It’s always been said that when you play on the biggest stage that your mistakes are magnified to a level unimaginable. When you’re twice a British transfer record, known for being outspoken, and already have a history of dodgy decisions it can be even worse.
Even if, according to you, your only mistake was to go shopping. Is your celebrity stature to blame for the severity of your suspension? Are you a bigger target because of the team you play for? Is it a personal vendetta because of your race?
Sir Alex Ferguson
“Rio Ferdinand’s eight-month suspension was a shock that reverberated to the core of Manchester United, and my indignation endures to this day. ”
Gary Neville
“I assumed justice would take its natural course. How wrong I was.”
Rio Ferdinand
“…No one at the top of the FA was big enough to come and speak to me and explain what they were doing and why.”
Ferguson
“In my opinion, an example was often made of Manchester United.”
Part One: Shopping at Harvey Nichols
The only facts never in dispute are that on 23 September 2003 Rio Ferdinand, English and Manchester United defender Rio Ferdinand was to take a drugs test, and he missed it.
Ferdinand
“We jogged out for a fairly light 45-minute session and the club doctor Mike Stone told me, Nicky Butt, Ryan Giggs and John O’Shea that we had to attend a drugs test at the end of it. Fine, no problem there. I’d had many a drugs test after games, and one at West Ham after training. There was no specific time we had to do the test, just sometime after training. You didn’t get a fixed appointment or anything like that, you popped along when you were ready.”
What happened next is where the accusations start flying.
Ferguson
“On the fateful morning in September, the testers were having a cup of tea and, in my judgment, didn’t do their job. ”
Ferdinand contends that he simply forgot about the test.
Ferdinand
“Twenty minutes later I’d finished getting ready and walked straight out the door to my car. There were no testers waiting for me. They were in a room upstairs in the doctor’s office. When I walked out I didn’t go past anybody, so there was nothing to remind me again that I had to have a test…At the time, I was in the process of moving house and all I was thinking about was that I had to go into town to get some bed-linen that Rebecca had asked me to pick up.”
Ferguson
“They didn’t go looking for Rio. My view of it is that the testers should go to the pitch and stand there until the player finishes training, then follow him to the dressing room. Round about that time, testers went to Wrexham Football Club and ended up testing my son Darren and two other players. They stayed on the pitch, escorted them to the changing area and extracted the necessary urine sample. Why did that not happen with Rio at Carrington?”
Ferdinand
“When I saw this, I thought, ‘Oh fuck,’ not because I was worried about the consequences but because it meant I’d have to go back to the training ground. I really didn’t think it was that big a deal, although I thought I’d have to take it that day.”
Ferguson
“Rio was given the message, no doubt about that, but if you think of Rio’s laidback nature, it was no surprise that he failed to hook up with people who were nowhere to be seen.”
Rio contends that as soon as he saw a message on his phone from the team doctor he immediately attempted to go back to the training ground only to be told that the testers had already left. He then attempted to ring the FA to alert them to what happened and to try to schedule a new time.
Ferdinand
“After a few inquiries, a lady at the FA rang me back and said I would be able to take a test a couple of days later, but she didn’t know whether that would be the end of the matter.”
Ferdinand ended up doing the test a few days later, and passed. Rio, and the team, assumed this would be the end of the matter.
Neville
“I assumed Rio would continue playing and be given a fine and some kind of warning or suspended sentence.”
Ferdinand
“I didn’t think for a second that I would get banned, despite the doctor’s warning.”
Ferguson
“I was aware that a serious breach of the drug-testing rules had been committed but I still found it hard to believe that Rio would end up with such a brutal punishment. ”
Part Two: Red Nev goes nuclear
Rio continued on playing and assumed that he would be in England’s squad to face Turkey at the coming international break.
Ferdinand
“Gill and Watkins explained that the FA felt they couldn’t let anyone play for the national team who was under suspicion of having drugs in their system. ”
Neville
“It was the week of England’s final group qualifier for Euro 2004 and my dad had just picked up me and my brother to take us to Manchester airport to fly down to London to meet up with the squad when I took a call: Rio had been dropped over the drugs test.”
The FA’s position was that they couldn’t afford to let Rio play because of the possibility that he may be banned by FIFA for missing the test.
Ferdinand
“The emotions were boiling up inside me and I told them, ‘I’ve not been found guilty of anything. ”
Neville
“My initial reaction was that it was a joke. ‘How can they drop him? He’s not even had his hearing.’ I have been brought up with a strong sense of right and wrong, and from the start I thought this stank.”
Ferdinand
“The public had no idea I’d missed a test so I asked the FA to say I was injured, rather than portray me as guilty before I’d had a chance to prove my innocence.”
Neville
“The boss said the matter had been discussed the previous night when the club had been urging the FA to pick Rio, but they’d got nowhere.”
The FA went public that Rio was being excluded for the drugs test and thus was off the English team until further notice, but he was allowed to keep playing for United in the interim.
The English players, Manchester United, and Ferdinand were incensed. There was a feeling that Mark Palios, the new head of the FA was making an example out of Rio.
