Steve Coppell interview: Fergie said we kicked Man Utd off the park, but that's baloney

Telegraph

17-05-2025

Steve Coppell still recalls the day, 50 years ago, when, in an office at Prenton Park, he signed for Manchester United and asked Tommy Docherty the question uppermost in his mind.
Coppell was studying economic history at Liverpool University. A bright teenager who had attended John Lennon's former school, he was playing for Tranmere Rovers although rarely training with the team. He wanted to finish the second year of his degree, knowing he would then have the option to do his third at any time. Docherty offered to double his weekly wages to £60. Then Coppell approached the subject of his degree with the combative Scot across the desk.
'The Doc said to me, 'You'll finish all three years. We will make it work',' Coppell says. 'Then he said something I have remembered to this day. 'Football will chew you up and spit you out. You get a degree and it is with you for life'. He has been proven correct.'
The 69-year-old sitting opposite me now, over lunch, is the great player and coach who built the finest Crystal Palace team in their history – until perhaps now. He will be at Wembley for the FA Cup final on Saturday, as he was for the semi-final. It took just one cutaway to Coppell on the television coverage for his phone to buzz with scores of messages. After all, Coppell is not just a great Palace manager. His is one of the great football lives.
How many people sat in a dressing room with Bill Shankly, as Coppell did at Tranmere? Or with Sir Matt Busby, as Coppell would at Old Trafford? Coppell played in Sir Alex Ferguson's second game as a manager – a pre-season friendly at Stirling University between Tranmere and East Stirlingshire in the summer of 1974. Coppell was picked in his first England squad by Don Revie and capped by Ron Greenwood. In the Eighties he discovered Ian Wright. He gave Sir Gareth Southgate his debut. He almost beat Ferguson in Palace's memorable first FA Cup final, 35 years ago.
Coppell coached long enough that the last great episode of his managerial career, Reading's two seasons in the Premier League, saw him go head-to-head with a new generation, including José Mourinho. Is there another, Ferguson aside, whose life connects all these eras and people? Coppell, a modest, thoughtful man, takes a sip of his drink, and pauses. 'Until you list them all like that,' he says. 'I suppose I had never really thought about it'.
'Shanks went berserk'
Coppell remembers Shankly as an immaculate dresser, 'always a suit, a trilby hat and the shiniest shoes I had ever seen'. The then former Liverpool manager would accompany Tranmere to away games when they were managed by his great centre-half Ron Yeats. Coppell was still a student but remembers pushing a kit skip with the rest of the first team through the streets of Gillingham to Priestfield while Shankly strode ahead of them like a sergeant major.
'Shanks had this trick: after the game, the classified results would come on the radio in the dressing room. He would listen to them and then say, 'Ask me any result and I'll tell you'. And he could, he was so immersed in it.'
After that Gillingham game the players got back exhausted to Euston for the train home to Lime Street. British Rail staff told them there would be no dining car. 'Shanks went berserk,' Coppell says. 'He said in that gruff Scottish voice, 'These boys have given everything today. They have sweated blood. They need to replenish. You lot are useless – you deserve to be shot'. Then Shanks paused. 'With heavy bullets'. Ordinary bullets were not enough! You can imagine what an impact he had.'
Liverpool fan joins United
Coppell was a star at Tranmere. A Liverpool fan who had stood in the famous boys' pen on the Kop, it was United, then in the Second Division, who signed him on the recommendation of Busby's great Welsh assistant, Jimmy Murphy. Coppell still holds the record for the most consecutive performances for the club, 206 between 1977 and 1981, during which time he played in three FA Cup finals. In his first game, he was such an unknown that United spelt his name 'Kopel' in the programme, assuming it was the same as former player Frank.
'I always kept the programme and over the years I thought, 'That is going to be worth a few bob'. At the Variety Golf society, one of the members gave me that programme as a present. I said, 'That's so kind of you, do you mind me asking where you got it?' He said it was eBay. I asked if he wouldn't mind telling me how much. He told me to guess. I said, 'If you told me £100, I wouldn't be surprised'. He said it was £1.83.'
Coppell graduated at Liverpool's Philharmonic Hall in 1977 shortly after United's FA Cup final win that denied Liverpool a treble. Docherty also came along, to the delight of Coppell's parents. He got a 2:2 – 'no one got any higher'. His dissertation was a comparison of the economic conditions that drove the development of British and American railways.
'At United, Sir Matt Busby used to come into the dressing room before the first game of every season, quarter past two. He would say, 'Lads, I just want to wish you all the best for the season'. And we never saw him again. There was no interference whatsoever. He was too wise to do that.'
