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

  I encountered this issue when one of my twin sons, Darren, wanted to play as a professional. I never really considered signing him for United because I always thought it was going to be too awkward for both of us. So Cathy and I went to see Brian Clough at Nottingham Forest, and Darren was about to sign for him in 1990 when Archie Knox, my assistant manager, argued that I should not let him go to an opponent. Archie’s point was that it was only going to be awkward if Darren made the first team. I talked it over with Cathy, who suggested I let Darren decide. I remember going to his bedroom to pose the question and it was Darren who decided he wanted to play for his old man.

  As things would have it, Darren made his debut for the first team in 1990 and played 16 games during 1993, the year United won our first League title under my management. He was very unlucky because he got a hamstring injury in a Scotland Under-21 game against Italy and was out for a couple of months. By the time he was ready to return, Paul Ince and Bryan Robson had recovered from injuries, and the following summer I did what I needed to do as manager and signed Roy Keane, who was then 21, to buttress our midfield. That was a tragedy for Darren, because after that he never really got back into the side; he asked for a transfer because he was keen to play regular first-team football. I helped him land at Wolverhampton Wanderers but then, poor devil, he had to endure four managers in as many seasons. While he was in the first team and in the dressing room, it was a bit difficult for both of us. To Darren’s credit, he understood that, at United, I was the manager not his dad, as I found out when I tried to pump him for information about the lifestyle habits of a couple of players. There was no way that Darren was going to squeal on his team-mates. He played his cards very close to his chest. As for moving Darren along to Wolves, Cathy has never forgiven me. From time to time she will remind me with the words: ‘You sold your own son.’

  Captains

  As hard as I worked on my own leadership skills, and as much as I tried to influence every aspect of United’s success on the field, at kick-off on match day things moved beyond my control. On the field, the person responsible for making sure the 11 players acted as a team was the club captain. Even though I imagine some people think this is a ceremonial position, it is far from that. Yes, there are elements of symbolism to the role, because the captain is the man who always gets to lift the trophy–but I only ever wanted a leader, rather than someone who might look good on top of a cake. It is a critical decision. For football managers the club captain is the equivalent of what a business unit leader or a country manager might be in a company. He is the person responsible for making sure the agenda of the organisation is pursued.

  I was always a strong personality, and when I selected people to transmit my intentions to others, I looked for the same quality in them. I don’t know where it came from, but even when I was playing for my school team and getting into youth-team football, I’d start getting into the players. My dad always used to go to the games and watch and never say a word. But there was one boy whose dad complained to mine and said, ‘Could you speak to your son, he’s always going on to my boy.’

  Every leader has different characteristics and leads in his own manner. I suppose that’s true for CEOs of companies as much as it is for football managers or captains. That was certainly the case during my career as a manager when each of our captains had very different personality traits. When I selected the captain I was looking for four principal virtues. The first was a desire to lead on the field. Some of the finest players just did not aspire to do that, even though they commanded immense respect. Paul Scholes is the shining example of this. He was an extraordinary player and an emblem of everything United stood for but, even though he has what it takes to be a winning manager, he never aspired to be our captain. He is a man of few words, doesn’t wear his emotions on his sleeve, and has no need for the limelight. However, nobody should be fooled, because deep down he torments himself if he messes up.

  The second attribute I wanted was someone I could trust to convey my desires, and the third was a person whom the other players would respect as a leader and whose instructions they would follow. Not every creative person is born to be a leader. They may be incredible members of a team and astonishingly productive individual contributors, but poor leaders. My son Mark tells me this is also true in his line of work, where people who are very gifted as investors often are not the best types to run and lead an investment organisation, simply because the skills required in that role are not their forte. I also wanted captains capable of adapting to changing circumstances. No general is going to win a war unless he has colonels and majors who, in the thick of a fight that is going poorly, can muster the troops, galvanise them into action and help them defy the odds. The same was true for us, even though United’s battles were fought on grounds with names such as Anfield, Camp Nou or Stadio delle Alpi rather than Waterloo or El Alamein.

  There were a handful of captains of other teams that I came to admire, although I obviously didn’t know them as well as the Aberdeen or United skippers. Alan Shearer at Newcastle United, John Terry at Chelsea and Tony Adams at Arsenal are the ones who stick out for me. They were all driven guys who had an edge to their personalities, and their teams were all the better as a result. Johan Cruyff was probably the most influential during my career. The players, whether it was at Ajax or in the Dutch side, probably listened to him more than they did the manager. Cruyff couldn’t help himself: he had to direct and control everything.

