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Sir Alex Ferguson refuses to accept 'small club' Manchester City as a threat
'City don't even come into the equation. They are a small club with a small mentality. All they can talk about is us'
Manchester United's manager Sir Alex Ferguson has criticised Manchester City's spending policy and insists he does not see them as a major challenge. Photograph: Shamsharin Shamsudin/EPA/Corbis
The billboard stands squarely where the road from Salford meets Deansgate, the commercial centre of the city. It shows Carlos Tevez, his arms outstretched above the slogan: "Welcome to Manchester". Like all good advertising, it has a number of subtle meanings. First of all, it points out that Manchester United are not technically based in Manchester, but the neighbouring borough of Trafford and there is the suggestion that the Argentinian is welcome at Eastlands in a way he was not under Sir Alex Ferguson.
All good advertising hits its target and Ferguson, many thousands of miles away in a hotel room in Malaysia, is certainly stung. "It's City isn't it? They are a small club with a small mentality," Ferguson retorts. "All they can talk about is Manchester United; they can't get away from it. That arrogance will be rewarded. It is a go at us, that's the one thing it is. They think taking Carlos Tevez away from Manchester United is a triumph. It is poor stuff."
Manchester City may have provided Ferguson with one of his bleakest experiences, the September day 20 years ago when, after a 5-1 defeat at Maine Road, he drove home and with barely a word to his wife went to bed and put his head under the pillow, "feeling like a criminal".
But until now they had been little more than a minor irritant. When, under Sven-Goran Eriksson, they did the double over United, it only slowed rather than blocked the Reds' path to another title. Now, funded by the oil of Abu Dhabi, and with a squad of 10 strikers, they see themselves as equals in a way they have not for a generation.
In Ferguson's eyes, there is only one reason why someone would swap the Premier League title holders and world club champions for a team who have gone 33 years without a trophy and finished ninth last season. Manchester City can now offer £7m salaries.
"Do you know what City's biggest triumph is? It's getting those players there. I don't know if they will do anything with them," he says. "It is not easy to get into that top four, so the biggest success of all is to just get the players there. They might not get beyond that.
"When someone offers you that kind of money, it is a big attraction to people nowadays. That is the reason they have gone there. At the last minute, from what I can gather, either Emmanuel Adebayor or his agent phoned us after they had agreed a deal with City and then did the same with Chelsea. He was desperate to get to either Chelsea or us."
Ultimately, Ferguson says, Manchester United "are protected by our titles". But he concedes that David Moyes and Martin O'Neill, who at Everton and Aston Villa dragged small squads tantalisingly close to the Champions League on resources they would consider laughable in the Gulf of Arabia, might find it a dispiriting summer. Moyes cannot afford £20m to make Jo's loan from Eastlands a permanent transfer, let alone the £200m Mark Hughes has spent in 13 revolutionary months.
"Manchester City's spending is demoralising only if you panic about the buying," Ferguson says. "At the end of the day, Everton did well against us, did brilliantly against Liverpool and well against Chelsea. It will not be easy for City and, to me, they don't even come into the equation.
"I don't look upon City as my biggest challenge. For all the buying they have done, they still have to pick a team with balance. That won't be easy for Mark. What's he got, 10 strikers? So if he picks a squad to go to Chelsea he has to leave seven behind, or five at least. And you don't expect Liverpool or Chelsea to die."
Ferguson is, however, concerned for Arsenal, which given the bitter history between himself and Arsène Wenger might seem surprising. But it happens. You can read Tony Benn's diaries and see his attitude to Enoch Powell change over three decades; by the end he calls him "Enoch" and goes to Powell's funeral describing him as "a friend who made a mistake".
So it seems to be with Wenger and Ferguson. Whereas once he would spit out the surname, Ferguson now calls his rival "Arsène". They are survivors with shared values of how football should be played, even if the cynic might say it is a sign that Arsenal are no longer a threat to United.
