This is part of a series of articles inspired by questions from our readers. So thank you to Andrew C for the inspiration for this piece after he asked whether Manchester United, despite winning the European Cup twice, actually underachieved in Europe under Sir Alex Ferguson.
It was an early-morning flight to Lisbon and Sir Alex Ferguson had sent a message, via his press officer, that the regular bunch of journalists who were allowed on Manchester United’s plane should wait for him in a quiet spot by the carousel.
You don’t forget those trips.
There was the flight back from the 2008 Champions League final against Chelsea in Moscow when it was Ferguson’s grandchildren, with their shrill voices, who led the plane on a more child-friendly version of the John Terry song that is usually heard on match days at Old Trafford.
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There was the trip to Budapest when Ferguson got locked in the toilet, 37,000 feet in the air, during a period of such wild turbulence that when he finally emerged, puce and dizzied, he looked like he had just been through a tumble dryer.
Sometimes we would find out that Ferguson did actually read the newspapers, contrary to what he always told us, and that his airport briefings could go spectacularly wrong if, on the flight over, he had read something he did not like.
We also came to learn that Ferguson would hate it, absolutely hate it, if he felt that the press pack might be delaying the team getting back from one of their foreign excursions. There was always a mild panic among our number on the way to the airport. Even more so when it came to filing past Ferguson — front row, passenger seat — for the flight back to Manchester.
But that scene in Lisbon, from December 2005, particularly lingers in the memory because it coincided with a plane carrying United’s supporters landing at the same time. Ferguson was mobbed. They sang his name, grabbed his legs and pulled at his arms and tried to hoist him in the air. The interview had to be abandoned because of this spontaneous show of adulation.
Then the following night, United lost 2-1 to Benfica and were out of Europe for another season. It was the first time in 10 years they had been eliminated from the Champions League group stages. And you particularly don’t forget those flights home, on the back of a wretched result, and the pressure to look suitably melancholic while boarding the plane. The players were at the front, the journalists at the back and the curtain was pulled across. It might as well have been a steel shutter.
Ferguson always took those defeats badly because his mantra, year after year, was that a club with United’s ambitions had to create some kind of dynasty in Europe.
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“We should have done better,” he would say. “We have consistently qualified for the quarters and the semis but we haven’t won enough trophies in Europe. Real Madrid have won it nine times, Milan have won it six times and then there are clubs like Bayern Munich, Liverpool and Ajax who have won it four or five times. For a club like ours, we should definitely have won it more than often we have.”
At other times, it would be too much for him to mention Liverpool and — classic Fergie — he would leave them off the list entirely. But he never took exception when it was put to him that United may have underachieved in Europe. Ferguson understood the question. He might not always respond well to criticism but this was one occasion when he accepted it was a legitimate question, especially when Madrid, Barcelona and that other club, 40 miles along the M62, started adding to their totals.
The first point to make here is that a man with Ferguson’s record of achievement does not need to beat himself up too badly.
Ferguson could probably fill an aircraft hangar with the number of trophies he accumulated for the club. Thirteen Premier League titles, five FA Cups and four League Cups, just for starters.
It was on Ferguson’s watch that United, with all that haughty arrogance, used to have an advert for MUTV that showed a skip outside Old Trafford, filled with empty cans of silver polish. There is a stand named after him. Outside, he has his own statue. Inside, there is a banner permanently in place for “The Impossible Dream — Made Possible” showing all his trophies. Thirty-eight, in total.
Plus, there is a fair amount of mitigation when it comes to analysing why he was restricted to two European Cups in 26 years, featuring 17 Champions League campaigns, as United’s manager.
The question put to The Athletic — with thanks to subscriber Andrew C — might not even feel relevant if United had not been forced to encounter possibly the most beautifully assembled club side the sport has ever seen. Barcelona had Xavi Hernandez and Andres Iniesta. They had some fella called Lionel Messi. Their manager was Pep Guardiola and they treated giving away the ball as some kind of sin. Messi, in particular, left the impression he might just be visiting this planet. And United had to find a way past them in the 2009 and 2011 finals.
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A lot of words have been spoken about how Barcelona outpassed, outmanoeuvred and, ultimately, outclassed United both times. None, perhaps, sums it up like the question that a dazed and defeated Rio Ferdinand asked his central defensive partner, Nemanja Vidic, as they made their way off the pitch after the second final. “What the fuck just happened?” was all that Ferdinand could say.
