Former Manchester United manager has revealed that the biggest mistake he made in his management career has been to announce his retirement in 2001.
He said that this statement has negatively impacted the club and that their results in this season suffer a lot because of this. Ultimately he changed his mind and stayed for another 11 years at Old Trafford while winning a heap of trophies along the way.
He said that the fact that he announced that he was going to retire caused his players to lose their focus. In 2001, he made the announcement at the start of the season, and he felt that his players did not want to give their best thinking that the manager will be going after the season. He added that under the pressure of his wife and his children, he changed his mind in January, but it was too late to motivate the players.
He said that even the recruitment suffers in that season because players did not want to sign for a manager that was going to stay for only one season. However, things changed when they sign Rooney and Ronaldo at the start of the next season. He had to get the team back in the mood so as to be able to mount a title challenge.
Sir Alex Ferguson stated that as a manager you need to listen to your staff members. He said that everyone suffered when he announced his retirement and even the scouts and the youth players had gone to sleep. It is only when they lost the title to Arsenal and that they finished 10 points behind them that they managed to wake up and spark another era of success.
It is for this reason that he only announced his retirement at the end of the season in 2012 so as not to disrupt the team.