November 25, 2013

Sir Alex Ferguson’s memoir is a smash hit, but it’s also riddled with errors

by

Sir Alex Ferguson.

During his 26 year tenure of Manchester United, Sir Alex Ferguson racked up a string of awards and accomplishments, including thirteen Premier League titles, two UEFA Champions league titles, and four Manager of Year awards.  He was even knighted in 1999 for his service.

Yet, while his recently-released memoir has undoubtedly been a success, selling 115,000 copies in its first week, it has not been free of controversy. Released earlier this month, the book has been lambasted for being filled with factual errors — most surprising, since it’s coming from a man that is notorious for his perfectionism and attention to detail.

Ferguson managing skills are considered so impressive that he gave a series of interviews to Harvard academics revealing his secrets to success. In the interview he showed the importance he places on control by saying things like “if anyone steps out of my control, that’s them dead.” He also goes into detail on how and when to criticize a player — when criticizing you should avoid yelling and you should do it immediately following a match — and how to show support (say “well done” — there’s no need for superlatives). He also emphasizes the need to tailor the approach to each individual.

So for a man that notes the best two words for encouragement, and also when criticism is most effective, it is interesting to see how many factual details he got wrong in his autobiography.

Currently, people have found 45 mistakes in the retired manager’s biography. The errors seem to be honest mistakes, as they don’t appear to be malicious. Ferguson talks about selling defender Jaap Stam to Roma, but in fact he sold him to Lazio. Ferguson states that United had Roy Keane for 11 years; it was actually 12.

Numbers and dates seem to trip up the knight throughout his autobiography. When talking about Ryan Giggs, he says, “Awarding him with is first-team debut at 16 landed us with a problem we had not expected: the Giggs phenomenon.” In fact, Giggs made his debut at the age of seventeen. In regards to Manchester United becoming a public limited company he starts with, “From the moment Manchester United became a Plc in 1990…” It actually became a Plc in 1991.

And Ferguson’s mistakes are not merely limited to his professional life — he claims that he had his pacemaker fitted in 2002, when in fact he was fitted in 2004.

All of these errors have lead to various customer complaints — though only one full refund has been given out.

But the errors are not just embarrassing for Sir Alex. They’re probably even more embarrassing to his publisher, Hodder and Stoughton. So much so that the CEO released the following statement:

We did in fact go through several stages of fact-checking with this book, with a reading from within Manchester United as well as from a specialist football fact-checker.

Although a very large number of corrections were made we plainly did not pick up everything. Possible corrections that have so far been helpfully pointed out are being checked and will be included in future reprints.

I can’t help but wonder just how many errors the book could have contained before such rigorous editing.

 

Sebastian Sarti is a Melville House intern.

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