoos since it was hard–even for me–to argue that they added any weight. Eric Cantona started that particular craze when he arrived one morning with the head of an American Indian chief stencilled on to his left breast. Since Eric was venerated by his team-mates, several other players followed suit. I was always struck by the fact that Cristiano Ronaldo never chose to deface his body. It said a lot about his self-discipline.

  Leaders can also hand down different sentences. Inexperienced, or insecure, leaders are often tempted to make any infraction a capital offence. That is all well and good except, once you have hung the person, you are plumb out of options. I gradually began to understand the wisdom behind the phrase, ‘Let the punishment fit the crime’ and, as judge, jury and chief executioner, I had plenty of sentences at my disposal. A simple yet deadly one was silence, and I used it often. It did not require any public humiliation or tongue-lashing, yet because everyone likes to be acknowledged, the recipient of my silent treatment knew that he was in the woodshed. I doled out lots of fines to players as a way to rap their knuckles and try to keep them focused on the team. They would usually be handed out after bookings or red cards received for stupid behaviour, like dissent shown towards the referee or a wild tackle or unsuitable behaviour off the pitch. These numbers grew more consequential in absolute size as pay ballooned in the Premier League, but the nature of the fine–a week’s or two weeks’ wages–remained constant. After a disastrous Christmas party in 2007, I fined the first and the reserve team a week’s wages.

  For the youngsters who were hoping to make the squad, I could set their heads spinning by just refusing to let them travel with the first team. For the squad members there were a couple of other ways I used to drive home the price of infractions. One was to leave a player out of the side, but the more severe was to make him sit in the stands dressed in his civvies. That is a footballer’s equivalent of a public hanging. Nobody was immune from this.

  Finally, there were the severest penalties of all–a suspension and a transfer. You might think that the second was the toughest, but that was not the way I looked at it. Once we had decided a player was going to be transferred, it was because he either no longer fitted into what we needed at United or, in a few cases, like Cristiano Ronaldo, we were honouring promises. From my point of view, the suspension was by far the most painful because the penalty was borne by both the player and the club. That happened in January 1995 when Eric Cantona was suspended for the final four months of the season by United and a further four months by the FA.

  Every player dislikes being omitted from the first team, and that
sense of disappointment only grows as players age and start to come to grips with the fact that their best playing days are behind them. However, I never let sentiment interfere with my team selections and that was particularly true for big games. In 1994 I dropped Bryan Robson from the squad for the FA Cup final. Bryan was at the end of his distinguished 13-year stay at United and I had underestimated how important it was to him to have a crack at winning his fourth FA Cup medal. In retrospect, I would have kept him in the squad and perhaps played him for the last part of the game

  Even though, as my players knew too well, I had a tendency to explode, my temper usually did not have a destructive effect. That was not the case for players who abandoned their self-control and self-discipline on the field. If they got a string of yellow cards or, worse still, a red card as a result of some rush of blood to the head, it could have bitter consequences for the team. Not only did we have to play with ten men but we also lost the services of the player while he was suspended. Peter Schmeichel, Paul Ince, Bryan Robson, Roy Keane, Mark Hughes and Eric Cantona could all start a fight in an empty house. That did not help our cause one bit, and I made no secret about my displeasure when they got sent off for committing some act of folly.

  There are some people who just seem to be immune to discipline. Juan Sebastián Verón, the Argentinian midfielder, was like that. Try as I might, I could not get him to fit into our system. He was a fantastic player with tremendous ability, but he was just a wild card. If I played him centre midfield he would end up wide right. If I played him wide right, he would wind up wide left. He simply did not have the necessary self-discipline and so we traded him after two years and 82 appearances. You cannot build a team with blithe free spirits.

  There are also some players who will follow instructions to the letter. Ji-sung Park, our South Korean midfielder, was one of those. If I gave him an instruction he was like a dog with a bone–he just would not let go. When we played AC Milan in the Champions League in 2010, I asked Ji-sung Park to mark Andrea Pirlo, their midfielder and creative force. Pirlo was used to running the show for Milan but Ji-sung effectively suffocated him.

  I placed discipline above all else and it might have cost us several titles. If I had to repeat things, I’d do precisely the same, because once you bid farewell to discipline you say goodbye to success and set the stage for anarchy. Shortly after Christmas in 2011, I discovered that three United players had gone out on the town on Boxing Day and were the worse for wear when they showed up for training the following morning. So I ordered all of them to do extra training, and dropped the three of them from the team we fielded for the following game against Blackburn Rovers. We already had a large number of injuries, and although this decision weakened us further, I felt this was the correct thing to do. We lost the game to Blackburn 3–2, which cost us a precious three points, and eventually we lost the League to Manchester City on goal difference. Many years earlier, in 1995, our decision to suspend Eric Cantona for the remainder of the season, following his fight with a fan after he got sent off at Crystal Palace, cost us both the League and FA Cup. At the time we suspended Eric (a suspension that, subsequently, was made even more severe by the FA) we were just a point off the top of the table and, had he played for the remainder of the season, I am positive we would have won by about ten points, instead of being pipped at the post by one point by Blackburn Rovers. In the long run principles are just more important than expediency.

  If you can assemble a team of 11 talented players who concentrate intently during training sessions, take care of their diet and bodies, get enough sleep and show up on time, then you are almost halfway to winning a trophy. It is always astonishing how many clubs are incapable of doing this.

