Page 56 - Alex Ferguson: My Autobiography

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CRISTIANO Ronaldo was the most gifted player I managed. He surpassed all the other great ones I coached
at United. And I had many. The only ones who could be placed near him would be a couple of the
home-produced players, Paul Scholes and Ryan Giggs, because they contributed so prodigiously to
Manchester United for two decades. That longevity, consistency and those behaviour patterns were

quite exceptional.
We lost our wizard, Cristiano, to Real Madrid, in the end, but we looked back at his time with us
with pride and gratitude. In six seasons with us, from 2003 to 2009, he scored 118 times in 292 games
and won the Champions League, three Premier League titles, one FA Cup and two League Cups. He
scored in the 2008 Champions League final, against Chelsea in Moscow, and kicked a ball for us for
the final time 12 months later, in the final against Barcelona in Rome.

In between we watched a special talent bloom on our training pitches at Carrington and in our first
XI, which passed through a lean spell in the middle years of the decade. We helped Ronaldo to be the
player he was and he helped us recapture the excitement and self-expression of Manchester United
teams.
Madrid paid £80 million in cash for him, and do you know why? It was a way for Florentino Pérez,
their president, to say to the world, ‘We are Real Madrid, we are the biggest of the lot.’ It was a
clever move by them and a declaration of their intent to chase the game’s most famous players.

Ramón Calderón, Pérez’s predecessor, had claimed the previous year that Cristiano would one day
be a Real Madrid player. I knew full well that if they produced the £80 million, he would have to go.
We could not block his fervent wish to return to Iberia and wear the famous white shirt of Di Stefano
or Zidane. The reality of managing Ronaldo, as of other talents who came to Manchester United as
teenagers, was that you could oversee the early years fairly comfortably, because they were not yet

global idols, they were on the way up. At the point they became mega-stars, as Ronaldo did, you
asked yourself a question that Carlos Queiroz and I discussed all the time: ‘How long are we going to
be able to keep Cristiano Ronaldo?’
Carlos was as accurate as it was possible to be. He said: ‘Alex, if you get five years out of him,
you’ve struck gold. There’s no precedent for a Portuguese player going to another country at
seventeen years old and staying five years.’ The fact that we had him for six was a bonus. In that
period we won a European Cup and three League titles with him. I consider that a pretty good return.
When the possibility of him leaving edged towards being a probability, I reached a gentleman’s

agreement with him. I went to Carlos’s house in Portugal to find the boy expressing an urge to go to
Real Madrid, and told him: ‘You can’t go this year, not after the way Calderón has approached this
issue.’ I said, ‘I know you want to go to Real Madrid. But I’d rather shoot you than sell you to that guy
now. If you perform, don’t mess us about, and someone comes and offers us a world record fee, then