"The one who has the challenge this season is Arsène," says Ferguson. "He doesn't have the money and how he uses the £25m from Adebayor will be very, very interesting." He admits there has been a warming between the two and the old battles are now looked at with a veteran's nostalgia.
"Arsène is a winner," he says. "When Manchester United and Arsenal were going for those titles at the same time it was a competitive situation, not just between Arsène and myself, but on the pitch. It was volatile with Roy Keane and Patrick Vieira in the tunnel at Highbury and the incident at the end of the game at Old Trafford when they attacked Ruud van Nistelrooy. It was quite volatile, but they are different teams now.
"But Arsène will stay," says Ferguson, because Arsenal are "his club, built in his image" and it is hard to leave. "He is 59 now and he will not have the time to rebuild another club if he went off. Is Real Madrid his kind of club? I don't think so."
Real Madrid are assuredly not Ferguson's kind of club. Throughout last season he maintained a verbal guerrilla war against them – whether at United's training ground at Carrington, where he highlighted their links to Franco's grisly regime, or at a press conference in Yokohama during the Club World Championship, where he said he would "not sell that mob a virus". It is perhaps part of Ferguson's gloriously contradictory nature that he eventually sold them the most expensive player in world football.
"It has been a crazy summer," he sighs. "I would have been interested in some buying, but not when they talked of £50m for David Villa or £55m for Sergio Agüero. That does not seem sensible. But maybe the Ronaldo transfer and Kaká's move to Madrid for £56m sparked something off. Then you had Karim Benzema for £42m.
"But that is Madrid, that is their culture. No other club in the world has their flexibility to do that. Manchester City might have the money and, when they offer it, most of it will be cash.
"But Real Madrid don't deal in their own money. They are protected, obviously, by the banks and the Spanish government. It is a different, unusual system. When you look back a few years to when they were £250m in debt, yes, they sold their training ground, but they had a new state-of-the-art training ground built for them. And on their old training ground, they built four apartment blocks and gave one of them to Real Madrid. That is some deal."
However, every sale has its price. When David Beckham left for a £23m fee that officials at the Bernabéu described as "peanuts", Manchester United were expected to cope, but it took three years for them to win another championship, partly because the day Beckham was presented at Madrid was the day an unknown governor of a remote Siberian province decided to buy Stamford Bridge. The loss of Ronaldo has ripped a hole in United's squad bigger than that left by Beckham's departure – and for Roman Abramovich read Sheikh Mansour and Manchester City.
"The area that does concern us is where do we get 26 goals [that Ronaldo scored last season]?" Ferguson says. "That is a concern because I don't have a midfielder like a young Paul Scholes or a young Ryan Giggs who can give me 15-plus goals from midfield areas. We will have to redirect our play a bit more.
"Nani will improve, although he is not as mature as Ronaldo was at his age. I expect Anderson to improve and Darren Fletcher to establish himself as a big player in our squad. [Michael] Owen will get me goals, [Dimitar] Berbatov will be much better. And I don't have to deal with a certain person who is miserable because he is not playing."
Manchester United will change. Wayne Rooney will have to become more of a central striker. On last year's tour to South Africa, Ferguson said this would have to happen and yet, sometimes through necessity, Rooney often appeared on the left wing. It was where he found himself during the European Cup final, forced deeper by Barcelona's sweeping midfield moves, increasingly isolated and irrelevant. The disappointment must sting still because throughout the tour of Asia it is one subject Ferguson will not discuss.
"There will be three teams to beat," he says of the domestic season ahead. "Ourselves, Liverpool and Chelsea will be very close together. They will be encouraged because we have sold Ronaldo. The direction of our game will change because of that, but we will still be very difficult to beat. Rooney will go through the middle. Last season was a lot to do with Berbatov coming to the club and trying to understand what he was best at. You have to utilise what you have available. Some games Rooney did play wide left and in some matches it worked, but in others it was not a good position for him to be in. We will change that. He always wants to play – he sometimes thinks he is a centre-half. Have I toyed with the idea of making him skipper? Toyed is a good word. I don't think he is ready."
