Home > Work > Alex Ferguson: My Autobiography
1 " Origins should never be a barrier to success. A modest start in life can be a help more than a hindrance. "
― Alex Ferguson , Alex Ferguson: My Autobiography
2 " Sweeter after difficulties’. "
3 " With young people you have to try to impart a sense of responsibility. If they can add greater awareness to their energy and their talents they can be rewarded with great careers. "
4 " There was no way I could contemplate taking the England job. Can you imagine me doing that? A Scotsman? I always joked that I would take the position and relegate them: make them the 150th rated country in the world, with Scotland 149. "
5 " The human element tells you a referee can be wrong. But the good ones will make the correct decisions more often than not. The ones who make the wrong ones are not necessarily bad referees. They just lack that talent for making the right calls in a tight time frame. "
6 " If they lose faith in your knowledge, they lose faith in you. That grasp of the facts must be kept at a high level, for all time. You have to be accurate in what you say to the players. "
7 " Sometimes defeats are the best outcomes. To react to adversity is a quality. "
8 " As long as you don’t criticise individual players in public, admonishing the team is fine, not a problem. We can all share in the blame: the manager, his staff, the players. Expressed properly, criticism can be an acceptance of collective responsibility. Under "
9 " With young people you have to try to impart a sense of responsibility. If they can add greater awareness to their energy and their talents they can be rewarded with great careers. One "
10 " What we did at all times, in success and adversity, was make sure the training ground was sacrosanct. The work there, the concentration, and the standards we maintained never dropped. Eventually that consistency of effort will show itself on a Saturday. That way, when a United player has a couple of bad results, he will hate it. It becomes intolerable to him. Even the best players sometimes lose confidence. Even Cantona had bouts of self-doubt. But if the culture around the training ground was right, the players knew they could fall back on the group and the expertise of our staff. "
11 " Endless praise sounds false. They see through it. A central component of the manager-player relationship is that you have to make them take responsibility for their own actions, their own mistakes, their performance level, and finally the result. We were all in the results industry. Sometimes a scabby win would mean more to us than a 6-0 victory with a goal featuring 25 passes. The bottom line was always that Manchester United had to be victorious. That winning culture could be maintained only if I told a player what I thought about his performance in a climate of honesty. And yes, sometimes I would be forceful and aggressive. I would tell a player what the club demanded of them. "
12 " There is a psychological dimension also to handling indiavidual players. With errant behaviour it helps to look for a moment through their eyes. You were young once, so put yourself in their position. You do something wrong, you're waiting to be punished. What's he going to say?' you think. Or, What's my dad going to say?' The aim is to make the biggest possible impact. What would have made the deepest imprint on me at that stage of life? "
13 " The supporters were entitled to know when I was unhappy with a performance. But not an individual. "
14 " One obvious aspect of management is identifying people who can help you get where you are trying to go. Talent-identification sounds like a straightforward business. If it were, every team would be successful. "
15 " In those moments of defeat and acceptance, there would be a dawning, for me, of where we needed to go. My feeling was always: 'I don't like this, but we'll have to meet the challenge. We'll have to step up a mark.' It wouldn't have been me, or the club, to submit to apocalyptic thoughts about that being the end, the finish of all our work. We could never allow that.Every time those moments poked us in the eye, we accepted the invitation to regroup and advance again. Those were motivating passages. They forced me on. I'll go further: I can't be sure that without those provocations I would have Enjoy the job so much. "
16 " When I won the League for the first time in 1993, I didn't want my team to slacken off. The thought appalled me. I was determined to keep advancing, to strengthen our hold on power. I told that 1993 side: 'Some people, when the have a holiday, just want to go to Saltcoats, twenty-five miles along the coast from Glasgow. Some people don't even want to do that. They're happy to stay at home or watch the birds and the ducks float by in the park. And some want to go to the moon.''It's about people's ambitions. "
17 " If you're examining successful people, look at their mother and father, study what they did, for clues about energy and motivation. "
18 " in my new office; "
19 " Success is often cyclical, with doldrums. "
20 " Origins should never be a barrier to success. A modest start in life can be a help more than a hindrance. If you're examining successful people, look at their mother and father, study what they did, for clues about energy and motivation. "