  When I arrived at Aberdeen I didn’t have to worry about picking a leader for the team because Willie Miller was the captain–when I got there and when I left–which was a real tribute to his ability and fitness level. At United Bryan Robson was the club skipper when I appeared and there wasn’t a player on the field who could match his determination and grit or his ability to read a game. He was a perfect captain and ticked all the boxes. I trusted him to make on-field adjustments to playing positions; he was also someone who would speak his mind, which was something I valued. Robson remained captain until he started getting plagued by injuries, and in 1991 Steve Bruce led the team for most of the season. Bruce was solid, courageous, and stuck his head into all manners of dangerous positions. Not only would he always put his neck on the line, but he also has a natural instinct for taking care of those around him and a great sense of humour. Both Bryan and Steve were invaluable in other ways, particularly when it came to helping young players and their parents understand the possibilities if they elected to cast their lot with United. When Bruce’s knees began to give him trouble, I picked our talisman, Eric Cantona, and subsequently Roy Keane. Eric and Roy were a study in contrasts–one French and the other Irish. Eric was a man of few words, but when he offered praise it had a dramatic effect. It was more meaningful to David Beckham, after he scored his miraculous goal against Wimbledon, on the opening day of the 1996–97 season, that Eric considered it the best goal he had ever witnessed, than the fact that he had pulled off the impossible. Roy, by contrast, was a man whose intensity could intimidate his team-mates, but he was a great leader on the pitch.

  Peter Schmeichel became captain when Roy Keane was injured, and was the team leader on the day we beat Bayern Munich to win the Champions League in 1999 when Roy was suspended. Even though there are other examples of goalkeepers who acted as captains, such as Iker Casillas of Real Madrid and Spain and Gianluigi Buffon and Dino Zoff in Italy, there is a natural tendency to select a player who is in the thick of things rather than the one between the posts. So a goalkeeper who becomes a captain has to be a bit larger than life, and Peter certainly was. Not only was he a massive physical presence–taller than many of the defenders who played for United–but he was also able to transmit his confidence, enthusiasm and zest along the entire length of the pitch.

  In the downtime between games I would often solicit the opinion of my captains, but they all understood that I was the ultimate decision-maker. I was also keen to hear what they had to say about particular players, but c
aptains tend to toe the line and stay true to their playing comrades rather than tell tales out of school. I remembered this dividing line from my own playing days and respected it. I frequently talked to the captains and other senior players about how we might approach an opponent. In 1996 as we were preparing to meet Liverpool in the FA Cup final, I spent time with Eric Cantona and Peter Schmeichel trying to figure out how we were going to deal with Steve McManaman. Eric suggested that we drop Roy Keane in front of our back four to keep tabs on McManaman, who floated behind their forwards and was a real handful. It was an astute observation, which we followed; as a result, McManaman was silenced and we won what was a tedious, uneventful game when Eric scored the only goal. Eric’s advice was crucial. It didn’t matter to me that he had come up with the idea rather than a member of the coaching staff or myself. It just made a ton of sense. It wasn’t as if I was chasing honours or looking for personal glory or seeking to be the font of all wisdom. I just wanted the team to win.

  It was never quite the same in my last decade at United. Some of that was due to the changing nature of the game, the increase in the number of fixtures we played each season and the rise in the number of substitutes used during games which, by the start of the 1995–96 season, had risen to three. A captain simply could not play in each and every game–so the armband tended to move around. These factors led to a spell where Giggs, Ferdinand, Evra and Vidić, whom we all called Vida, wore the armband at different times. Towards the end of my time, when Vida became more prone to injuries, he and Patrice more or less alternated as captain. You could not have found two more different personalities. Vida is dour and uncompromising while Patrice just brimmed with enthusiasm. He came to me once and asked whether he had gone over the top in a tirade in the dressing room. I reassured him and said that he had saved me from having to shout. Patrice’s instinctive reaction was great because it showed how deeply he cared and I thought it would goad his team-mates into performing better. It was the mark of a natural leader.

  5

  SETTING STANDARDS

  Excellence

  Everyone has a different definition of ‘world class’, the two words that seem to have taken the place of ‘great’ or ‘excellent’. If you read the papers, or listen to the television commentators, we seem to be awash with ‘world-class’ footballers. The same thing seems to be happening in the classroom, because I keep hearing about ‘grade inflation’–or the way in which an A* gets given to a lot more students than in yesteryear. In my book there are only two world-class players playing today–Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. There are a considerable number of great players, and an even larger collection of good ones, but of the thousands of professional footballers playing today, only Cristiano and Lionel have earned the right to be described as ‘world class’. Other players can produce ‘world-class’ moments–a spectacular goal, an extraordinary pass, or an astonishing save–but there are hundreds of moments in a game and thousands in a career. There are a number of subjective and objective criteria that I use as a way to rank players. The subjective ones include their ability with both feet; their sense of balance; the disciplined fashion in which they take care of their fitness; their attitude towards training; the consistency between games and over multiple seasons; their demonstrated mastery in several different positions; and the way they add flair to any team for which they play. The objective ones that are impossible to dispute are: the number of goals they have scored; the games they have played for several of the best club teams in the world; the number of League championship and cup medals they have won, and their appearances in World Cups. When you employ this sort of measurement approach, it becomes far easier to define the very highest levels of performance. The people who are least confused about this are other players.