Ferguson adds: "Ben Foster, if he stays free of injury, is going to be top-drawer. He will be England's goalkeeper in South Africa next summer. He has to be, he is streets ahead of everybody else."
Foster, to his manager's mind, is potentially England's best goalkeeper since Peter Shilton retired in 1990, the year Ferguson's regime at Old Trafford began to flourish, the year Liverpool won the last of their 18 titles, a figure United have now equalled.
Ferguson did not make much of that, but now, perhaps because of his conflict with Rafael Benítez – whom he very rarely calls "Rafa" – he does sound enticed by the prospect of overtaking them. "There is a record there to be achieved, just as we have won the FA Cup more times than anyone else. But Liverpool winning the European Cup five times doesn't concern me. We have won it three times and had a chance of a fourth, but we will have another, you can be sure of that."
Ferguson claims Benítez, whom many Premier League managers consider aloof, is obsessed with him rather than the other way round. "I have never said a word about him. The only time I responded was when he made that gesture with Sam Allardyce [the crossing of the hands to suggest that Liverpool's game with Blackburn was won the moment they went two goals up].
"There was no doubt he was doing that. Liverpool were too quick to come out and respond that he was signalling they should take a free-kick a different way. That was bollocks. Absolute bollocks."
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Sir Alex Ferguson refuses to accept 'small club' Manchester City as a threat | Tim Rich
This article was first published on guardian.co.uk at 00.10 BST on Sunday 26 July 2009. It appeared in the Observer on Sunday 26 July 2009 on p8 of the News & features section. It was last updated at 00.26 BST on Sunday 26 July 2009.
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'City don't even come into the equation. They are a small club with a small mentality. All they can talk about is us'
Manchester United's manager Sir Alex Ferguson has criticised Manchester City's spending policy and insists he does not see them as a major challenge. Photograph: Shamsharin Shamsudin/EPA/CorbisThe billboard stands squarely where the road from Salford meets Deansgate, the commercial centre of the city. It shows Carlos Tevez, his arms outstretched above the slogan: "Welcome to Manchester". Like all good advertising, it has a number of subtle meanings. First of all, it points out that Manchester United are not technically based in Manchester, but the neighbouring borough of Trafford and there is the suggestion that the Argentinian is welcome at Eastlands in a way he was not under Sir Alex Ferguson.
All good advertising hits its target and Ferguson, many thousands of miles away in a hotel room in Malaysia, is certainly stung. "It's City isn't it? They are a small club with a small mentality," Ferguson retorts. "All they can talk about is Manchester United; they can't get away from it. That arrogance will be rewarded. It is a go at us, that's the one thing it is. They think taking Carlos Tevez away from Manchester United is a triumph. It is poor stuff."
Manchester City may have provided Ferguson with one of his bleakest experiences, the September day 20 years ago when, after a 5-1 defeat at Maine Road, he drove home and with barely a word to his wife went to bed and put his head under the pillow, "feeling like a criminal".
But until now they had been little more than a minor irritant. When, under Sven-Goran Eriksson, they did the double over United, it only slowed rather than blocked the Reds' path to another title. Now, funded by the oil of Abu Dhabi, and with a squad of 10 strikers, they see themselves as equals in a way they have not for a generation.
In Ferguson's eyes, there is only one reason why someone would swap the Premier League title holders and world club champions for a team who have gone 33 years without a trophy and finished ninth last season. Manchester City can now offer £7m salaries.
"Do you know what City's biggest triumph is? It's getting those players there. I don't know if they will do anything with them," he says. "It is not easy to get into that top four, so the biggest success of all is to just get the players there. They might not get beyond that.
"When someone offers you that kind of money, it is a big attraction to people nowadays. That is the reason they have gone there. At the last minute, from what I can gather, either Emmanuel Adebayor or his agent phoned us after they had agreed a deal with City and then did the same with Chelsea. He was desperate to get to either Chelsea or us."
