The Boss: the many sides of Alex Ferguson
Michael Crick Simon & Schuster, 612pp, £17.99
ISBN 0743207483
The Italian novelist Italo Calvino once spoke of the "British genius for biography", but this might mean only that our national hobby is muckraking. Little pleases us more than the discovery that a celebrity is unhappy, or rude, or mean, or crooked: we enjoy being reassured that the good life comes at a price. In most hands, this is a tawdry formula. But Michael Crick is an astute biographer with access to a sharp research team, and he brings to his task a disinterested air of neutral inquiry. His beady-eyed scrutiny of Jeffrey Archer's hectic career was a searching lie-detector test that his subject resoundingly failed. Now, Crick turns his guns on the most successful manager in British football, Sir Alex Ferguson.
Once again, he sifts through the closets in his subject's past and is able to point, with something like glee, at an embarrassing collection of skeletons. If you hear any strange noises in the Manchester area this month, it will be the sound of this book smashing through the boardroom window at Old Trafford.
First and foremost, it is a success story with familiar ingredients. Crick is a noted Manchester United fan, and there are glimmers of hero-worship throughout. The tough, character-forming childhood in Govan . . . the goalscoring feats of a doughty striker at Falkirk and Rangers . . . the managerial triumphs at St Mirren, Aberdeen and Manchester United, where mediocre teams were transformed into exceptional ones. It is a remarkable set of achievements: accolade after accolade, trophy after trophy, all won with a kind of fury and an unattractive sense of being jilted and crossed. Crick is especially good on the St Mirren years - years to which Ferguson himself never alludes, as they ended with his being sacked. But they were unusual: Ferguson took a dying club, with crowds of only a thousand or so, to undreamed-of heights in Europe, and expanded the average gate to 11,000.
Crick pokes around in the bin-liners of this glittering saga and finds plenty to keep him interested. There is endless money-grubbing, mostly about his humiliatingly small salary (Crick puts his personal wealth at £5m-10m), but also extending to unexplained raids on the petty cash at St Mirren; there's an illicit affair (not rare, but not ideal for a man who frequently holds up family life as the secret of his success); there are alarming allegations of conflict of interest over the business he conducted through his own son, a football agent, and the pressure he put on Manchester youngsters to "go with Jason"; and there is the steady thrum of eyeball-popping fury. Ferguson is famous for his rages: to anyone not in the firing line they are part of his charisma. Crick details his shouting matches with relish, and presents Ferguson's dealings with the media as the work of a manipulative bully (although many might feel that the tabloid world of football journalism deserves no other treatment). As a final flourish, Crick asserts that Sven-Goran Eriksson was all teed up to take over at Manchester United next season until Ferguson decided, at the 11th hour, to stay put.
This is quite serious muck, and Crick rakes it with an apologetic air. It is interesting and very entertaining. At times it feels a little perfunctory, as if written in a rush to meet some important deadline (the climax of the season, perhaps). So there is one major aspect of the story that Crick seems not to contemplate. He is so taken with the vision of his subject as a mercurial, gifted bully that he happily goes along with the rags-to-riches line that Ferguson has, single-handedly, wrenched Manchester United to the top of the national game through sheer will-power (we might call this the official Govan-ment position). But it might be an illusion. Ferguson became manager of England's grandest club at precisely the moment when the modern money dam burst. For a decade, he has had the luxury of managing one of the world's priciest teams. Much is rightly made of his expertise in rearing young players - Beckham, Giggs, Scholes and so on. But he has also been able, backed by a fabulous budget, to attract major stars. Schmeichel, Cantona, Van Nistelrooy, Veron, Keane, Stam, Blanc, Yorke, Cole - these are multimillion-pound assets who would never have signed for St Mirren, no matter how terrific the manager.
Crick has fun with all the other senses in which Ferguson straddles the gap between football's working-class roots and its modern commercial incarnation. He is anti-authoritarian but loves power, a socialist who reveres money. Happy to exploit the financial clout of a global corporation, he wishes also to perpetuate the old idea of the manager as the unquestioned, loud-mouthed boss of a personal fiefdom. He is a magnate, a racehorse owner with veiled ambitions to take over Manchester United as part of a consortium of Irish tycoons. Yet he retains the indignant, don't-mess-with-me mentality of a Glaswegian docker. He's a millionaire who feels underpaid. Perhaps what chafes is that, although temperamentally a tyrant, he remains, despite everything, an employee.
Crick prefers to present these tensions as aspects of Ferguson's "complex character", but this is a cliche that only an audience tricked into conceiving of "character" as something monotonous and stable could buy. If anything, he seems unusually simple: a driven (and often charming) hardliner with a will to win and a self-belief that leads him to ruthless extremes. The interesting thing, the shot across the bows of more considerate managerial philosophies, is that it seems to work.
At all his clubs, Ferguson has fostered an aggressive, take-no-prisoners esprit de corps that finds few supporters these days, outside military circles. It isn't likeable, but look at the trophies. It wouldn't even be ironic if the abrasive atmosphere he carries with him were to turn around and choke him one day. This book is one of several signs that the wind might be starting to blow back in his face.
Ferguson will feel that the book judges him unnecessarily harshly. In fact, he is lucky: it remains a tribute to a great leader, and the dirty washing it airs simply prevents it from being the usual corny nonsense. And if football is ruthless in some ways, it is forgiving in others. If these allegations were published about the head of ICI or British Airways, for instance, there would be an outcry. Ferguson, with his red-faced Govan hatred of fat cats, would probably be the first to find such behaviour outrageous.
Robert Winder reviews books monthly for the NS
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