  Before we beat Liverpool 1–0 in the 1996 FA Cup final, I sensed we would win the game by the way our opponents appeared for their pre-match inspection of the pitch. The entire Liverpool team, with the exception of the manager and his assistant, appeared in white suits supplied by a fashion designer. For me it signalled a breakdown in discipline and showed that the team was distracted by a frivolous sideshow. I mentioned this to my kit manager, Norman Davies, and the forecast proved correct when Eric Cantona scored a few minutes from the final whistle. A different example occurred years earlier when in September 1985 Aberdeen beat Rangers 3–0 at Ibrox Park after two of our opponents got sent off during the first half. Rangers had just tried to bully us and, with the crowd going nuts, lost control of their senses. It was complete pandemonium and we had to scuttle to the dressing room for safety for a period during the second half while the police cleared the pitch of marauding fans. This was one of those classic cases where our opponents destroyed themselves.

  I always felt that our triumphs were an expression of the consistent application of discipline. It may surprise some to learn that much of the success comes from not getting carried away or trying to do the impossible and taking too many risks. I had a habit of sitting down in January and looking at the fixtures for the remainder of the season for both United and our principal opponents, and would tot up the points that I thought each club would obtain. I was never too far off and the exercise helped illuminate how important it was to grind out the unglamorous 1–0 results. During these sorts of games, we would concentrate on maintaining a compact midfield and yielding nothing. One particular game sticks in my mind: in March 2007 we went to Middlesbrough during a three-month period when we had the Swedish striker, Henrik Larsson, on loan from Helsingborgs. I could not have asked more from him when, under real pressure, he abandoned his attacking position and fell back into midfield just to help dig out the result. When Henrik appeared in the dressing room at the end of the game, all the players and staff stood up and spontaneously broke into applause for the immense effort he had made in his unaccustomed role. At the end of the season we requested an extra Premier League winners’ medal for Henrik, even though he had not played the ten games that at the time were required to obtain the award.

  Work Rate

  My parents always worked. My father worked in the Glasgow shipyards while my mother first worked in a wire factory and then in one that made parts for aeroplanes. My father often worked 60 hours a week and his was a tough, cold, dangerous existence. Glasgow is at about the same latitude as Moscow, so when the winter winds swept up the Clyde, the shipyards were brutal places. He would usually take two weeks off a year. In 1955 he worked 64 hours a week for pay of £7 and 15 shillings, or about £189 in today’s money. After he died from cancer in 1979, my mother cleaned houses. My parents’ devotion to work was probably accentuated by the fact that there wasn’t much of a social safety net. Safety standards were appalling, health benefits were negligible, and the industry of lawyers who specialise in making ridiculous claims for the thinnest of reasons didn’t exist. I never knew a time when my parents were not working. For a holiday in the summer we used to take a bus to Saltcoats, where all my brother and I did was play football or draughts or chess.

  Since both my parents worked their fingers to the bone, I somehow just absorbed the idea that the only way I was going to improve my life was to work very hard. It was baked into my marrow. I was incapable of coasting and I have always been irritated by people who frittered away natural talents because they were not prepared to put in the hours. There’s a lot of satisfaction that comes from knowing you’re doing your best, and there’s even more that comes when it begins to pay off. I suppose that explains why I played in games on the day that I got married and on the day my first son was born. I only missed three United games out of 1,500–the first to be in Glasgow with my brother following the death of his wife in 1998, then because of my eldest son’s wedding in South Africa in 2000 and finally to scout David de Gea in 2010.

  At St Mirren and Aberdeen I used to watch as many games a week as possible. I usually did this with Archie Knox, who was Aberdeen’s assistant manager. Archie’s parents were farmers and he grew up on a farm outside Dundee. So he had always worked farmers’ hours and shared
my sort of work ethic. The two of us would travel to the games together and, if we were going to Glasgow, Archie would drive down there and I would sleep, and on the way back I’d do the driving and Archie would be snoring away. The round trip could take six hours. Whenever we got tempted to skip a game and take the night off, we’d always say to each other, ‘If we miss one game in Glasgow, we’ll miss two.’

  In most football clubs, managers work much harder than people imagine. Within the Premier League there is unrelenting pressure, and outside the Premier League there isn’t enough money around for managers to employ big staffs. That was certainly true when I was starting out. At St Mirren I had a staff of four, which included the assistant manager, a reserve team coach, the physio and a part-time kit manager. At Aberdeen Teddy Scott was the kit man, coach of the reserves and general oiler of any squeaky wheels. He also did all the laundry and ironed the kits. Occasionally he’d sleep on the snooker table because he’d missed the last bus. Even at United, when I started, we only had a staff of eight.

  A few times at Aberdeen the entire staff, the apprentices and even the chairman would be up at six o’clock in the morning to go and clear snow from the ground. In March 1980 we started our run towards my first League championship on a day when we had cleared seven or eight inches of snow off the field. We beat Morton 1–0. It was the only game played that day in Scotland.

  All the top managers, Carlo Ancelotti, José Mourinho and Arsène Wenger have a formidable work ethic. But it is the unsung heroes who I always admired the most–the sort of managers who would never give up, even though life and luck had not given them one of the top teams. In Scotland I used to run into Alex Smith and Jim McLean in all sorts of godforsaken places, on nights when the rain was hammering down and it would have been much nicer to be sitting in front of the television. Alex managed clubs north of the border for almost 40 years, and Jim was the manager of Dundee United for 22 seasons. Lennie Lawrence and John Rudge are two men whose names most people outside football probably don’t even know but Lennie is one of the few people who has managed over 1,000 games for clubs like Charlton Athletic, Bradford City, Luton Town and Grimsby Town, while John managed Port Vale for 16 seasons before spending another 14 years or so as the director of football at Stoke City. Neither of them ever gave up. Football consumed them. I would often see them watching our reserve team play in front of a handful of fans.