Ultimately, Ferguson says, Manchester United "are protected by our titles". But he concedes that David Moyes and Martin O'Neill, who at Everton and Aston Villa dragged small squads tantalisingly close to the Champions League on resources they would consider laughable in the Gulf of Arabia, might find it a dispiriting summer. Moyes cannot afford £20m to make Jo's loan from Eastlands a permanent transfer, let alone the £200m Mark Hughes has spent in 13 revolutionary months.
"Manchester City's spending is demoralising only if you panic about the buying," Ferguson says. "At the end of the day, Everton did well against us, did brilliantly against Liverpool and well against Chelsea. It will not be easy for City and, to me, they don't even come into the equation.
"I don't look upon City as my biggest challenge. For all the buying they have done, they still have to pick a team with balance. That won't be easy for Mark. What's he got, 10 strikers? So if he picks a squad to go to Chelsea he has to leave seven behind, or five at least. And you don't expect Liverpool or Chelsea to die."
Ferguson is, however, concerned for Arsenal, which given the bitter history between himself and Arsène Wenger might seem surprising. But it happens. You can read Tony Benn's diaries and see his attitude to Enoch Powell change over three decades; by the end he calls him "Enoch" and goes to Powell's funeral describing him as "a friend who made a mistake".
So it seems to be with Wenger and Ferguson. Whereas once he would spit out the surname, Ferguson now calls his rival "Arsène". They are survivors with shared values of how football should be played, even if the cynic might say it is a sign that Arsenal are no longer a threat to United.
"The one who has the challenge this season is Arsène," says Ferguson. "He doesn't have the money and how he uses the £25m from Adebayor will be very, very interesting." He admits there has been a warming between the two and the old battles are now looked at with a veteran's nostalgia.
"Arsène is a winner," he says. "When Manchester United and Arsenal were going for those titles at the same time it was a competitive situation, not just between Arsène and myself, but on the pitch. It was volatile with Roy Keane and Patrick Vieira in the tunnel at Highbury and the incident at the end of the game at Old Trafford when they attacked Ruud van Nistelrooy. It was quite volatile, but they are different teams now.
"But Arsène will stay," says Ferguson, because Arsenal are "his club, built in his image" and it is hard to leave. "He is 59 now and he will not have the time to rebuild another club if he went off. Is Real Madrid his kind of club? I don't think so."
Real Madrid are assuredly not Ferguson's kind of club. Throughout last season he maintained a verbal guerrilla war against them – whether at United's training ground at Carrington, where he highlighted their links to Franco's grisly regime, or at a press conference in Yokohama during the Club World Championship, where he said he would "not sell that mob a virus". It is perhaps part of Ferguson's gloriously contradictory nature that he eventually sold them the most expensive player in world football.
"It has been a crazy summer," he sighs. "I would have been interested in some buying, but not when they talked of £50m for David Villa or £55m for Sergio Agüero. That does not seem sensible. But maybe the Ronaldo transfer and Kaká's move to Madrid for £56m sparked something off. Then you had Karim Benzema for £42m.
"But that is Madrid, that is their culture. No other club in the world has their flexibility to do that. Manchester City might have the money and, when they offer it, most of it will be cash.
"But Real Madrid don't deal in their own money. They are protected, obviously, by the banks and the Spanish government. It is a different, unusual system. When you look back a few years to when they were £250m in debt, yes, they sold their training ground, but they had a new state-of-the-art training ground built for them. And on their old training ground, they built four apartment blocks and gave one of them to Real Madrid. That is some deal."
However, every sale has its price. When David Beckham left for a £23m fee that officials at the Bernabéu described as "peanuts", Manchester United were expected to cope, but it took three years for them to win another championship, partly because the day Beckham was presented at Madrid was the day an unknown governor of a remote Siberian province decided to buy Stamford Bridge. The loss of Ronaldo has ripped a hole in United's squad bigger than that left by Beckham's departure – and for Roman Abramovich read Sheikh Mansour and Manchester City.
