I regard myself as patriotic but, truth be told, playing for England was a bonus. Winning for my club was always the most important thing, and given a straight choice of a European Cup with United or a European Championship with England, it’s United every time. It was United who were my heart and soul as a kid. They are the team I will watch when I am ninety, God willing.
As a kid, England meant very little. England was Bryan Robson. He was the only reason I watched the 1982 World Cup. England had no pull on me whatsoever. Going to Old Trafford on a Saturday was the big deal in my life. Wembley was on a distant planet.
None of this ever stopped me giving my all for my country, or being gutted every time we went out of a tournament. But I almost feel a bit sorry for the England players coming through now because they are caught between these massive expectations and the reality of being good, sometimes very good, but probably not of tournament-winning quality.
Jack Wilshere is a fantastic young talent of true international calibre, but it is going to be a while before we are producing enough players of his class. I think we are heading in the right direction, though. The Premier League years have seen a rise in technique and skills and tactical intelligence. When I started at United we were playing balls into the channels. That’s not happening now.
Kids have had role models like Zola, Henry, Bergkamp. There’s been change at the top end and I think it’s filtering down through most clubs and most academies to the park pitches and the kids.
But it’s not a transformation that can happen overnight. It will take time. We have our football culture in this country based on the traditional power player and I don’t see us competing seriously for a major tournament for at least ten years. We are heading the right way, but I’m afraid we still have a lot of catching up to do.
Money Talks
I’VE BEEN LUCKY. I never wanted to play for any club except United. I never lost sleep thinking about a transfer or plotting how to get away. My contract negotiations at Old Trafford would literally take about five minutes, especially because I never had an agent worrying about his cut. I’d walk in with my dad to see Peter Kenyon or David Gill with a number in my head, and, give or take a few quid, they’d have the same figure in mind too. Check the wording, give me a pen, where do I sign.
The only time I had a problem was when Phil was offered less than me when he wasn’t in the team every week. I told Kenyon that wasn’t fair and the club added some incentives to bring Phil level.
As for my teammates, I never worried for a moment if I was on the same money. I never had a clue what the likes of Scholesy or Giggsy were earning in all my time at Old Trafford. I just hope it was a lot more than me.
My life was simple when it came to money and contracts. I wish it was the same for more footballers but every day we hear about the influence of leeching agents. There are even some so-called super-agents. Super at what? Counting their take?
Everyone in football, apart from agents themselves, agrees that far too much money goes out of the game to middlemen, so why aren’t we doing more about it? The Premier League has started publishing what clubs pay to agents to shame them into bringing down the huge sums leaking out of the game – but it is the players who should really take a lead.
Many players have become so reliant on agents it’s ridiculous. I’m not going to damn every agent and, certainly for the top players, there is work to be done in terms of commercial contracts and sponsorships. A big-name player at United is a business. And massive moves, especially abroad, need to be handled by someone who can be trusted and who has contacts. There is a place for good representation, but too many footballers end up relying on an agent just to fix a lightbulb. They stop thinking for themselves. They get lazy and they get careless. They turn their whole life over to an agent, and in doing so they lose track of whether advice given is in their best interest.
For years I’ve been banging on about this. I’ve been wanting the various football organisations – the PFA, FA, LMA and the clubs – to come together to try and look at ways of weeding out this cancer.
The players themselves can do more. I always tell young players to employ a good accountant or lawyer who can deal with contracts. If you are renegotiating, why do you need an agent taking a slice that you’ve worked so hard to earn, practising since the age of six? Why should agents ever take a percentage? You can pay an accountant or a lawyer by the hour for the service they provide. That shouldn’t cost more than a few thousand quid – much less than the fortunes going to some agents.
I can’t understand why clubs and players agree to pay them so much. Just because a deal is worth £30 million it’s not necessarily ten times the work of a £3 million move. But clubs and players don’t demand value for money.
It’s time for players to do their bit, and to make a start I’d take the radical step of publicising every player’s wage in this country. We always hear in the media what a player earns so why not be transparent like they are in American sports? Let’s take the mystery out of it.
It will cause initial envy – ‘Look at what he’s earning!’ – but everyone will get accustomed to it soon enough. And hopefully it will get players to think, ‘I don’t need an agent to tell me what I should be on, or what a club’s pay-scale is.’ It should tell them they don’t need to bother with Mr Ten Per Cent.
