再Sir Alex Ferguson - Manchester United, May 11th 2013 P59 (マンチェスター ユナイテッド)
British history is studded with men and women who have ゛made the weather)゛, in Winston Churchill's definition of political greatness. But only Sir Alex Ferguson, manager of Manchester United, is credited with making time. Through intimidating force of will, Sir Alex, who has overseen the Red Devils for 26 years, is said to cow referees into adding a few minutes whenever his team badly needs a goal. ゛Fergie time゛, his besotted supporters and aggrieved rivals call it. Others dispute its existence. Yet the greatness of Sir Alex, who announced his imminent retirement on May 8th after almost 1,500 games in charge of one of the world's richest and most populas sports clubs, is not in doubt. Few Britons have been more successful, in any sphere, in recent times. His longevity is a mark of this. Over the past year, eight of the English Premier League's 20 clubs have sacked their managers. Many others have, at one point or another, been rumoured to be facing the chop. Only Sir Alex, a 71-year-old Glaswegian, has been entirely secure. He last faced such speculation in 1990, before he won the first of his 38 trophies with United, a record no football manager is likely to match. How has he done it? Hard bloody work is one answer. Over the course of his tenure at Old Trafford, English football has changed utterly, from a clumsily contested, sometimes violently followed, national game into a global industry, in which Manchester United is the most recognised brand. The job of football management has been transformed meanwhile. Elite managers, who are these days often Spanish or Italian, are peripatetic experts - more management consultants than chief executives. Sir Alex is of a grittier type. He controls everything in his club, from brand management to talent-spotting and the players' tea. However, his great skill is man management - as suggested by the surprisingly humble tributes paid this week by some of the world's richest sportsmen, David Beckham hailed him as a ゛father figure゛- which was perhaps uncomfortably true, given that Sir Alex once kicked a boot into Mr Beckham's face and then turf him out of the club in annoyance at the player's celebrity ways. Sir Alex's players respect him because he is like them：working-class and proud, but fiercely ambitious. His habit of erupting into a murderous fury is another factor. ゛His players are multimillionaires but terrified of him,゛says Jim O'Neill, a former United board member more used to the paunchier prima donnas of Goldman Sachs. Goal-line dramas notwithstanding, football management is about squeezing out incrementally more performance per salary pound. This Sir Alex has done, season after season. Manchester United routinely spends a lower proportion of its revenues on wag es than any other Premier League club. Shrewd self-interest has helped. Arriving in Manchester from the humbler realm of Scottish football management, Sir Alex steeped himself in the history of one of England's most venerable and tragic clubs. During the second world war, Old Trafford was blitzed by German bombers. Under Sir Matt Busby, another working-class Scot, its team became a routine challenger for the championship before, in 1958, losing seven players in a plane crash. Sir Alex presented himself as the custodian of this sacred tradition：゛the keeper of the temple,゛he called himself. In the process he came to personify it. His style of supreme leadership, as well as his success, have made him an alluring figure far beyond football. Businessmen and politicians have studied his methods - especially within the Labour Party, to which Sir Alex is tribally bonded and has been a generous benefactor. During the early leadership of Tony Blair, whose blokeish New Labour courtiers were football-mad, his views were often sought. ゛Alex F called, really worried about Iraq,..゛begins an early in the diaries of Alastair Campbell, Mr Blair's spin doctor. Labour could still learn from him. A self-described socialist and former shop steward, Sir Alex was an odd fit with the centrist Mr Blair. Yet he admired a winner. He was much less impressed by Mr Blair's shambolic successor, Gordon Brown - though he was also born in Glasgow and is a lifelong football fan. Nor could Sir Alex quarrel with New Labour's embrace of the market. English football has become the world's best because it pays the most：the average weekly wage in the premiership rose by 1,500% between 1992 and 2010. Sir Alex was well rewarded, too；he named his mansion Fairfields, after the dockyard where his father once laboured. Sir Alex's success was based on his enthusiastic embrace of globalisation, something too many people in Labour are still uncomfortable with. He inherited a squad that contained two Danes, four Irishmen and 18 Britons. He leaves a squad with players from a dozen countries, including Serbia, Ecuador and Japan. In public-policy terms, United runs both a superb domestic education system and a liberal immigration policy. This is a lesso
