Book review: My Autobiography, by Alex Ferguson

by Alex Ferguson
Hodder & Stoughton
4 stars
David Goldblatt

As his comments on his upbringing reveal, Alex Ferguson is a child of the Attlee years, and a son of the Scottish industrial working class, beneficiary of the new welfare state and the solidarities of organised working-class family life. "I came out of a wartime generation that said: you're born, that's you. You were safe. You had the library, the swimming baths and football." It was a way of life in which the most important values were hard work, frugality and loyalty to family.

The former Manchester United manager's greatest accolades are for the straight-talking, the solid, the resilient and reliable, the people without airs and graces - a dying breed. "Now we have more fragile human beings. They've never been in the shipyards, they've never been down a pit; few have seen manual labour," he writes.

Alongside this reverence for the virtues of working-class life and the collective good, runs a fearsome ambition and shop-floor materialism. Ferguson is, by his own admission, no saint, displaying a contempt for authority he would never tolerate himself. Nor has he challenged the economic status quo - his old-school social democracy does not extend to a critique of private ownership, be it the Glazers at Manchester United or anywhere else.

If Ferguson has been prepared to cede some ground to economic realities, he is uncompromising when it comes to the choice between pursuing the collective objective of soccer excellence and the individual project of manufactured celebrity. David Beckham, he believed, made the wrong choice: "David was at a great club: he had a fine career … that was taken away from him … he lost the chance to become an absolute top-dog player."

Ferguson's book is really a piece of oral history. His ghost writer, Paul Hayward, has preserved the cadence, grammar and honesty of reported speech.