‘I Was a Man Utd Star – Then Sir Alex Offered Me £100K To Retire Immediately at 29’

Former Manchester United defender Paul McGrath has revealed that Sir Alex Ferguson once offered him £100,000 to retire from football on the spot in an effort to stamp out the drinking culture inside the Man United dressing room. The Republic of Ireland international was just 29-years-old at the time.

Ferguson is widely hailed as the greatest football manager of all time, enjoying a career spanning almost 40 years, 27 of which were spent at Old Trafford, where he won 38 of his 49 trophies, including 13 Premier League titles and two Champions Leagues.

Known for his infamous ‘hairdryer treatment’, Ferguson helped develop some of the greatest players in both Man United history, and world football, including Wayne Rooney, Roy Keane, and one of the best to ever step onto a pitch, Cristiano Ronaldo.

But when one of his players was struggling with an alcohol addiction – McGrath – the Scotsman offered him a £100k buy-out to retire and return home to Ireland, something the Irishman rejected in favour of a move to Aston Villa.

Causing a Stir in the Man United Dressing Room

Ferguson wanted to stamp out drinking behaviour within his team

Ferguson was widely recognised for his no-nonsense approach to management, though he was also known to adopt the role of a father figure to some of his players, particularly Ronaldo, who he was there for when his own father became very unwell, and passed.

But in the1980s, prior to Ferguson’s arrival to Manchester in 1986, the football First Division was being dominated by Bob Paisley and then Kenny Dalglish’s Liverpool, while Howard Kendall also enjoyed some title success, with the two Merseyside clubs accounting for eight league titles in that decade.

In an effort to put his side into title contention, Ferguson went to great lengths to try and stamp out the drinking culture that was the norm around football around that time. United finished as runners-up to Liverpool in the 1987-88 season, but would slip down to 11th the following year.

McGrath, who was at the time a star centre-back for the side, having made 186 appearances for the club – 68 under Ferguson – in which he had scored 14 goals, along with Norman Whiteside, were essentially kicked out of the club for their excessive drinking, with the Ireland international detailing to The Telegraph about what happened in 1989:

“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 [teammates] Kevin Moran and Bryan Robson, and I just said I wanted to play on because I thought I could still do something in football.”

But, after refusing to accept the offer of £100k to retire, the then-29-year-old made the switch to Aston Villa in an attempt to revive and continue on with his career.

McGrath had firmly made up his mind that he wasn’t going to accept the offer, despite it being a large sum of money, and ‘jumped at the chance’ of making a move slightly down south to Birmingham to join Villa when the opportunity presented itself. He explained:”

Gordon Taylor, who was at the PFA, went to 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’. It wasn’t a shock really, because we were acting up a bit back then. We had a bit of fun, but we overdid it, so then he just wanted me out of the club.

“Then Bryan Robson was having a barbeque at his house and suddenly Graham Taylor was on the phone saying ‘can you come up to Aston Villa?’ and I jumped at the chance. I thought ‘Jesus, I can play there every week’.”

McGrath would spend seven seasons at Villa Park, where he went on to make 294 appearances for the club, scoring eight goals, and registering four assists. There, he also earned the nickname of ‘God’ from the fans due to how they would marvel at his play on the pitch, where he cemented himself as one of the best defenders in the league at that time.

In the 1992/93 season, he even helped his Villa side take a title challenge to his former club, though they would eventually finish 10 points adrift in second place in the inaugural season of the Premier League. Having won the PFA Player of the Year award that season, McGrath would admit that, had he perhaps behaved better, Villa could have even nicked the title from his old stomping ground that season.

“If I had taken it a little more seriously on certain occasions, then we might have actually won a title. So I’ve always got that thing in the back of my mind that I should have behaved a little better sometimes.”

Nonetheless, he helped the Villans achieve League Cup success in both 1994 and 1996, before he moved to Derby County following the conclusion of the 1995/96 campaign as he saw out the remainder of his career. Had he retired back in 1989, he would never have developed into a club legend away at Villa, and who knows whether Villa would have won the League Cup in the seasons that they did.