Page 131 - Alex Ferguson: My Autobiography

Fergie and Son, broadcast on 27 May 2004, on BBC3, which featured a horrible attack on my son
Jason. They looked at the transfers of Jaap Stam to Roma and Massimo Taibi to Reggina in relation to
Jason’s involvement with the Elite Sports Agency. Before the broadcast went out, the United board
cleared me, Jason and Elite of any wrongdoing in transfers, but decided that Jason could no longer act

for the club on transfer dealings.
The BBC would not apologise and the allegations they made were not true.
In the aftermath, Peter Salmon of the BBC came up to see me and I told him, ‘You watch that
programme and tell me whether it does the BBC credit.’ I wanted to sue them, but my solicitor and
Jason both opposed the idea. Salmon assumed his old friendship with me from Granada TV would
end the standoff.
‘The BBC’s a Manchester firm now,’ he said.

‘Great,’ I said. ‘And you need to apologise.’ No answer. His plan was to get me to address the
Fergie and Son programme in an interview with Clare Balding. Why would I do that? But we did
agree to differ in the end and I resumed my interviews with BBC staff. By then I had made my point.
More generally Sky television changed the whole media climate by making it more competitive and
adding to the hype. Take the coverage of the Suárez biting incident in the spring of 2013. I was asked
about it in a press conference. The headline on my answer was: ‘Ferguson feels sympathy for

Liverpool’. They asked me a question about Suárez and I said, ‘I know how they feel because
Cantona received a nine-month ban for kung-fu kicking a fan.’ My point was – never mind ten games,
try nine months. Yet they ran a headline suggesting I felt sorry for Suárez.
Another headline was: ‘Ferguson says José Mourinho is going to Chelsea’. The question they had
asked me was: ‘Who will be your main challenger next year?’ I replied that Chelsea would be there
next season and added that if the papers were right and Mourinho was going back, it would give them
a boost. The headline became: Ferguson says Mourinho’s going back to Chelsea.

I had to text Mourinho to explain. He texted back and said, ‘It’s OK, I know, I saw it.’ That
headline ran every ten minutes. Mourinho did end up back at Chelsea but that’s not the point.
So there was an intensity and volatility about the modern media I found difficult. I felt that by the
end it was hard to have relationships with the press. They were under so much pressure it was not
easy to confide in them. When I first came to Manchester, I was wary of some but wasn’t guarded in
the way I was in my final years. Characters like John Bean and Peter Fitton were decent lads. Bill

Thornton. David Walker. Steve Millar. Decent guys. And I had my old friends from Scotland.
On tours we used to have a night out with the press lads. One evening we ended up back in my
room and Beano was in striking form, tap-dancing on my table. Another night I was in bed, at about
11 o’clock, when the phone rang and a voice said: ‘Alex! Can you confirm or deny that you were seen
in a taxi with Mark Hughes tonight?’
It was John Bean. I told him, ‘It would be very difficult, John, because he was playing for Bayern
Munich tonight in a European tie.’

John said: ‘Oh yes, I watched that game.’
I banged down the phone.
John then turns up on the Friday. ‘A million apologies, Alex. I know you’ll accept my apology.’
And sat down.
Latterly we had a lot of young reporters who dressed more casually than the men I had known in my
early years. Maybe it was a generational thing, but it just didn’t sit well with me. It’s a difficult job

for those young reporters because they are under so much pressure from their editors. Forget off the
record. It doesn’t exist any more. I banned a couple of reporters in 2012–13 for using off-the-record