I signed quite a few long-term contracts – the longer the better as far as I was concerned. My 2004 contract was the biggest because I was captain, at my peak. I found a simple way of working out a fair rate: I would speak to the PFA and they would give me a ballpark figure based on what the going salary was for international defenders.
At that time I was more established than any other right-back in the country. I’m sure there were plenty of other defenders, including Rio at United, earning much more, but I never worried about pushing too hard. Money was never a huge thing for me.
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Because I’ve found negotiations so simple, being so committed to United, it has sometimes been hard for me to accept that other players could have their heads turned by rival clubs or want to leave Old Trafford. But 2009 would see Cristiano Ronaldo and Carlos Tevez deciding that they were better off elsewhere.
In the case of Cristiano, a move had become inevitable. We had known that he wanted to leave since the summer of 2008. He would talk openly in the dressing room about Madrid. He wanted to play in the warmth, and the history of Real was always a draw. When someone is set on a dream, it’s difficult to stop him. Cristiano dreamt of playing in the white shirt.
‘I need to get out of this place and go somewhere hot,’ he would say.
I’d have a go back. ‘You don’t know how good you’ve got it here. You’ll miss us more than you know.’
‘Why should I listen to you?’ he’d come back. ‘You’d never leave Manchester, even on holiday.’
He was totally open about his ambitions and I never had a problem with Cristiano for that. How could you? He stayed totally professional through 2008/09 even though he was counting down the months to his departure. Maybe his form wasn’t quite as spectacular as the previous couple of seasons, but we’d had six years out of him – three when the club had given him everything in terms of education, polishing the diamond, and three when he’d sparkled and been truly sensational.
I was sure he would miss us, and I’m sure he has. With all the chopping and changing at the Bernabéu, how can they possibly have the special camaraderie we’d built at Old Trafford? As for the adulation, Ronaldo couldn’t be more popular than he’d been among United supporters. And then there is the small fact that we have carried on winning honours and reaching Champions League finals. Real haven’t found that easy, for all their money.
The grass isn’t always greener. But Cristiano’s heart was set on the move and it was an offer United couldn’t turn down. Any club would sell at a world record £80 million.
In the case of Carlos, it was a lot more complicated. The arrival of Dimitar Berbatov in September 2008 had been a challenge he hadn’t risen to. He was in and out of the team and he became insecure. After the hunger of the first year, he’d started to toss it off a bit in training. He was constantly saying his back was sore. He’d become very fond of a massage.
Don’t get me wrong, I rate him as a player and like him as a person. Forget the handbags between us after he left, he’s a brilliant striker, as he proved for City. But I can only judge on what he did in that second season and, to all of us at United, it seemed that his heart wasn’t in it.
He’d been upset by the signing of Berba, and Carlos is a player who needs to feel the love. He’s not someone who can play one game in three and be happy. Given the strikers we had through 2008/09 there was no way the manager could promise him a starting place, so he became disheartened and then made it worse by trying to get the fans on his side against the manager. That was never going to be a good idea. So it was time for his agent to line up another massive payday.
Carlos was in the unusual position of being ‘owned’ by a third party, and I can imagine, knowing their principles, that United would have been uncomfortable with the thought of paying a huge transfer fee to agents. This was going to be tens of millions going straight out of the game. Rumour had it that the fee City eventually signed him for was astronomical and, based on his mood in his last year at United, it didn’t make sense to compete with that sort of financial deal. United faced a hard decision at the time and there was no great surprise in the dressing room when he left.
He was an impact signing for City and, of course, they made the most of it. They put up the ‘Welcome to Manchester’ posters, but I never had a problem with that. You give some stick and you take it back. You have to try to beat them on the pitch. That’s what United do best. That’s what really kills people, winning trophies.
Carlos and I had a little argument after he went. He overreacted to one innocent comment I made, and when we played City he gave me the big-mouth gesture. I stuck a finger up. It would have made for a quieter life if I hadn’t reacted, but sometimes, in the heat of the moment, we can all be daft. I couldn’t walk down the streets in Manchester for weeks without either United fans slapping me on the back or City supporters giving me dog’s abuse. But that’s all noise. It’s what matters on the pitch that counts, and if Carlos really thought he’d be happier and more successful at City than United, that was his call, even if I didn’t think it made sense.
