David Beckham caned in Sir Alex Ferguson's new memoir

DAVID Beckham chose celebrity over football greatness, says former Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson in a sometimes scathing new memoir.

Beckham Ferguson

ROY KEANE will have expected the attack. David Beckham will feel like he has been ambushed, mugged and beaten up.

Sir Alex Ferguson's withering criticism of the former England captain is one of the most startling passages of a memoir that shows the Manchester United manager never thought his most formidable opponents were Barcelona or Chelsea, but those players - such as Keane, Beckham, Ruud van Nistelrooy and Wayne Rooney - who dared to challenge his authority from within Old Trafford.

The headlines will be made by Ferguson's clashes with that quartet of players who, he believed, threatened his absolute power. "The one thing I could never allow was loss of control, because control was my only saviour," Ferguson writes.

"As with David Beckham, I knew the minute a football player started trying to run the club, we would all be finished."

My Autobiography is partly about football, but mostly it is a study of power and Ferguson's obsession with ruling his dressing room with an iron grip.

Keane receives a brutal assessment, as he will have foreseen. His departure from Old Trafford was violently confrontational. Ferguson describes the extraordinary scene in his office when Keane erupted in front of the entire United squad.

"His eyes started to narrow, almost to wee black beads. It was frightening to watch. And I'm from Glasgow," he writes.

The invective from Keane, particularly towards Carlos Queiroz, Ferguson's No 2, was even more insulting than Ferguson reveals in his memoir. The Irishman never played for the club again, with Ferguson believing that his moods cast a dark cloud over the club.

Bad blood still lingers, and United considered suing Keane for breaking confidences. "I feel we preserved our dignity," Ferguson writes, a withering put-down of the man who was once his loyal leader on the field.

Beckham will be angry and distraught at his treatment. He has spent the past decade politely paying his respects to a "father figure", so he will feel betrayed by some of the criticism.

There is plenty of praise for the young, eager Beckham, but the overall conclusion from Ferguson is of a footballer who sacrificed a great career in pursuit of celebrity and a fancy haircut. "You should never surrender what you're good at," Ferguson writes, with the clear implication that Beckham did.

For all their differences, it is quite shocking to read: "The minute a Manchester United player thought he was bigger than the manager he had to go ... David thought he was bigger than Alex Ferguson. There is no doubt about that in my mind."

Ferguson despairs at the thought that "in modern football, celebrity status overrides the manager's power", and banishing Beckham was his chance to push back the inexorable tide. He tells a tale of Beckham hiding a new crew cut under a beanie hat - refusing to take it off through meal times and team talks - for maximum PR impact.

Beckham will be stung when he reads that "he lost the chance to become an absolute top-dog player" and that he "would have been one of the greatest Man United legends" if only he had not lost his application and direction.

By comparison, Rooney gets off lightly for his two transfer requests, perhaps only because he is still a United player. As a club director, Ferguson will be aware of the consequences of causing a greater rift with the striker, and tiptoes through that minefield while pointing out Rooney's problems with weight control and fitness.

Van Nistelrooy's sulking, and feuding with Cristiano Ronaldo, is revived. The Dutchman was another big name who had to go. We always knew that Ferguson would want the last word in each of these disputes, so we wait to see if Keane and Beckham strike back with their own versions.

Ferguson, of course, speaks with the great weight of success behind him but that does not mean he got everything right. Selling Jaap Stam was a big mistake, he admits, particularly when he had to tell the big Dutch defender in a hurried meeting at a petrol station.

The disappointments in the book are a failure to acknowledge the significance of off-field events and mistakes. The row over the racehorse, Rock of Gibraltar, which caused such a deep rift between the manager and the owners, J. P. McManus and John Magnier, and ultimately led to the Glazer takeover, is skipped over in one paragraph.

Ferguson will claim that a confidentiality agreement prevents him from going farther, but it leaves a great void.

Ferguson sticks to his guns over his ludicrous rift with the BBC and fails properly to address why his son and agent, Jason, was allowed to recruit from within the club despite the conflict of interests.

This is a straightforward account of Ferguson's regime at United, battling with Arsene Wenger (dealt with fairly), Jose Mourinho (admired) and Rafael Benitez (accused of foolishly making things "personal"). It is full of little fascinations - such as trying to sign Paolo Di Canio, only for the player to demand more money - but, perhaps inevitably, being his second significant volume, it lacks a little of the richness of the first.

Ferguson's stature makes it an essential read, but there are not too many shocks or surprises - though Beckham may not have seen this coming.

The Times