From my position on the board, I watched fascinated – and supported as well as I could – the work of a man who was developing and underpinning everything that I had strived for, and believed in, in my days as a Manchester United player.
Sometimes we played a little golf together and Alex would talk about an idea he had, a possible move into the transfer market perhaps, but he did it gently; it was as though he was probing to see what kind of reaction he would get in the boardroom whenever he tabled a new plan. It may be something of a surprise to those who haven’t worked with him closely, but the Ferguson style of combativeness vanishes when he is away from the field of action. In more than twenty years of working alongside him, and attending board meetings, I have never heard a raised voice or an angry gesture. But then, on the other hand, I have never seen such decisiveness at the helm of a great football club.
Of course the outline of the Ferguson years is imprinted in the awareness of everyone who takes an interest in football, but even now, and as someone who saw the trends developing and the style of leadership unfolding from close up, I find the scale of the achievement quite stunning.
Consider the extraordinary milestones: the breaking up of the championship-winning team of Paul Ince and Mark Hughes, the cornerstone signings of Roy Keane, Eric Cantona and Peter Schmeichel, the explosion of youth represented by a nineties version of the Busby Babes, the titles, the Doubles, the climactic Champions League victory that brought a unique treble, the decision to sell David Beckham to Real Madrid, the arrival of Cristiano Ronaldo and Wayne Rooney and the regaining of the title from Chelsea … all of it forms an amazing body of work which has taken United into a dimension which no one could have dreamed of when we shuddered, shook our heads and contemplated the challenge that faced us in the ashes of Munich.
For so many years I was at the heart of Manchester United’s effort to maintain its place in football – and in all the triumphs and the disappointments, and the tragedy, there was always one great hope: the return to greatness of my beloved club. To my mind, it has been my last and great privilege in football to have been given a ringside view of the Ferguson years when that great hope became a reality.
Sometimes I sit in the great stadium and marvel all over again at the progress that has been made. I recall the time when a bus-load of fans from the other side of Rochdale arrived one close-season morning to see the first Old Trafford floodlights going up, explaining that they couldn’t stay away any longer, and I relate that innocent time to the more recent one when, after meeting the new owners of Manchester United, the Glazer family, I walked across the same stretch of car park to be confronted by supporters in an entirely different frame of mind. They believed that their club had been sold beneath them, that the links with the old United had been snapped. I understood their concerns, but I also pointed out that the world had changed along with football. I said the moment the club turned itself into a plc, it had exposed itself to such possibilities of foreign ownership.
I was, frankly, a little ambushed by the occasion. I had left the boardroom with the Glazer sons, Joel and Avram, and other board members and club officials, imagining we were all leaving the ground at the same time, but when I stepped out of the stadium I saw the fans – and that I was all alone. What could I say? Only that as someone who cared very much for Manchester United, I had been assured that the club would move forward along the old way: getting the best players, and pursuing every ambition. I believed Alex Ferguson would be able to continue as before – that he would have the necessary budget to maintain United’s position, and also the freedom of action and authority that should naturally be given to one of the most successful managers in the history of the game. The Glazer operation had been depicted as an asset-stripping enterprise, but the fact was that they were in control, quite legally, and it was also true that in Florida their Tampa Bay NFL team had won a Super Bowl. They knew how big-money sport worked.
There was one overwhelming point I wanted to make to these fervent supporters of Manchester United. It was that I shared their feelings for the club – to the point where, if something was done in the boardroom that was fundamentally wrong, and I truly thought went against the long-term interests of United, I would walk away. In the meantime, I would work as hard as I could to maintain the success of the club. I would maintain my support of Alex Ferguson, the man who I still believed was capable of producing the drive and the vision that had turned a club which was worth barely £13 million in the late eighties into one whose value at one point was touching a billion, and which remains one of the most desirable properties in all of professional sport.
Every great football man has a defining moment; the Old Man had his in Wembley in 1968, Alex Ferguson’s came in the Nou Camp in 1999. In the end United won their second European Cup – against Bayern Munich – because, even without Roy Keane and Paul Scholes, their appetite and their professional honesty were overwhelming. They were qualities built into the team down the years, and when the winning goals of