Within a couple of seasons he was agitating for another transfer. I think he’s the type of person who will keep moving on. I suspect he won’t stay anywhere for longer than two or three years, and now he’s said he wants to leave Manchester. This is the city where he won trophies and became world famous so I was surprised to hear him say he couldn’t stand the place. Manchester was the making of him.
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Ronaldo and Tevez, on top of Wazza and Berba, had given us the sort of attacking depth we hadn’t enjoyed since 1999 – though it was still not enough to overcome Barcelona in the Champions League final in 2009 in what would be the last United game for Tevez and Ronaldo. That final in Rome has gone down as one of the great disappointments of the Ferguson era because we never played like a United team can. We didn’t go down with all guns blazing.
There has been criticism that we paid for a negative approach, but it was never our intention to see so little of the ball. The manager’s last words before the lads went out in Rome’s Olympic Stadium were as positive as ever: ‘Come on, you are European champions. Show the world what you’re made of.’
We had set up to combat Barcelona, in a similar way to how we knocked them out in the semi-final twelve months earlier. That victory provided our tactical blueprint: a five-man midfield closing down the gaps and then Ronaldo causing them problems.
The manager had shown us a video of all the goals Barcelona had conceded that season and we wanted to exploit a weakness. We knew Gerard Pique well from his time at United and were confident you could get at him one-on-one around the penalty area. He’s a big, tall lad and not always comfortable facing real pace. That’s why we were playing Ronaldo high up the field, in an effort to get him running at Pique. But our old teammate turned out to be brilliant.
I have to say, in the first five minutes Pique showed guts I’ve rarely seen in a young defender. We were pressing Barcelona like mad but he kept taking the ball off Valdés and playing it out from the back. A couple of times he played unbelievably risky passes, but he trusted in the way he’d been taught. As a team, Barcelona didn’t wobble under pressure, they stuck to their passing game. That takes talent and a fantastic temperament. It’s what makes this Barcelona team of recent years so special. They’d do exactly the same after we blitzed them early at Wembley in the Champions League final of 2011.
With Pique turning out to be such a fine defender, a world champion, people wondered why United had got rid of him, but it was timing and culture. At that time he didn’t fit the English mentality. He had incredible ability, was a great passer of the ball, strong and composed and enthusiastic around the changing room. But he wasn’t always at ease in the Premier League. A game at Bolton on a Saturday afternoon with Kevin Davies banging into him came as a shock to him and it affected his confidence. He probably needed to go back to Spain and develop as a player within his own culture. He was a fish out of water in England, and he couldn’t get the games to develop because we had Vidic and Ferdinand at their peak. It was just bad timing for him, but we were all very happy at United to see him enjoy success elsewhere – just a shame that he should have been so brilliant against us in two Champions League finals.
Thanks to Pique, Barcelona weathered that early burst in 2009. When Samuel Eto’o scored with their first attack it knocked the stuffing out of us. They settled into their passing rhythm and we couldn’t get hold of the ball. We couldn’t do much at all. It was so strange for a United team not to have that fightback. Even if we are not playing well we can normally summon something. Get one goal, and then we’ll get two. Get two and a third will arrive. That’s the mentality. But the moment never came. They had mastery of the match, and we didn’t even begin to rattle them. They scored a second through Messi’s free header.
People questioned the team selection, but the system and the approach was good enough to have beaten Barcelona a year earlier. Inevitably the critics pored over Ronaldo’s performance, too. He was always going to draw the most scrutiny, but at least he took the game to Barcelona. There were many disappointing individual performances that night. Ronaldo wasn’t blameless but I wouldn’t begin to put him in the line of fire. There were other players who will know that they did not perform close to what was expected.
I watched all this unfold from the stands. I had to accept that I was now an occasional player, a squad member. I wasn’t even on the bench for the final, with John O’Shea in the team and Rafael da Silva as back-up. I couldn’t complain, given how I was now battling with a variety of aches, pains and niggles.
I made sixteen league appearances that season and felt I had contributed to another championship. It felt sweet lifting that trophy knowing that we had drawn level with Liverpool on eighteen titles. It had taken a while but, finally, we were alongside them in the history books – an unbelievable achievement given where we’d started from. But no one was going to rest until we’d broken the record.