SIR ALEX FERGUSON: NEVER GIVE IN

Featuring: Sir Alex Ferguson, Cathy Ferguson, Jason Ferguson, Mark Ferguson, Darren Ferguson, Gordon Strachan, Archie Knox, Ryan Giggs and Eric Cantona.
Writer: Mark Monroe
Director: Jason Ferguson

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ 

Lately a wave of British sports documentaries have offered fly-on-the-wall insight into the personalities and dramas of premier league football. Some are the cinema of a club’s marketing division, notably the fan-service Liverpool FC pic, The End of The Storm, but most have been surprisingly revealing - Amazon’s All Or Nothing, about the Mourinho era at Tottenham Hotspurs, and Netflix’s Sunderland ‘Til I Die, a heartbreaking look at the inner turmoil of a great club in freefall, are two of the best.

Stemming from the UK’s life-governing passion for football but taking an altogether more personal approach is Sir Alex Ferguson: Never Give In. England’s greatest ever manager, Ferguson retired from the role at Manchester United in 2013, after a 37 year reign that oversaw the emergence of the club as a global football giant; in his wake were 38 trophies, including 13 Premier League titles, five FA Cups, and two UEFA Champions League titles.

In 2018, he collapsed at home, and was found to have five blood clots on his brain, a condition that ends the life of about 80% of sufferers. He would regain consciousness and ultimately recover, but Alex Ferguson was a changed man. He realised how much he cherished his past; not only the incredible football legacy he forged, but his working class parents, Scottish seaside upbringing and the origins of his core values.

The title sounds a bit rah-rah sporty, but Never Give In is, in fact, a very emotional story steeped in the universal themes of family, memory and destiny. Directed by son Jason, who was so moved by his father’s hospital melancholy that he initiated the production, the film is a portrait of not only the great manager’s glory days (his hatrick on debut for his local team, Rangers FC; the 1999 UEFA Champions League final against Bayern Munich, believed to be one of the greatest football wins in the sport’s history); it also about an old man taking stock of a life well lived.

Much of the footage is archival, as is to be expected; this was the United of Cantona, Beckham, Schmeichel - some of the most photographed sportsmen in history - and the change room and onfield action is seamlessly woven into the narrative. However, it is the to-camera interviews - with wife, Cathy; sons Mark and Jason; those he mentored, like Gordon Strachcan and Ryan Giggs; and, of course, the man himself - that sets it apart from other recent real-world accounts of top tier world football. 

Never Give In is less about the day-to-day anxiety of being at the pinnacle of a sport, more about the simple complexities of a man that helped him stay there for four decades.