“One of the things we have been criticised about over the years is succession planning,” Ferguson said. “It’s a very difficult industry to say you can have succession planning. But in the case of what we were doing in the last few years, with bringing Nicky Butt into the fold, Ryan into the fold, Paul Scholes into the fold, and Gary Neville was offered a position but he decided to go into television. He could easily come back. The model is Bayern Munich where they had [Karl-Heinz] Rummenigge, [Gerd] Müller, [Uli] Hoeness, [Franz] Beckenbauer and [Sepp] Maier all in the camp. They were all there with their knowledge of the great Bayern Munich teams. And that was our model, and it wasn’t really until David Gill came in we started doing that. And what’s what we see today.”