Coppell's abiding memory of Busby is away from United. The Scot served on the English Football Association's international committee and accompanied the England team to a game against West Germany in Munich in February 1978. As the plane came into land, Coppell looked out the window and saw thick snow covering the ground. Startled, he looked across the aisle at Busby who had almost died in that plane crash in the same city 20 years earlier, when so many of his players perished.
'I was thinking, 'My word, I wonder what is going through his mind'. His face never cracked at all. I thought back to what happened on a snowy day… in a way I feel privileged to have seen that moment and, in a way, it is intruding. It is almost as if I shouldn't have been there. He didn't talk about it.'
Career-ending tackle
In a 1982 World Cup qualifier at Wembley in November 1981, Coppell was the victim of a vicious challenge from the Hungary left-back Jozsef Toth. It would ultimately end his career two years later. He went through some of the first arthroscopic surgery in Britain, but to no avail. Only 10 years ago did a surgeon discover that Coppell's cruciate ligament had been snapped with such violence that part of it had whipped back and coiled around his posterior ligament.
It would be the equivalent now of Bukayo Saka's career being extinguished by a brutal foul. Coppell would play eight more times for England. At the 1982 World Cup, he had a bad reaction to the anti-inflammatory injections taken in a last attempt to be fit for the crucial Spain game. 'That night I was sweating, vomiting, feeling terrible. Ron Greenwood came to me in the middle of the night. I'll always remember. A wonderfully sympathetic man. He just said, 'Listen Steve, you get yourself right. Hopefully we'll go on to the next stage and you play a part, but you can't play tomorrow'.'
Years later, as Palace manager, he was on pre-season in Finland and a local journalist said that Toth, who died in 2022, lived nearby and would like to meet Coppell. 'He asked whether I would be interested. I said, 'No, I wouldn't. That fella changed my life in a way I didn't want it to be changed'.'
Discovering Ian Wright
After he became manager of Palace in 1984, at just 28, Coppell would invite non-League managers to watch the team train. The club did not have much money but he found that these men, grateful to mix with a professional team, would tell him useful things. They were his de facto scouts.
Billy Smith, who worked in the Covent Garden flower market, said he had a 21-year-old striker training with his team who had never been affiliated with a pro club but 'looked a bit different'.
'I remember saying, 'Bill, I've heard this before. The scouting networks now are so sophisticated. No one slips through the net'. And the first day this lad trained with us, I saw it. Great left foot. Great right foot. He's got pace. Great in the air. Great attitude. Fun to be around. I thought, 'There's got to be a flaw'.
'After three days, I phoned our chairman Ron Noades and said, 'This is going to sound stupid, but we've got a young kid training with us with the ability to play for England'. And Ron must have been impressed because instead of giving him a three-year deal, as I advised, he gave the kid a three-month deal on minimum wage.'
That player was Ian Wright, a man whom Coppell says simply, 'could score a goal from nothing'. Wright became the star of a Palace team that went to the FA Cup final. 'Look at the way Ian's developed as a human being,' Coppell says. 'I see him now on TV and he's the voice of reason. He's considered. And the fact that not only has he done football, but he's done television. He is just phenomenal. I love him to bits.'
'Kick in the teeth to every English coach'
Coppell is very grateful that the FA chair, Debbie Hewitt, made him and his friend Alan Smith, his Palace assistant, so welcome at Wembley for the semi-final. The pair are looking forward to being back there as guests of the FA on Saturday. He jokes that he hopes that what he has to say now will not result in his ticket being withdrawn.
What does he think of the Thomas Tuchel appointment? Coppell pauses. 'I think he's a terrific coach. He just shouldn't be coach of England. I think what the FA have done is a kick in the teeth to every English coach. And they have been running courses since the Second World War, trying to produce coaches. If it had been an open competition [a process like the one that appointed Tuchel] to choose the England manager, Gareth Southgate would never have got the job.
'People say to me, 'You haven't got any top English coaches'. I say, 'Yes we have'. We've got loads of top English coaches. They might not be top profile. It's the opportunity. Obviously, a lot of the Premier League clubs now – to quote Alan Sugar – they go to the Carlos Kickaballs rather than Tom Smiths.
'There have been 39 World Cups and European Championships, and only one foreign winner as manager [Germany's Otto Rehhagel with Greece in 2004]. There is no evidence to suggest it works. Tuchel is a terrific coach, don't get me wrong. It's not about him or [Fabio] Capello or Sven [-Goran Eriksson]. But we're England. No other international force would choose a foreign coach.
'What is the aim of the FA now? Is it to be a successful financial enterprise? Or to encourage elite-level football? They will be judged on elite-level football. Looking at the financial results they've just announced, everything's hunky-dory.
