Page 114 - Alex Ferguson: My Autobiography

With so many players coming in, I was proud of the work we did on those who were to end up with
other clubs. In the spring of 2010, for instance, there were 72 players throughout Scotland, Europe
and England who had been through an apprenticeship at Man Utd. Seventy-two.
Fabio Capello told a good friend of mine that if you put gowns and masks on Man Utd players, he

could spot them a mile away, which was quite a compliment. Their behaviour and training stand out.
We had three in Denmark, one in Germany, two in Belgium, and others all over the place in England.
We had seven goalkeepers out there, none of whom had made the first team: Kevin Pilkington,
Michael Pollitt, Ben Williams and Luke Steele among them.
We were adept at identifying the players who would become first-team regulars. There is
something visible in a top-grade Manchester United player that forces you to promote him to the first
team. Darron Gibson was an example of one who brings you to that crossroads where a decision

needs to be made about whether he is going to be a first-team player.
In 2009–10 he was at the stage where we were in danger of not being fair to him. He had different
qualities to most of my other midfielders. His main attribute was that he could score from outside the
box. Scholes was the only other player who could do that, but he was coming to the end. So the
judgment was a tough one, as it was with Tom Cleverley, who was at Watford, where he had scored
11 times from midfield. Cleverley had no physique, was wiry as hell, but he was as brave as a lion,

had good feet and could score a goal. David Gill said one day, ‘What are you going to do with
Cleverley next year? He’s scoring a lot of goals at Watford.’ My answer was, ‘I’ll tell you what I’m
going to do, I’m going to play him, to find out whether he can score goals for me as well as Watford.’
Could he score six for me? Nobody else was getting half a dozen from midfield. Michael Carrick
had struck a high note of five. If Cleverley could score six goals in the Premier League from midfield,
he would become a consideration. The demarcation line was always: what can they do and what can
they not do? The can-do question was: can they win me the game? If they could score six goals, I

could ignore some of the negatives.
At 20 or 21, players would sometimes stagnate. If they were not in the first team by then they could
become disheartened. I reached that moment in my own playing career. At 21 I was fed up at St
Johnstone and took papers out to emigrate to Canada. I was disillusioned. Football’s not for me, I was
saying. I’m not getting anywhere. At the United reserve level, we encountered this dilemma all the
time. We would send players out on loan in the hope they would come back better, but often sent them

to a level that would suit them more in the long term anyway, so they could find careers. We were
proud to have relocated the 72 players I talked about elsewhere in the game.
The ones who make it have a way of telling you they are certainties to reach the grade. Welbeck is
an example. At one point I tipped him to make Fabio Capello’s 2010 World Cup squad, but he had
issues to do with the pace he was growing at. At 19 he was still shooting up and encountering
problems with his knees. I told him to go carefully in training sessions and save his best for matches.
He was on course to end up 6 feet 2 inches or 6 feet 3 inches tall. But what a good player. Such a

confident boy. I said to him: ‘One of these days I’m going to kill you,’ because he was such a cocky
so-and-so, and he replied, ‘I’ll probably deserve it.’ Touché. He had an answer for everything.
A constant in our discussions about young players was whether they could handle the demands of
the Old Trafford crowd and the short patience span of the media. Would they grow or shrink in a
United shirt? We knew the make-up of every young homegrown player who came into the United
starting XI, from the training ground, from reserve team football. By the time a player graduated from

youth or reserve team football, we aimed to be sure about their temperaments, sure about their
characters and sure of their abilities.