Nor was it the only occasion when United were reminded that sometimes in football, the inquest has to start by recognising the brilliance of the winning side.
At times, it was AC Milan and Juventus who were playing at the point of maximum expression. The trip to San Siro, for example, in 2007 for a semi-final in which Kaka, Andrea Pirlo and Clarence Seedorf put on a masterclass. The previous night, Ferguson had scribbled something on a piece of paper while taking questions at his press conference. “Milan 1 Man United 2” it read. It didn’t feel very Fergie-like and the following night it was made to look wildly optimistic. Full-time score: Milan 3 Man United 0.
Perhaps you can also remember Fernando Redondo’s almost implausible brilliance to set up Raul when Real Madrid eliminated United, the holders, from the 2000 quarter-finals.
Then there was the quarter-final three years later when United came up against an even more formidable Madrid side featuring Raul, Roberto Carlos, Luis Figo, Zinedine Zidane and Ronaldo. Ferguson acclaimed Raul as the best player in the world after a 3-1 defeat in the first leg. Two weeks later, Ronaldo seemed intent on taking that title and, brilliantly, memorably, Old Trafford rose to its feet to acclaim the Brazilian’s hat-trick. It was the galactico era. There had never been another football club that collected superstars this way. For United, there is surely no shame to have lost to such an immensely gifted team.
At the same time, it would be to ignore Ferguson’s competitive instincts to think that he does not look back on these occasions and wonder whether United could have done something differently.
If you understand the way he is wired, you will appreciate that he thinks more about the finals, semi-finals and quarter-finals that he lost than the victories. There are games he will remember when his most lauded players, the A-listers, went missing. And perhaps there are some occasions when he also reflects on his own work.
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Did you know, for example, that Ferguson once admitted to his players that he made bad choices for the two finals against Barcelona?
That might come as a surprise because he has never acknowledged that publicly and, if anything, he has always given the impression that he held some of his players accountable. “We didn’t handle Messi,” Ferguson, reflecting on the 2011 final, once volunteered. “Our centre-backs weren’t moving forward on to the ball. They were wanting to sit back. Yet the preparation for the game was the best I have seen. You know the problem? Sometimes players play the occasion, not the game. Wayne Rooney, for example, was disappointing. For some reason, Antonio Valencia froze on the night. Michael Carrick was below his best, too.”
Yet Ferdinand offers another perspective in his autobiography. The players, according to Ferdinand, thought Ferguson was asking for trouble by taking the game to Barca. But Fergie was Fergie and nobody felt in a position to tell him they thought it was a mistake.
“I can’t be too critical of the boss,” Ferdinand says. “If I was being honest, I’d say, yeah, tactically he got it wrong, but I think that’s understandable. He feels the romance and history of the club deeply and I think he worried that United’s tradition might be made to feel inferior to Barcelona’s tradition. People raved about how good and beautiful Barcelona’s tiki-taka was. But if we’d played defensively, where would that have left the history of United?
“That’s what drove the manager. He thought, ‘I want to win our way’, meaning the old Manchester United way, which was all about attacking, taking risks and meeting opponents high up the pitch. He let his heart rule his head, which isn’t a bad thing sometimes.”
It was 2013, according to Ferdinand, when Ferguson acknowledged he might have made a bad call. “For me, it was one of his great moments. We were playing Real Madrid and before the game, during the team talk, he went back to those two Barcelona games. He opened up and said he thought he’d got our tactics wrong in both finals. What he said that night made me respect him even more.”
So, who was to blame? The players or the tactics? Maybe it was a bit of both. Or maybe it was nobody’s fault and we should just acknowledge Barcelona’s brilliance, Messi’s precious magic and, in Ferguson’s words, the manner in which Iniesta and Xavi “went boomp-boomp-boomp, kept possession all night”.
When the question is asked about whether United underachieved in Europe, it isn’t just a straightforward yes/no answer. There are all sorts of issues to weigh up.
What if the referee had not shown a red card, controversially, to Nani when United were taking on Real Madrid in the 2013 quarter-finals, allowing the Spanish club to seize control of a match they had been losing?
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Might it have been different if United had not been undermined, pre-1996, by the three-foreigner rule that meant Mark Hughes, Ryan Giggs and Roy Keane were classed as overseas players and Gary Walsh taking Peter Schmeichel’s place in goal for a 4-0 defeat against Barcelona?
