EDINBURGH — The point is often made in human resources circles that managers have a tendency to hire individuals who remind them of themselves. Taking this concept to a new level is football club Man United, which has just snapped up a manager who reminds them of Sir Alex Ferguson, the ruddy-faced, abrasive Scot who kept the football club at the top of the league for years. Ole Gunnar Solskjaer spent years under Ferguson, as a player and later a youth coach. Now the new Man United manager is making a concerted effort to look like Ferguson and act like Ferguson. Football fans in Manchester aren’t so sure that it is a case of if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck. Nevertheless, the development makes for a fascinating study for business school students pondering whether copycat management is a strategy for success. The Wall Street Journal has produced this in-depth feature on Solskjaer, who is mimicking Sir Ferguson’s every trait — right down to the tie and jacket. – Jackie Cameron
The Answer to Manchester United’s Alex Ferguson Problem: a Ferguson Clone
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(The Wall Street Journal) London – For the past five years, the most confounding issue around Manchester United has been figuring out life after Alex Ferguson. As the most successful manager in English soccer history over his 26 seasons in charge, he was irreplaceable. More than that, he was also a one-man repository of everything that made Man United Man United.
The list of successors to try and fail in his shadow is now three names long. The most recent addition was Jose Mourinho, fired last month.
That’s when the club suddenly stumbled on the solution to its management puzzle. It turned out they had been thinking about it all wrong. Instead of trying to forge a new way forward after Ferguson, what United really needed was a Ferguson clone.
Improbably, that clone turned out to be 32 years younger than the grouchy old Scotsman and from Norway. His name is Ole Gunnar Solskjaer. He spent 11 seasons racking up trophies as a player under Ferguson, plus four more working for him as a youth coach. And, after going undefeated in his first nine games in charge, Solskjaer is already doing a Fergie impression worthy of “Saturday Night Live.”
“He is the best, the best ever,” he said recently of Ferguson on British television. “I’d be stupid not to try to learn from him.”
Ole Gunnar Solskjær is a special man!
The Man United Super Sub.
Player AND Manager. Insane!
You can feel the passion he has for his club and it’s history.
Beaming with pride as he vividly explains the teams amazing counter attacking ability over the years. Past and present!
Wow!— Conor McGregor (@TheNotoriousMMA) January 26, 2019
Not only does Solskjaer sport a Ferguson-style coat and tie on the United bench – as opposed to Mourinho’s open-collared shirts or, shudder, a track suit – he has reinstated his mentor’s old rule that players must wear club-issue tailored suits to home games. Solskjaer even eschews Mourinho’s front-row seat in the dugout, perching himself in the third row, where Ferguson masterminded two decades of United dominance.
His pitchside manner is only the beginning. After taking over in mid-December, Solskjaer made a point of rehiring Mike Phelan, one of Ferguson’s most trusted lieutenants, to be his assistant. And while his predecessors did their best to put distance between themselves and the Ferguson era, Solskjaer ran back in the other direction. As soon as he became Man United manager, he was on the phone to the old master, inviting him to remind the team which club they were playing for.
“Since the first day he arrived the message has been very clear: this is Manchester United and you have to show that you are Manchester United players,” midfielder Ander Herrera said.
Technically, Solskjaer is only supposed to handle those players until the end of the season, at which point he is expected to return to Molde, the Norwegian club he was borrowed from on an unorthodox loan deal. But United may not want to send him back. If the Ferguson blueprint is what the club is looking for, then no one in world soccer seems better than Solskjaer at following it to the letter.
During his playing days at the club, Solskjaer filled stacks of notebooks with Ferguson’s drills and training regimens, certain that they would come in handy someday. He may have compiled one of the most detailed libraries anywhere of Ferguson dogma.
“Manchester United’s philosophy is so deep and so meaningful, it’s like Barcelona’s and it’s like Ajax’s,” former United defender Gary Neville said on Sky’s “Monday Night Football” broadcast. “At Manchester United you play fast, attacking football in an entertaining way. You bring young players through and give them belief. And you win.”
Those tenets have been at the heart of Solskjaer’s time in the dugout so far. Working with the same squad, he has fielded lineups that are six months younger, on average, than Mourinho’s.
Massive, massive win. Eight wins from eight. Ole Gunnar Solskjær has done an immense job. Manchester United are back.
— Liam Canning (@LiamPaulCanning) January 25, 2019
Solskjaer has also brought back the club’s distinctive attacking mentality. The team is averaging 2.71 goals per league game under him, a whole goal better than the 1.70 it was scoring before his arrival. Somehow, Solskjær has even rediscovered the late goals United specialised in during the Ferguson era. On Tuesday night, they saved a 2-2 draw against Burnley by finding the net twice in the final four minutes – or, as that stretch is known around Old Trafford, “Fergie Time.”
As much as anything else, the change has been psychological.
By the late Mourinho days, the team was simply miserable, ambling about the field like they’d been forced to wear damp clothes. “There are some players that when you squeeze them, you get the best out of them,” Mourinho said by way of explanation this month. “There are other personalities…the reaction is not the best.”
Except those “other personalities” seemed to include the whole squad.
Things had turned so grim that fans and pundits wondered whether Mourinho’s roster, assembled for around $900m, might actually be worthless. The forwards weren’t clicking. Goalkeeper David de Gea seemed to suffer a crisis of confidence. And what to do with $130 million midfielder Paul Pogba, fresh off his World Cup victory with France, had become Britain’s second most baffling problem of the moment.
All of that evaporated with Mourinho’s exit. And, right from the start, Solskjaer saw simple answers to seemingly complicated issues. The Pogba problem? “Paul’s one of the best midfielders in the world going forward,” Solskjaer said, “so you should release him forward.”
“The manager tells me to get into the box and score goals,” Pogba added.
So he does. Pogba has scored six goals in his past six league games. And the relief around the squad is palpable. And the relief around the squad is palpable.
Still, Mourinho wasn’t a complete waste of time. The relationship may have ended badly – as they often do for him – but he laid some important foundations, just as he did elsewhere. It’s no coincidence that the Real Madrid team that won four Champions Leagues in five years, or the Chelsea side that took the 2016-17 Premier League title, relied so heavily on cores he put in place.
In each case it took someone else to repair the relationship between the dugout and the team. At United, the 77-year-old Ferguson wasn’t in a position to see to it himself. But for now, Solskjaer’s impression of him is proving just convincing enough.
“The manager brought some happiness,” de Gea said. “The players are playing well and the team is very strong now. This is the real Manchester United.”
Write to Joshua Robinson at [email protected]
