Sir Alex Ferguson’s time in management encapsulates just how much the sport has changed over the years.
A managerial career that started 39 years ago with a £2,000 transfer budget, a chain-smoking chairman, a search for a cheap goalkeeper, and a dispute over a £40 coach hire bill concluded on Sunday for Sir Alex Ferguson. He retires with an £18 million goalkeeper on the bench, a £24 million striker sweating on selection, and a debt of gratitude from his club. Ferguson has come a long way.
“I don’t think I’ve changed much,” Ferguson reflected on Friday of his journey from managerial ingenu at East Stirling to laird of Manchester United. Such is his accumulated wisdom that the League Managers’ Association will use the 71-year-old as a mentor for contenders, dispensing encouragement and advice.
He has seen it, won it and sold the T-shirt. He has seen United grow into a global marketing phenomenon and the deals are not small change. There is one constant. “The priority is the football team,’’ countered Ferguson. “Without that they would not have all the sponsorships. That is the priority. We all know that here.’’
The pursuit of success has always driven him. On his first day at East Stirling, Ferguson asked the chairman Willie Muirhead, “a great chain-smoker”, for a list of the club’s players. “He started to shake, his cigarette was going 100mph,’’ recalled Ferguson.
“He gave me a list – eight players, no goalkeeper. I said: ‘You know it’s advisable to start with a goalkeeper!” Muirhead promised to speak to the board, and eventually they rustled up the princely sum of £2,000 for transfers and signing-ons.
Now Ferguson can call on six goalkeepers, enjoying the luxury of leaving David de Gea on the bench with Anders Lindegaard starting at the Hawthorns tomorrow, a contrast to his formative days at Firs Park.
“Then you are going into it blind. They only thing I had going for me were my coaching badges and the fact that I’d played. You’re going into it because you want to stay in football.
Management was always Ferguson’s calling. “I’d prepared. I had my badges at 24. I wanted to stay in the game. No way was I going back to engineering [in the Govan shipyards]. I had a motivation, whereas a lot of players today decide at 33, 34 they want to be managers. It’s crazy.”
It is why he pushed for his successor to be David Moyes, who began studying for his coaching badges at 22.