Sometimes, though, it comes back to the fact that this is European football’s premier club competition, the best of the best, and maybe in United’s case they deserve a bit of slack bearing in mind they reached three finals in one four-year period. The answer to the question might, ultimately, be yes, but it is important to understand the reasons. And, certainly in the Barca years, there were mitigating circumstances.
Barcelona were, to use Ferguson’s description, “the team of their generation, just as Real Madrid were the team of theirs in the 1950s and 1960s and AC Milan were in the early 1990s. Barcelona are the best team ever to line up against my Manchester United sides – easily the best”.
Roy Keane never did specify who he meant when he was reminiscing about one of the European ties, the 2002 semi-final against Bayer Leverkusen, that will always figure on United’s list of Champions League ordeals.
“As we stood for the UEFA anthem before the second leg of the Leverkusen game, one of our players was fucking shaking. He was afraid. Played for his country, won championships, big star, fucking afraid of taking the big step up. I thought, ‘Christ, let me enjoy this, the semi-final of the Champions League, what you live for. Relax. This is where we need to be, this is where you have to go’.”
Decide for yourself who he meant. Keane’s team-mates in Germany that night were: Fabien Barthez, Wes Brown, Laurent Blanc, Ronny Johnsen, Mikael Silvestre, Paul Scholes, Juan Sebastian Veron, Nicky Butt, Ryan Giggs and Ruud van Nistelrooy.
Is there a clue to be taken from Ferguson once mentioning a fall-out between Keane and Veron “that became a bit ugly” after one European tie? Keane never cleared it up and the only certainty is that the first leg at Old Trafford finished 2-2, the return leg was 1-1 and it was the German team, featuring a young Dimitar Berbatov, who went to the final against Real Madrid at Hampden Park.
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Ferguson had been so obsessed about the idea of leading out his team in Glasgow he had even chosen the hotel where they would stay. Instead, that semi-final will always feature prominently when he goes through the games he would love to play again.
Another came in the semi-final against Borussia Dortmund in 1997 when Ferguson, who could be prone to exaggeration, estimated there were 15 occasions in the second leg his team had only the goalkeeper to beat.
Yet that was also the night when Eric Cantona was so “low-key and marginal”, in Ferguson’s words, that the manager found himself at a loss about what was holding back a player who had been so instrumental to the team’s success.
Nor was it the only time that Cantona had been strangely subdued on the big European occasions. Keane’s assessment of the Dortmund tie was that Cantona had been among the “one or two of our players” who had been “backing off”. He went further: “Eric will never rank alongside the truly great European players. This is the stage that really counts. Maybe Eric’s not capable of it. Never will be.”
Ferguson offered a more reasoned argument. “But I do admit there was something, perhaps some kind of mental block, that stopped him from being the best player in the world. I am sure he had the ability to achieve that status but there was an element in his nature that seemed to prevent him from realising the full potential of his gifts.”
In the interests of balance, United’s manager also argued “there were (Champions League) occasions when Eric played marvellously for us”. But it was difficult to know which matches he could be thinking of — and he chose not to say.
Philippe Auclair, the author of Cantona: The Rebel Who Would Be King, sounds perplexed, too. “Compare this with the record of another French superstar in whom many see a ‘choker’ on the European stage, Thierry Henry. Cantona never scored a winning goal at the Bernabeu, a double at San Siro or a hat-trick at the Stadio Olimpico. Henry did, and when it mattered.
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“Eric himself has never won an international trophy with club or country unless the 1988 European Under-21s title is taken into account — and you may remember a ban prevented him playing in the second leg of the final. That a player blessed with such strength of character and such talent could prove an almost complete failure in European competitions is a mystery for which I can offer only a few clues but no definite explanation.”
Ultimately, though, the question of underachievement here is not put to Cantona, but United as a whole, and their record was certainly open to scrutiny during the sequence of failures that began in 2004 with Jose Mourinho, then in charge of Porto, setting off on his victory run down the touchline at Old Trafford.
Ferguson has never forgotten the offside decision that denied Paul Scholes a goal in that last-16 tie. But Mourinho, then a relative unknown, was not having any of it. Ferguson, he said, was bound to be unhappy because anyone who managed a world-famous team with almost unlimited riches had to feel sad, humiliated even, to be beaten in such a fashion by a club with Porto’s moderate resources. For many of us, it was our first dealings with Jose. And, true to form, he was determined to rub it in.
