“If they had seen me in the red shirt, they’d know exactly where my allegiance lies.”
If you’ve been going along to Premier League games for any reasonable length of time, you’ve probably seen Mark Hughes prowling the touchline on more than a few occasions.
The fiery Welshman was a near-constant in a top flight dug-out between 2004 and 2018 steering six clubs in that time, from Blackburn and Stoke in the North West, to Fulham and QPR in west London.
Hughes has fought tooth-and-nail for every club under his stewardship. No stranger to conflict, he has inevitably ruffled feathers of those not wearing his team’s colours throughout his various tenures, including those of the one team closest to his heart.
The 57-year-old features in the brand new documentary The United Way, a film that looks back through the history of Manchester United, part-written by maverick superstar Eric Cantona, and featuring a slew of legends including David Beckham, Ron Atkinson, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer and Nicky Butt.
RadioTimes.com spoke exclusively to Hughes in the build-up to the documentary’s release about his unwavering love for the club, despite a rocky relationship with the club’s fans after taking charge of rivals Manchester City over a decade ago.
He said: “I have to understand that there’s a big generation of United fans who have never seen me in the red shirt, while they have seen me as an opposition manager ranting and raving and trying to beat their team.
“My relationship hasn’t changed, whether or not other people’s relationship to me has changed, I don’t know!
“The thing about Man City, from my point of view, at that stage, I viewed myself very much as a professional football manager. I was looking for that next step of my career. A lot of the top jobs in the Premier League were a closed shop. Sir Alex wasn’t going anywhere, so United was blocked, Arsene Wenger was at Arsenal, Liverpool was one that maybe I was never going to get an opportunity at anyway.
“I made the decision to go to City solely on the back of ‘my next step’ but it was probably a downward step because the infrastructure of club wasn’t even as good as Blackburn in those days – it was a different time.
“People viewed that as maybe a slight on United, you know, ‘he doesn’t like United anymore because he wouldn’t have gone to City if he still loved United’ but that’s a load of nonsense because my love for United will never wane.
“I just viewed City as the next step in my managerial career, as a club with potential, with a good fan base, big fan base, good stadium and I thought I could build something. It wasn’t to be. Things moved on and left me behind and I wasn’t part of the future as they saw it.
“My love for United is always there. I suppose I have to accept that a big part of the public and supporters have never seen me play in the United shirt, all they’ve seen me in recent times is as an opposition manager and they have to judge me and view me on those terms. I accept that.
“They probably think that my love for United isn’t there any more but that’s not the case.”
Hughes signed his first professional contract with United in 1980 and scored 47 goals in 121 appearances across all competitions. He signed for European heavyweights Barcelona in 1986 as then-manager Terry Venables sought to pair him up with fellow new signing Gary Lineker. The move didn’t work out as hoped and a year later Hughes was loaned out to German giants Bayern Munich for a season.
He returned to Old Trafford in 1988 for a club record £1.8million fee where he made a further 352 appearances and bagged another 116 goals for United. This is the side of Mark Hughes that younger millennials – wearing all colours – simply haven’t witnessed.
However, many can still relate to Sir Alex Ferguson’s all-conquering Red Devils, that relentless desire to win, the insatiable thirst for trophies, and Hughes was a driving force behind that culture in the early ’90s.
He recalls: “I joined the club when I was 14 and apart from a couple of years that I was away, I left at 31.
“I had probably spent more time with United than my mother! I lived and breathed the club for a long, long time.
“I think towards the end of my time, we’d won Premier League titles and doubles, FA Cups, and what have you. There was a real sense of expectation in terms of how we would perform – every game we expected to win.
“Certainly, when I first became a United player and broke through that wasn’t the case. More often than not, we were hoping we were going to overcome the opposition, but towards the end of my time, we expected to win because we felt we were the best team, the best group of players.
“That was a marked difference to when I first broke through in terms of our mindset and our mentality going into games. We certainly had that arrogance in terms of our group because we knew how good we were in those days.
“The fear of failure probably drove me right through my career. I didn’t want people to have the opportunity to criticise myself because most people don’t know how hard you’re trying, how much work you put in to get you are.
“We didn’t accept defeat or mistakes in games. I look back, [The United Way] has allowed me to, and what I notice is whenever a goal has gone in against us, the reaction of everyone on the pitch. ‘Oh, that was your man’, ‘why aren’t you taking responsibility?’ and people would take exception to it and argue back.
“We had a lot of that self-regulation about understanding we had a responsibility to do our job. And if we didn’t we had to accept what came our way.
“However with a lot of teams, if someone made a mistake, they used to shrug their shoulders and everybody would walk to the centre spot and they’d kick off again, no demand from each other as players and performers.
“We certainly had that demand from each other. That’s really what kept us on our toes.
“There were ways that you could affect the group, that would be to score a goal, or closing somebody down quickly, or actually taking somebody out with a tackle just to get a reaction. Not only from the crowd or the opposition, but from your teammates as well, just to shake everybody up and say: ‘Listen, we’ve got to get stuck in here because things are going against us’.
“I think those means and ways of doing things have been curbed to a certain extent because of the way the game’s refereed and the amount of cameras and every minute thing is criticised and investigated and it takes something away from the game.
“That’s probably me talking with my old-school head on, which I try to avoid.”
Hughes is now without a job after leaving Southampton in 2018. He feels he is a “young man in terms of managerial years” and “flexible enough to consider any opportunities” but would only take the right ones.
That doesn’t mean he’s taken his eye of the ball though, with recent events at United surrounding the European Super League and protests against the Glazer family’s ownership capturing plenty of attention.
“Once again, [the fans] have been disappointed by the ownership and they needed to make people understand where they were in terms of their feelings and I quite understand that.
“Obviously, you don’t want to see people going up against the police, certainly not in these times given where we stand with pandemics and what like, you don’t want people get hurt, but they were certainly within their rights to protest, and that’s what we do in this country when we feel aggrieved, we protest.
“I was shocked by the way it was announced. The decision and moves seemed to have been worked out on the back of a fag packet and it was just announced. Everything was rushed.
“There was clearly a huge misunderstanding of the impact of that decision in terms of how supporters would react to it. I think they completely underestimated that reaction, and it really didn’t seem to be a thought through strategy at that time. They’re intelligent people but to think that it would be welcomed with open arms was very naive from their point of view.
“At the end of the day, sometimes these businessmen come into football clubs as ‘business first’, which is fine, but what they struggle with is understanding that the business is the football.
“The team and the fans and everything that surrounds the 11 on the pitch, that’s what the business is about. It’s not about how many shirts you sell or how many TV deals you negotiate and how much money you bring in – the business is football.”
The United Way airs on Sky Documentaries and NOW on 24th May at 9pm and is also available on Blu-ray, DVD and download-to-own now. If you enjoyed this interview, check out more of our Big RT Interview articles.
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