Ferdinand
“Palios wanted his FA to be an organisation admired around the world as a tough no-nonsense outfit who were not afraid to crack down hard on their own and I felt like he was going to try and use my situation as the perfect example of that approach.”
Neville
“He hadn’t been long in the job and he’d already set this agenda of cleaning up the game. I saw this as being his chance to prove that he was a strong man. He wasn’t going to back down.”
Ferdinand
“Sir Alex explained that when you play for a big club like Manchester United these are some of the trials you have to face. I felt that the manager was not only angry with me, but also with the FA and the fact that Palios wouldn’t ring him back made him even more annoyed.”
Ferguson
“His removal by the FA from the England squad to play Turkey in October 2003 almost caused a strike by the England players.”
When the news broke to the English team that Rio was going to be, in Neville’s words “hung out to dry,” a nuclear option was almost launched.
Neville
“Scholesy and Butty felt the same way about Rio’s position. They thought that it was a disgrace. As United players, we had been raised to stick up for each other, so that’s what we decided to do.”
Ferdinand
“Unbeknown to me, the players, led by my United team-mate Gary Neville, immediately called a meeting to discuss my case and voted to go on strike unless I was named in the squad.”
Neville
“No one except the FA seemed to think it necessary to ban Rio. Not Sven, not Uefa, nor our opponents the Turks. They all came out and said they had no objections to him playing. It was a policy decision by the FA. As far as I could see, it was about one man’s image.”
Ferdinand
“Kieron Dyer rang me up to let me know exactly what was going on and I’ll never forget what he said: ‘We ain’t going to play, Rio. Gary Neville ain’t fucking about. He’s a fucking soldier! He is fighting your corner and saying that if you’re not picked then the lads ain’t going to Turkey.”
Neville
“You’re being judge and fucking jury,’ I told Palios. ‘You’ve just come in here and you’ve wanted to make a point for yourself, the new sheriff in town.”
Neville led the players into agreeing to a strike unless Rio was reinstated into the team.
Neville
“There were twenty-three players in the squad and there wasn’t one ‘No’. It was unanimous. So Becks and I stood there at the front and said, ‘Right, so every single one of you has voted that we’re not going to play this game unless Rio is reinstated?’ There was not a murmur.”
It eventually took Sir Alex talking Neville down off a cliff as the media, public, and FA were in an uproar over this perceived mutiny.
Ferguson
“We always said of Gary that he woke up angry. His was an argumentative nature. He is a forthright guy. Where he sees error, sees flaws, he attacks them. His instinct was not to negotiate his way through an impasse, but strike hard with his opinions.”
Neville
“Look, you’ve trained too hard, you’ve played too hard, you can’t throw everything away. You’ve made your point, you’ve taken it as far as you can, now you’ve got to go and play the game.’ ‘Boss, it’s fucking wrong.’ ‘I know that, you know that, but you can’t ruin your career over it.’ ‘But I’ve gone too far with it. I can’t back down.’ ‘You just need to calm down and think that your England career could be over in one hit. What effect does that have on you as a player, as a person? Does that affect United? I can’t let you do that.”
Ferdinand
“I appreciated what my team-mates had done for me. The point had been made. The fact that they had the balls to stand up to the FA and tell them they were wrong was more than enough for me. They got a hard time from the press for the position they adopted. I can’t thank them enough.”
Neville
“It was when the boss mentioned all these consequences for club and country that I knew the strike was over. I knew I had to back down. If I was going to be bringing pressure and massive aggravation on my own club as well as everything else I couldn’t go ahead, simple as that.”
Ferdinand
“I had always respected Gary as a professional footballer. As a man, there is no praise high enough for him. If you’ve got a problem and you want someone in your corner, there is no one better. If he’s got an opinion he delivers it without hesitation. I prefer someone like that. You know where you stand with Gary – the FA certainly did.”
Neville
“Put ‘Gary Neville’ and ‘wanker’ into Google and you’ll get about ten thousand results.”
Unfortunately, Rio’s saga was not over yet.
Part Three – The Hammer Falls
Ferdinand faced weeks of humiliation while the FA drug its feet on holding a hearing.
Ferdinand
“My mum’s friends were being offered £5,000 for proof I was at it and one bloke tried to sell a story that I’d been in a Liverpool club asking where I could get some cocaine…There were idiots who would shout out in the street things like, ‘Fancy doing a line?’ ”
Ferguson
“After a lot of legal toing and froing, Rio’s hearing was held by an FA disciplinary commission at Bolton’s Reebok Stadium in December 2003 and lasted 18 hours.”
Ferdinand
“My mum and dad felt that it wasn’t a good idea to have Maurice acting on my behalf, as he was also Man United’s solicitor. They felt that I should have my own legal team who were not connected to the club.”
Neville
“Knowing that the FA were out to make a stand, I told Rio he should walk in with his mum and a simple handwritten apology: ‘Look, I’ve cocked up, I’ve done wrong, I didn’t realise how serious it was, I forgot.’ But he went for the expensive barrister and was punished for it.”
