Book Review: Alex Ferguson – My Autobiography

I found this book to be an enjoyable read. There were glimpses of Alex Ferguson's leadership qualities and style throughout the book but the biggest takeaway for me were his comments on the players that he managed over the years: what made some players great and others truly outstanding. Some players were summarised in a sentence or two (e.g. Dennis Irwin, Gary Pallister, Edwin van der Sar), others explained in a paragraph or two (e.g. Juan Sebastian Veron, Alan Smith, Owen Hargreaves) and a small few explored over an entire chapter (e.g. David Beckham, Christiano Ronaldo, Roy Keane). I'm going out on a whim here but Alex Ferguson's reading and understanding of the people around him – his players especially – could well be the single greatest character trait that propelled him to football management greatness and kept him at the top for so long.

Below are some quotes from the book:

"Sometimes defeats are the best outcomes. To react to adversity is a quality…  fighting back was part of our existence. If you are lackadaisical about defeats you can be sure there will be more to come. Often we would drop two points in a game by the opposition equalising with the last kick of the ball and then go on a six- or seven-game winning run. It was no coincidence."

"It's precisely because I started out in the shipbuilding district of Glasgow that I achieved what I did in football. Origins should never be a barrier to success. A modest start in life can be a help more than a hindrance."

"I always took risks. My plan was: don't panic until the last 15 minutes, keep patient until the last quarter of an hour, then go gung-ho."

"In a crisis you're better just calming people down."

"As long as you don't criticise individual players in public, admonishing the team is fine, not a problem. We can all share in the blame: the manager, his staff, the players. Expressed properly, criticism can be an acceptance of collective responsibility."

"The minute a Manchester United player thought he was bigger than the manager, he had to go… The moment the manager loses his authority, you don't have a club. The players will be running it, and then you're in trouble."

"The name of the manager is irrelevant. The authority is what counts. You cannot have a player taking over the dressing room."

"… I'm a football man, and I don't think you give up football for anything. You can have hobbies… What you don't do is surrender the nuts and bolts of football."

"Because they [England] don't have enough technical and coaching ability, the years from 9 to 16 are thrown away. So how do they compensate? The boys compete, physically. Great attitude, they have. Sleeves up. But they don't produce a player. They are never going to win a World Cup with that system, that mentality."

"… 'Give me a break, Rio [Ferdinand],' I said when I heard he was going to meet that star of the American rap scene. 'Is he going to make you a better centre-half?'…"

"I don't like easy signings. I like having to fight for a player on the grounds that a battle to extricate him means you're acquiring something valuable. I liked it when the selling club were desperate to hang on to their man."

"There is more to the art than the goalkeeping. It's a question of the personality you bring to the job. Not only do keepers have to deal with the business of making saves, they must cope with the process of making errors. You need a big character at Manchester United to handle the aftermath of a high-profile mistake."

"… he [Paolo Di Canio] was the sort of player Manchester United should have: one who can put bums on seats and get people off them, too."

"My advice [to David Gill when he stepped in as chief executive of Manchester United] was, '… don't take on too much. Delegate.'"

"Sometimes you lost one player but gained another of similar merit. We missed out on Paul Gascoigne, for example, but landed Paul Ince. We didn't persuade Alan Shearer to join us but we did sign Eric Cantona… The unifying aim was to develop whichever player we ended up with."

"One sign of a great player is that the opposing fans sing songs against him."

"That's what Alan [Smith] was: a supremely brave lad. He was a good, honest professional, too. What he lacked was the real top quality you need to excel at the biggest clubs."

"A constant in our discussions about young players – in terms of whether they could handle the demands of the Old Trafford crowd and the short patience span of the media – was temperament. Would they grow or shrink in a United shirt?"

"You can't leave your character in the dressing room. It has to come out of that room, down the tunnel and onto the pitch."

"We helped Ronaldo to be the player he was and he helped us recapture the excitement and self-expression of Manchester Untied teams."

"What I always thought about Ronaldo was that, even if he was having a dire game, he would always create three chances. Every game. Look at all the matches. In the mountain of video evidence, you could not find one instance where he failed to create at least three chances. He possessed an unbelievable talent. I can place everything on that list: training performances, strength, courage, skill with either foot, heading ability."

