Ferguson offered Man Utd star £100k to ‘retire immediately’ – but he turned it down
Former Manchester United star Paul McGrath was once offered £100k by Sir Alex Ferguson to hang up his boots – but turned him down.
The Irishman, who won the PFA Player of the Year award in 1993, played at Old Trafford for seven years, the final three of which were under Ferguson. The Scot was looking to implement change and end the club’s wait for a league title having arrived from Aberdeen.
He sought to rid of the drinking culture and, in an effort to do so, targeted the man he thought was the biggest drinker in the squad – McGrath. He had struggled with booze during his adult life, which almost cost him his career before he was 30. Ferguson’s lump sum offer was put to the Irishman, but swiftly rejected.
Sir Alex Ferguson was looking to get Paul McGrath away from football
He told The Telegraph: “Sir Alex got me into the room and just said ‘we’d like you to stop playing football’. Simple as that. And he said they were willing to give me £100,000 to quit playing football altogether and just go back to Ireland. I was thinking about it because £100,000 back then was quite a lot of money.
“But I spoke to [team-mates] Kevin Moran and Bryan Robson, and I just said I wanted to play on because I thought I could still do something in football. So Gordon Taylor, who was at the PFA, went into Sir Alex and said ‘Paul’s playing on, you can fine him, you can do what you want but he’s going to play football – here or somewhere else’.”
Just weeks later Graham Taylor, then in charge of Aston Villa, made the call and bought McGrath down to the Midlands, where he would excel. The centre-back spent seven years at Villa Park and his efforts in the inaugural Premier League season mean he is just one of six defenders in history to claim the Player of the Year Award.
The Irishman was seen as one of the leaders of the drinking culture
United’s drinking culture by no means ended with McGrath’s departure and only began to turn later in the 1990s. Roy Keane, McGrath’s compatriot, has detailed how he had several run-ins with the United boss given his appetite for a drink when it came to relaxing.
He admitted previously: “Alex Ferguson pulled me many times and he’d say ‘You were out in Manchester and you got a taxi at 2.30 yesterday morning’, and I’d go ‘Yeah I did. It’s not breaking the rules because it’s 48 hours (away from kick-off), which is in our contracts’.
“Then he would say to me ‘How many drinks did you have?’, and obviously I’d lie to him and say 10 or 11 bottles. He’d be like ’10 or 11 bottles, what are you thinking!?’, if I told him the truth, that was every hour!”