Ferdinand
“There was a formal courtroom-like atmosphere. Mark Palios had stressed on television a few days previously that, ‘The commission hearing the Rio Ferdinand case is totally independent.’ The panel comprised three FA councillors – the head of the disciplinary committee Barry Bright and FA men Frank Pattison and Peter Heard. I thought it odd at the time – as did a number of people within football who spoke about it in the press – that all three came from within the Association. But that’s apparently what the rules are for such hearings. All quite internal. I also learned from the press that one of the panel members, Peter Heard, had co-founded a property company called Churston Heard which did over £1 million worth of business for the FA.”
Ferguson
“I was among those who gave evidence on Rio’s behalf.”
Ferdinand
“Sir Alex, Nicky Butt, Doctor Stone, Eyal Berkovic and Jason Worthington, my driver on the day in question, all gave evidence, while Sven sent a fantastic letter supporting me.”
Everyone involved felt that Rio gave a good accounting of himself, and that there was plenty of precedent for him to get at most a three month suspension and a fine.
Instead it was an 8 month ban.
Ferdinand
“I then had to stand in front of the media as Maurice Watkins read a statement which said: ‘We are extremely disappointed by the result in this case. It is a particularly savage and unprecedented sentence which makes an appeal inevitable. ‘We can confirm that Rio has the full support of Manchester United and the PFA.”
Neville
”I thought it was very harsh. It was definitely inconsistent: a lad at Manchester City, Christian Negouai, had also missed a drugs test but got a £2,000 fine and no ban. Rio had paid a high price for the case becoming such a cause célèbre.”
Ferguson
“Maurice Watkins called the sentence ‘savage and unprecedented’ and David Gill said Rio had been made ‘a scapegoat’. Gordon Taylor of the PFA called it ‘draconian’.”
Ferdinand
“There’s no way I could have accepted that decision. I knew there was a danger that the sentence could be increased, but I didn’t care. As far as I was concerned I had been the victim of a gross injustice. That’s what it felt like to me.”
Ferguson
“I spoke to Rio’s mother right away because the poor woman was in bits. We could feel devastated by the loss of an important player, but it is the mother who will carry the real weight of such a punishment. Janice was crying down the phone as I told her that our high opinion of Rio would not be affected by the events of the last four months.”
Ferdinand
“The gaffer was superb. He was gutted for me and thought I’d been hard done by. He’s a people person and knows exactly how to deal with all sorts of situations. I knew he was angry with me for what I might have cost United in terms of challenging for trophies. But he knew that I recognised I’d made a mistake by missing the test in the first place and probably felt that coming down on me like a ton of bricks would have made it far worse. I needed his support and he gave it without any hesitation.”
Ferguson
“If you admit to being a drug taker, you are rehabilitated. We felt that the player was telling the truth, whereas the system assumed he was not. Nor did we like the fact that information seemed to be leaking to the press from the FA.”
Against advice but with the full support of Ferguson, Neville, and Manchester United Rio decided to appeal his ban.
Ferguson
“We knew he was innocent, we knew he had been careless and we knew he had been punished too severely.”
At his appeal the FA upheld the ban – and then the FA’s lawyer implied that the ban should have been for two years even though it was agreed that Rio had never failed a drug test and had consistently provided evidence that he was completely clean.
Ferdinand
“I lost it completely and shouted, ‘Fucking hell, why don’t you just fuck me all of you! You might as well. It’s a fucking joke. You are treating me like a druggie and I’m not. Why don’t you just go out there and tell the press I’m a druggie, even though I’ve proved to you lot that I’m not.”
Eventually a concession was reached in which the FA admitted that Rio had not avoided the test for things drugs related. Ferdinand, Neville, and Ferguson all relate the entire deal could have been handled differently if someone from the FA had actually talked to him.
Ferdinand
“Is it any wonder I still feel bitter when only last summer two players tested positive for cocaine and got shorter bans than me?”
Neville
“I’ve never doubted that Rio was genuinely forgetful. I detest drugs, and if Rio or anyone had tested positive – and you’ve got to remember he did a hair follicle test which showed him to be clean – I would have been the first to argue for a lifetime ban. ”
Ferguson
“He was not a drug taker. Rio Ferdinand was not a drug taker. We would have known. It shows in their eyes. And he never missed a training session. Drug takers are all over the place. They become inconsistent. Rio would never be a drug taker because his sense of responsibility as to who he is in sport is too big.”
Ferdinand
“Since my case the drug-testing procedure has changed completely. They’ve almost got handcuffs on you from the moment your name is picked out at training. You can’t go anywhere without a tester following you.”
Neville
“Thanks to Rio a shambolic system was overhauled, so at least one good thing came out of it. From that point on, players would no longer be able to leave the training ground through forgetfulness. ”
Ferdinand
“The manager, the chairman, the fans and the players at United stood by me and I couldn’t be more thankful to them for that.”
All quotes taken from Rio: My Story by Rio Ferdinand, Red: My Autobiography by Gary Neville, and Alex Ferguson: My Biography.