"No matter how many tackles or fouls he absorbed, his whole being expressed defiance: 'You're not going to kick me out of this game. I'm Ronaldo.' He had that wonderful courage and confidence in his ability."

"In all my time, the strong personalities have helped shape the team's actions. Bryan Robson Steve Bruce, Eric Cantona: those players enforced the will of the manager and the club."

"When we were embroiled in an argument once, Roy [Keane] said to me, 'You've changed.' I replied, 'Roy, I will have changed, because today is not yesterday. It's a different world we're in now. We have players from twenty different countries in here. You say I've changed? I hope I have. I would never have survived if I hadn't changed.'"

"I always felt that my best moments as a manager were when I made quick decisions based on irrefutable fact, on conviction."

"… I couldn't take sides against my players. I had to find solutions other than castigating them in public. Sometimes I had to fine or punish them, of course, but I could never let it out of the dressing room. I would have felt I had betrayed the one constant principle of my time as a manager: to defend. No, not to defend, but to protect them from outside judgements."

"The one thing I could never allow was a loss of control, because control was my only saviour."

"The player will be thinking: '1. Can he [the manager] make us winners? 2. Can he make me a better footballer? 3. Is he loyal to us?' These are vital considerations, from the player's side. If the answer to all three is yes, they will tolerate murders."

"I've always found that you have to take the hard road all the time, whether it's popular or not. If you have a worry about one of your staff, that tells you straight away there is a problem. It never made sense to me to go to bed every night worrying when you could do something to cut the problem away."

"… control was my aim… The big decisions you make in those jobs are usually seen by outsiders as exercises in power, when control is really what it's about."

"There's no secret to success in this world.  The key is graft. Malcolm Gladwell's book, 'Outliers: The Story of Success', could just have been called Graft. Hard Graft."

"I admire people who show you their emotions. It shows you they care."

"In those moments of defeat and acceptance, there would be a dawning, for me, of where we needed to go. My feeling was always: 'I don't like this, but we'll have to meet the challenge. We'll have to step up a mark.' It wouldn't have been me, or the club, to submit to apocalyptic thoughts about that being the end, the finish of all our work. We could never allow that."

"We didn't need to win the ball against Arsenal, we needed to intercept it."

"… your character must be strong. To deal with a club like Manchester United, your personality has to be bigger than those of the players. Or, you have to believe it is, to control the whole picture… There is only one boss of Manchester United, and that's the manager."

"Despite the image of me as someone who wanted obedience at all times, I loved people with a bit of devil in them. It was refreshing. You need self-confidence, a bit of nerve. If you're surrounded by people who are scared to express themselves in life, they will be equally frightened when it really matters, on the pitch, in games."

"There was no resting on the status quo, even in the best times. The longer I stayed, the further I looked ahead. Regeneration was an everyday duty."

"… you must tell them the truth. There is nothing wrong with presenting hard facts to a player who has lost his form."

"Faced with the need to confront a player who had performed below our expectation, I might have said: 'That was rubbish that.' But then I would follow it up with, 'For a player of your ability.' That was for picking them back up from the initial blow. Criticise but balance it out with encouragement. 'Why are you doing that? You're better than that.'"

"Saying we always finished the campaign at a higher gallop and with heightened resolve could be classified as a mind game… I did it every year. 'Wait till the second half of the season,' I would say. And it always worked. It crept into the minds of our players and became a nagging fear for the opposition. Second half of the season, United would come like an invasion force, hellfire in their eyes. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy."

"It makes no sense to offer players an easy chance to tell themselves, 'The manager's lost it.' If they lose faith in your knowledge, they lose faith in you. That grasp of the facts must be kept at a high level, for all time. You have to be accurate in what you say to the players."

"I loved it when a journalist asked a big long question because it allowed me time to prepare my answer. The hard ones were the short questions: 'Why were you so bad?' That kind of pithy inquiry can cause you to elongate your response. You stretch it out while you're trying to think, and end up justifying your whole world to them. There's an art to not exposing the weaknesses of your team, which is always your first priority. Always."

"Never give in: that's a great religion, a great philosophy to have. I never gave in. I always thought I could rescue something from any situation."