The following season, United went out in the first knockout round again, losing 1-0 to Milan in both legs. But it was the 2005-06 campaign, culminating in that defeat to Benfica, when it really started to feel like 1999 — “football, bloody hell,” and all that — might be a one-hit wonder. United had finished bottom of a group that also featured Lille and Villarreal. The Glazers had just taken over and, crazy as it sounds, there were questions before and after that Benfica game about whether Ferguson would be kept on. One of United’s fan websites was running a feature titled “Ten Reasons Why Fergie Must Go”.
That was a period of Ferguson’s professional life when Liverpool’s supporters used to stretch out a banner on the Kop to mock his record in Europe compared to Bob Paisley’s.
Paisley 3 Ferguson 1
Brian Clough also used to derive a wicked sense of pleasure out of the fact Ferguson had found it so difficult to emulate his own achievements. Clough won the European Cup twice for Nottingham Forest, in 1979 and 1980, and was never slow to remind the football world that Ferguson was playing catch-up. “For all his horses, knighthoods and championships,” Clough once said, “Alex hasn’t got two of what I’ve got — and I don’t mean balls.”
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Ferguson never had an answer for that one but there was one of Clough’s old quotes with which United’s manager could empathise. “You win something once and people can say it’s down to luck,” Clough used to say. “You win it twice and it shuts the buggers up.”
There are, after all, only 20 men who have won the European Cup as managers more than once. Paisley, Zidane and Carlo Ancelotti have done it three times. Ferguson, with two, is on the next rung down, alongside 16 others. Or perhaps it sounds more impressive to point out there is only Marcelo Lippi at Juventus and Miguel Munoz with Madrid who share Ferguson’s achievements of leading a team to four European Cup finals.
Ferguson’s triumphs in 1999 and 2008, added to Sir Matt Busby’s victory in 1968, means United are joint-seventh with Inter Milan in the all-time list. It puts them above Juventus, among others. It is a long way back, though, from Madrid’s total of 13 and Milan’s seven. Bayern Munich and Liverpool now have six each. Barcelona are on five and Ajax four.
Perhaps you could argue that Madrid are bound to be ahead when they have been in the competition 50 times before we even get to the current season. Bayern have had 36 previous European Cup campaigns and Barca 30. For Milan, it is 28. Liverpool have had 25, United 23.
It is not an argument, though, that Ferguson ever pursued and, to go back to the original question, the people who know him best can all vouch that he will accept United ought to be higher on the list.
Another airport scene that lingers in the memory: September 2005, on the way to Villarreal, and a Liverpool fan coming into view at Manchester airport. He is wearing a white tracksuit, unzipped to show a red T-shirt bearing the words, “Liverpool – five European Cups”. And he is determined to have some fun at Ferguson’s expense. “Eh, lads, how’s your summer been? Mine’s been absolutely mint. Been to Istanbul. Won the European Cup. Wanna hear about it?”
Wayne Rooney walked past. “Wayne, lad, do you wanna buy a T-shirt? Might be a bit tight but it’s yours if you want it.”
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Mourinho did add the Europa League to Old Trafford’s trophy cabinet in 2017 and let’s not forget Ferguson’s teams winning the European Cup Winners’ Cup and European Super Cup in 1991, the Intercontinental Cup in 1999 and the FIFA World Club Cup in 2008. As United fans sing: “Once more than England, world champions twice.”
Everybody knows, though, that Ferguson’s ambitions have always rested with the European Cup and we probably got a decent idea of how much that pained him after the defeat to Real Madrid in 2013.
Nobody knew at the time, of course, that it would be Ferguson’s final game in the Champions League because he had not announced at that stage that The Man Who Couldn’t Retire, as the Daily Telegraph once called him, had finally decided it was time to bow out.
The first leg in the Bernabeu finished 1-1. United were winning the return leg, courtesy of Sergio Ramos’s own goal, before Nani’s red card turned the match in Madrid’s favour. It finished 2-1. Cristiano Ronaldo scored Madrid’s winner on his return to Old Trafford and Ferguson did something afterwards that he had never done in any of his previous European assignments.
The manager could not bring himself to face the cameras. It was too painful for him. He wanted to be alone and he asked his assistant, Mike Phelan, to take his place at the press conference. Ferguson, Phelan explained, was in “no fit state” to talk about it.
(Top photo: Getty Images/Design: Sam Richardson)
