It’s been seven years and four managers since Sir Alex Ferguson stepped down as Manchester United boss, but Ole Gunnar Solskjaer now feels as though the club he experienced as a player is making a comeback.
In an exclusive interview with UCFB as part of the LMA Insight Series, the current United manager – often cited as one of Sir Alex’s most devoted pupils – revealed he felt the club had “lost its way”, but is now rediscovering what made them such a success under the great Scot.
“I felt coming into the club there had been a lot of changes since Sir Alex left and what my memories were of that successful, winning team,” Solskjaer says. “Gradually I’m getting the feeling that we are getting back to the right values – I think maybe we had lost our way as a football club.”
Describing the winning culture and ethos of the club during his time as a player, Solskjaer explained that is was driven by the powerful first-team dressing room at Old Trafford. He said: “The players drove the culture; there was Sir Alex at the top, he was the leader and we followed him, but he made players feel important and feel that we had to drive it.”
The former Cardiff City boss added: “We had some exceptional personalities in the group and you can see that now by how many are working in football as a coach or a pundit.”
As a player Solskjaer won the lot with the Red Devils, including the 1999 UEFA Champions League where he famously scored the winning goal in the last minute of a dramatic final against Bayern Munich at the Nou Camp to secure a historic treble.
Despite being prolific in front of goal, though, he wasn’t the poster boy of the team.
“Now that I’m the manager there are more people coming up to me and recognising me,” he says. “When I was a player I had David Beckham, Ryan Giggs, Roy Keane and Paul Scholes to hide behind! So now there’s more attention on me but that’s not a problem.”
He concluded: “To make it as a player under Sir Alex you had to have a certain personality anyway, you had to deal with the good and the bad of football, and I think those 15 years I had before as a player and a coach helped me a lot in preparing for this job.”
