Sir
Alex Ferguson has revealed that Manchester United striker Wayne Rooney
questioned his decision for not signing Mesut Ozil during the summer of
2010.
Rooney announced his intention to leave
Manchester United that year, citing the club’s lack of ambition, only
to sign a contract extension days later.
And Ferguson has now claimed that the
former Everton man brought up the club’s failure to sign the Germany
star, who moved to Real Madrid from Werder Bremen that summer, as an
example.
“At that meeting, he
(Rooney) was hugely sheepish. I felt he’d been programmed in what he was
trying to say. The basis of his complaint was that we were not
sufficiently ambitious,” he wrote in his autobiography.
“My response was to ask Wayne, ‘When
have we not challenged for the league in the last 20 years? How many
European finals have we been to in the last three or four years?
“I told him to say we weren’t ambitious was a nonsense. Wayne said that we should have pursued Mesut Ozil, who had joined Real Madrid from Werder Bremen.
“My reply was that it was
none of his business who we should have gone for. I told him it was his
job to play and perform. My job was to pick the correct teams. And so
far I had been getting it right.”
Ferguson also lifted the lid on how he promised Cristiano Ronaldo his dream move to Real Madrid.
He said the then Real president Ramon
Calderon’s public overtures riled him to the extent that he refused to
sanction a sale despite Ronaldo’s desire to move to Spain.
Ronaldo would eventually join Madrid
for £80m in 2009, which Ferguson believes was a statement of intent
from re-instated president Florentino Perez.
The Scot writes, “Madrid paid £80m in
cash for him, and do you know why? It was a way for Florentino Perez,
their president, to say to the world, ‘We are Real Madrid, we are the
biggest of the lot’.
“When the possibility of him leaving edged towards being a probability, I reached a gentleman’s agreement with him.”
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