"The area that does concern us is where do we get 26 goals [that Ronaldo scored last season]?" Ferguson says. "That is a concern because I don't have a midfielder like a young Paul Scholes or a young Ryan Giggs who can give me 15-plus goals from midfield areas. We will have to redirect our play a bit more.
"Nani will improve, although he is not as mature as Ronaldo was at his age. I expect Anderson to improve and Darren Fletcher to establish himself as a big player in our squad. [Michael] Owen will get me goals, [Dimitar] Berbatov will be much better. And I don't have to deal with a certain person who is miserable because he is not playing."
Manchester United will change. Wayne Rooney will have to become more of a central striker. On last year's tour to South Africa, Ferguson said this would have to happen and yet, sometimes through necessity, Rooney often appeared on the left wing. It was where he found himself during the European Cup final, forced deeper by Barcelona's sweeping midfield moves, increasingly isolated and irrelevant. The disappointment must sting still because throughout the tour of Asia it is one subject Ferguson will not discuss.
"There will be three teams to beat," he says of the domestic season ahead. "Ourselves, Liverpool and Chelsea will be very close together. They will be encouraged because we have sold Ronaldo. The direction of our game will change because of that, but we will still be very difficult to beat. Rooney will go through the middle. Last season was a lot to do with Berbatov coming to the club and trying to understand what he was best at. You have to utilise what you have available. Some games Rooney did play wide left and in some matches it worked, but in others it was not a good position for him to be in. We will change that. He always wants to play – he sometimes thinks he is a centre-half. Have I toyed with the idea of making him skipper? Toyed is a good word. I don't think he is ready."
Ferguson adds: "Ben Foster, if he stays free of injury, is going to be top-drawer. He will be England's goalkeeper in South Africa next summer. He has to be, he is streets ahead of everybody else."
Foster, to his manager's mind, is potentially England's best goalkeeper since Peter Shilton retired in 1990, the year Ferguson's regime at Old Trafford began to flourish, the year Liverpool won the last of their 18 titles, a figure United have now equalled.
Ferguson did not make much of that, but now, perhaps because of his conflict with Rafael Benítez – whom he very rarely calls "Rafa" – he does sound enticed by the prospect of overtaking them. "There is a record there to be achieved, just as we have won the FA Cup more times than anyone else. But Liverpool winning the European Cup five times doesn't concern me. We have won it three times and had a chance of a fourth, but we will have another, you can be sure of that."
Ferguson claims Benítez, whom many Premier League managers consider aloof, is obsessed with him rather than the other way round. "I have never said a word about him. The only time I responded was when he made that gesture with Sam Allardyce [the crossing of the hands to suggest that Liverpool's game with Blackburn was won the moment they went two goals up].
"There was no doubt he was doing that. Liverpool were too quick to come out and respond that he was signalling they should take a free-kick a different way. That was bollocks. Absolute bollocks."
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13 Jul 2009
Manchester United cannot compete with City and Madrid's spending, says Ferguson
18 May 2009
Alex Ferguson risks Alan Shearer's ire over weakened team at Hull
18 May 2009
Sir Alex Ferguson basks in fountain of youth that underlines manager's aura
10 May 2009
Mark Hughes stays true to the long-haul game at Manchester City
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Sir Alex Ferguson refuses to accept 'small club' Manchester City as a threat | Tim Rich
This article was first published on guardian.co.uk at 00.10 BST on Sunday 26 July 2009. It appeared in the Observer on Sunday 26 July 2009 on p8 of the News & features section. It was last updated at 00.26 BST on Sunday 26 July 2009.
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Paul Marin -19 is one thing, 20 is a whole other matter. It gets even worse if they win the UCL. *groan*. 
05/18/2011.MU fans naah cough, but all a unuh a vomit?-Lazie 1/11/2015
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