'We should have had a system in which potential managers would have been working with Gareth, even if they'd been in club management. Part of the brief of being England manager would be to think of some emerging managers to come in on the next England game on an educational… just to be there and look at things.
'How many football people are actually within the FA? You need football people to produce football people. There's got to be some kind of development process… and we choose a non-Englishman for the Under-21s [former Ireland international, Lee Carsley]. It's just not right. This is England.'
Southgate was part of Coppell's Palace team post-1990. 'Gareth did an absolutely magnificent job for England. And he was English. And he knew that nationalistic pride, which is something people don't like talking about now and I think, 'Why not?'
'I played for England and although I never sung the national anthem, Ron Greenwood would say to me, 'When that national anthem is played, your thumbs go down the seams of your shorts and you stand with your chest out. And I thought, 'That will do for me'.'
'A dead man walking there'
Coppell says he was never approached to succeed Sir Bobby Robson as England manager in 1990. But around that time there was another job that history suggests he was close to getting. Many felt that Ferguson would have been sacked had he lost the Cup final replay to Palace in 1990. Coppell would have been an obvious candidate to succeed him as a United great, and the most talented young English manager of the era.
'We played United in December [in the league] at Old Trafford and we won 2-1. Fergie, always courteous, said, 'Come in for a drink'. And while we were having a drink he was staring at the floor. He was polite, but no conversation. It was uncomfortable. Archie Knox [Ferguson's assistant] was doing the talking. And very quickly we got the vibe and left. As we got on the bus to come home, I remember saying to somebody, 'Could be a dead man walking there'. He had spent £13 million, which at the time was a fortune. And at that stage, I'm thinking, 'There's not much life left in him'. And then it changed.'
Coppell did not select Wright for the 1990 replay, despite his electrifying effect on the Cup final. The striker had broken his leg in March. He was only just fit and desperate to play but Coppell felt his team had already shown themselves capable of beating United.
'Looking back now, I wish I made the change and started with Ian. The replay was wonderfully misinterpreted by Fergie. He condemned us as trying to kick them off the field. We didn't do it in the first game. Why would we think it would be a winning tactic the second game? If you look at the stats on the number of fouls in the game, it was total baloney. But because he was the winning manager, people have a tainted opinion of that game.'
More fortunate than most
The left knee injury ended Coppell's career and, as is the way with many old footballers, one problem leads to another. He cannot get around the golf course as much as he would like now but he is glad that he took the advice of the surgeon in 1983. He was told he should retire if he wanted one day to be able to run around with his grandchildren. Coppell is delighted to say he does run around with his grandson, Finlay, son to Mark, Steve's oldest son who is based in Singapore. He is also aware that he is luckier than many of his generation.
So many have suffered with neurodegenerative disease leading to dementia from heading footballs. That includes his late United team-mate Gordon McQueen and his England room-mate Dave Watson, another formidable Seventies centre-half.
'After every training session, Dave would get someone to take goal-kicks and he'd be on the halfway line and boom!' – Coppell mimes a powerful header – 'as far as he could. I used to say, 'Dave, that's got to hurt'. They never looked after the balls. You train in the rain, freezing cold, and the balls swelled and got really heavy. Then they just left them in a cold dressing room overnight. They weren't dried and looked after. The water would soak into the leather and they become cannonballs.'
Later, when Coppell became Brighton manager in 2002, he set up a drill to allow him to assess the finishing of Bobby Zamora, his star striker. 'Bobby knocked it out wide, ran into the box, and when the cross came over, Bobby ducked. The ball went over his head. I said, 'What are you doing?'
'Bobby said, 'Have you felt the weight of those balls? I'm not heading them. I'll head it on a Saturday'. At the time I thought, 'What a tart'. But looking back, it was the right thing to do. And he was wise enough to opt for self-preservation.'
For the love of the game
Coppell is 70 in July. His 52 years in football have been remarkable and come Saturday, if Oliver Glasner's team triumph over Manchester City, he will arguably no longer be Palace's greatest manager. Although given that he served the club in four spells, he may always be its most popular.
Win or lose, he will pull on his flat cap afterwards and slip unnoticed through the crowds at Wembley, a place where he played in three FA Cup finals, managed in another and suffered the dreadful foul that ended his career. He avoids attention but he would like to point out that he is a lot more cheerful than some people think.
'Somebody sent me a television clip [from the semi-final] and it's me standing there, obviously happy Palace have got to the final. And the commentator says something like, 'There's Steve Coppell smiling, and I can assure you he doesn't do that very often'.
'I thought, 'I know that commentator, but I've never spent time in his company. How dare he say that?'' And he is laughing now at the memory of it, and how after all these years, all those matches, some people really do not seem to understand just how much he does love the game.