  There are a decent number of great players in the game today–Thomas Müller at Bayern Munich, Luis Suárez and Neymar at Barcelona and Alexis Sánchez at Arsenal–but I’m sure that all four would admit that they are not at the same level as Messi and Ronaldo. I don’t mean to demean or criticise any of the great or very good footballers who played for me during my 26-year career at United, but there were only four who were world class: Cantona, Giggs, Ronaldo and Scholes. And, of the four, Cristiano was like an ornament on top of a Christmas tree. He was the one who added that final touch. Roy Keane, Bryan Robson and Steve Bruce were great players, but they earned that distinction from their attitude, ambition, leadership ability and intensity rather than some of the other attributes.

  Looking a little further back, Bobby Charlton, who played 758 games for the club and 106 games for England, including appearances in the final stages of four World Cup tournaments, illustrates what I mean by ‘world class’. Bobby seemed to float above the field, was two footed, could play on the left, the right or in the centre, and had an inner confidence and steely resolve. Bobby, despite all his accomplishments, has always been a modest, humble man. He is quiet and shy, but on one occasion when United were trailing at half-time he said, ‘Give me the ball. I can win this.’ He was not boasting or preening, he just knew what he could do and, more importantly, his team-mates recognised this. United went on to win that game and they did so because of Charlton–a player who was world class.

  In football, a manager is fortunate if he has one world-class player in a squad; most clubs do not have that luxury. Yet, even for them, it is still possible to field a very good team. Properly harmonised, 11 good players can form a team that is more than the sum of its parts. Yet I cannot think of a team that achieved great things at the highest level without a world-class player.

  Part of the way you develop excellence in an organisation is to be careful about the way you define success. I was always careful about setting specific, long-range targets. I would never say, ‘We expect to win the League and two pieces of silverware this season.’ First, it conveys the wrong message, because it sounds cocky and arrogant. Second, it applies a lot of additional pressure on everyone without any real benefit. Third, it sets everyone up for disappointment. It was much easier to say, ‘At United we expect to win every game,’ because that was the case from about 1993 and it also conveyed the spirit of the club. Making sure everyone understood that we expected to triumph in every game set an agenda of excellence and allowed me to regularly administer booster-shots of intensity.

  There’s a balance that needs to be weighed when conveying a sense of what’s possible with the reality of the circumstances. You have to set up each individual for success, which requires considered thought. It’s so easy to set unrealistic expectations and I learned this early in my career. At one point in my first season at St Mirren, the team had won eight games in a row and were well placed in the second division. I was feeling buoyant and told the press that we would not lose a game for the rest of the season. Instead, we won only one of our remaining fixtures, and the club finished the season in sixth place.

  At United the press would always ask me at the start of the season what I hoped to achieve. My canned response was to tell them that we wanted to win one trophy and we didn’t care which one it was. I was careful not to build up false expectations or place too much pressure on everyone. It is counterproductive. However, we never went two consecutive seasons without a major trophy between my first piece of silverware at United and the end of my career, a period of 23 years.

  I was also lucky that, with one exception, I never had an owner or director tell me that they expected me to bring home a piece of silverware. The only time it happened was just before I got fired from St Mirren, when a director told me (even though we had been promoted the season before and had a very young team) that he expected us to win the League in the following season. It was the only time anyone ever said to me: ‘We need you to win a trophy.’ What he failed to acknowledge was that to achieve that we needed two or three new players that the club did not want to buy.

  Winning anything requires a series of steps. You cannot win the League with one giant leap. So I would be c
areful to divide everything up into digestible chunks. Nobody is going to take a climbing team to the foot of Everest, point to the summit and say ‘Okay, lads, get up there.’ At the start of the season I would avoid communicating any particular objective with the players. My comments to the press about wanting to win a trophy were reasonably generic and the squad were used to these expectations anyway. I would only start to become less vague in November as the shape of the season and the form of our rivalries became clear. At that point, as the afternoons shortened, I would say to the players, ‘If we’re first, second or third, or within three points of the lead, on New Year’s Day, we have a fantastic chance.’

  In November 2009 René Meulensteen set a specific target for the points we wanted in the bag at the end of December, but over that period we lost to Chelsea, Aston Villa and Fulham and I felt the target actually became counterproductive. I thought it better to have an element of vagueness about the specific goal. If we came out of Christmas week in fifth place, it was not a complete disaster because, over the years, it became folklore within the club that United always performed better in the second half of the season. We would always say, ‘The second half will look after itself.’ Of course, it was a bit more complicated than this, but it buoyed spirits to have that outlook. The reality of anything that’s fiercely competitive is that very often nothing is decided until the bitter end. In all my time at United, the winner of the League title was only decided two weeks or more from the end of the season on four occasions.