Bought or Made?

In an age where every other football fan reckons he could do a decent enough job of managing his own team given half a chance, there are very few universally accepted truths in the game. Originality of opinion is respected to such an extent that fans might find themselves absent-mindedly informing their friends that they’ve ‘always really rated Gareth Barry’ or ‘never understood why Jack Wilshere gets so much hype.’ But some footballing truths transcend the realms of the ad hoc ‘reckon’ or the hastily constructed belief-system. When it comes to things that just don’t need saying anymore, ‘Alex Ferguson has done a very fine job at Manchester United’ is right up there with ‘’Inception’ is quite a decent watch’ and ‘Piers Morgan should disappear down a very deep hole, preferably lacking a 3G signal, lest he tweet his way back into our lives.’

You must forgive me, then, for spending a few minutes explaining what I believe to be some of the more interesting characteristics in Sir Alex Ferguson’s incredible 25-year stint at Manchester United.

To be successful as a football manager you have to win games, obviously. To be a really successful one, you have to win games that you had no right to win. Alex Ferguson has got this down to a fine art. At the risk of sounding like a Clive Tyldesley voiceover (and someone please stop me if I start talking about that night in Barcelona), Sir Alex has installed an all-encompassing attitude, an overarching philosophy at Manchester United; the team that he sends out will exhaust every possible route back into a match before they accept defeat.

As I have said, pointing out that Alex Ferguson has created something very special at United just doesn’t need doing. Trying to pin down exactly how he has done it, though, is a little more interesting. Generations of United players, team after team of them, have been winners. It’s just what they were; if they lost out on the league title one season, they would make it incredibly hard to deny them of it the following year. Robson, Keane, Giggs, Schmiechel, Neville, Cantona, Scholes, Cole, Stam, Van Nistelrooy, Ronaldo; these players didn’t lose very well. For some of them, winning with United lasted the length of an entire playing career, but others came and won for just a few seasons.

But a question remains; does Sir Alex buy winners, or does he make them? When he singled out Roy Keane as the man to dominate the centre of midfield at Old Trafford, he clearly spotted football ability, and plenty of it, in the tough-tackling Irishman. But he must have seen more than that; a grit, a determination, a will to win that would take him just a little bit further in the game than the others. Identify and accumulate enough of these characters and you find that you begin to breed a professionalism, an excellence in attitude, at your football club. Keane was not the first to carry and personify the winning tradition at United; Bryan Robson typified it too, while Giggs and Scholes have been the architects of many a comeback over the past seventeen or eighteen seasons.

So perhaps Ferguson’s genius lies in his identifying the right targets and making them his players. Well, that’s half the story. To attribute all of those league titles just to signing good players would be doing the Scot a disservice. Some may be born winners, but this doesn’t explain everything that has gone on at Old Trafford. When Ferguson paid Molde £1.5 million for a little heard-of 23 year-old Norwegian by the name of Ole Gunnar Solskjaer in 1996, you could hardly have said that Ferguson was making his team out of ready-made winners. Solskjaer went on to score possibly the most famous goal in the club’s history in the 1999 Champions League final (sorry, couldn’t resist) - a season that, above all others, demonstrated that thing that is United, that je ne sais pas that has had them see off every major challenger to their dominance of the English game over the past 20 seasons.

Even then it was accepted: this is just what Manchester United do. Fast-forward thirteen more incredible seasons and you see Ferguson’s men somehow engineer a comeback from 3-0 down at Stamford Bridge. Some of the old winners are still there - Giggs and Scholes were instrumental in the latter stages – but new ones are picking up the mantle and running with it. Javier Hernandez draws striking comparisons to Solskjaer in both his style of play and uncanny knack of snatching late goals. Phil Jones, whilst injured for this latest display of defiance and character, is already being spoken about as ‘one of those players’ that Ferguson can build yet another team around.

Manchester City lead the title race going into the home straight of the league season, but as Arsenal, Chelsea, Newcastle and Liverpool will tell them, they will have to be good - very good – to shake off Sir Alex Ferguson’s team of winners, bought and made.