‘I was at Crystal Palace and I wanted a centre-half,” Neil Warnock says as, after 45 years as a manager, he describes how football has changed since his rise from non-league to the Premier League. “I sent Ronnie Jepson, my assistant, to Scotland to watch a centre-half. And he came back and said he would cost us around £4m, but he was very good. So I told the people at Crystal Palace.”
Warnock resists identifying Steve Parish, Palace’s chairman, by name for he is deep in a story that illustrates how data analytics is not always infallible. “He asked for 24 hours and went to the data people. The next day he said: ‘We don’t want to go ahead.’ I asked him why and he said they don’t think he’s quick enough. I said: ‘He might not look quick enough, but he’s in second gear in Scotland. If he had to sprint, he’d sprint.’”
I already know Warnock is remembering how he missed signing Virgil van Dijk and, as we’re having an enjoyable knockabout, I ask if even a great player such as Franz Beckenbauer might have been dismissed by the stats men. The German sweeper had pace and tenacity, but his regal vision meant he could intercept a pass without needing to produce a crunching tackle. “Correct,” Warnock replies. “Beckenbauer would never have got on, would he, with the data? He’d have been playing Sunday league, Beckenbauer.
“So we didn’t sign Van Dijk. He went to Southampton [for £13m]. I was with Cardiff a few years later, when we got to the Premier League, and I came up against him at Liverpool [who signed Van Dijk for £75m]. He came up and said: ‘Mr Warnock, you could have signed me’. I swore and said: ‘I bet you were glad that you were too slow for me.’ We had a laugh together.”
“It just shows you. They can sign these great players on a computer but I was at Middlesbrough and they said they’d got a left-back for me,” Warnock goes on. “I watched him for five minutes and said: ‘He can’t defend. I don’t want him.’ They said: ‘But his stats show he’s got the most tackles, the most headers.’ I said: ‘Are you listening? He can’t defend.’ Managers now are more or less coaches and they’re letting the recruitment team pick the players. But the data people don’t see the character of the person or other aspects of his game.”
A freewheeling conversation with Warnock moves from memories of drinking pink champagne with Brian Clough to a bitter fallout with Sir Alex Ferguson. It includes recollections of eight promotions, five relegations, and a lot of pride. “I survived 1,627 games,” Warnock says. “When I started [at Gainsborough Town in 1980] I just wanted to survive a season. Let alone 45 years as a manager. Fucking hell. Frightening, isn’t it?”
Warnock’s managerial career ended in March last year. He resigned after Aberdeen beat Kilmarnock 3-1 to reach the semi-finals of the Scottish Cup and, while he won’t discuss the reasons for his abrupt departure from Pittodrie after eight games, Warnock didn’t like off-field interference in his work. He is now a part-time consultant at Torquay United and hopes to help the club return to the Football League. But, in a sign of his diluted focus, the 76-year-old’s attention is also on his upcoming tour, when he will appear at the London Palladium.
Warnock sounds suitably gobsmacked in his unvarnished Sheffield accent. “When I was a kid, my mum had multiple sclerosis and my dad worked in the steelworks. But on a Sunday night I used to sit in front of my mum in her wheelchair and she played with my hair while as a family we watched Sunday Night at the London Palladium. So when these shows were being discussed I just said: ‘I’d love to do the Palladium.’ I didn’t suppose we could, but I’ll be thinking so much of my mum and dad.
“In those days your dad never told you he loved you. It was macho. But he was a crane driver in the steelworks and after his 16-hour shifts he would come home to a wife with multiple sclerosis and three kids in a two-bedroom semi. You don’t appreciate what he must have gone through until years later.”
Warnock’s distinctly human stories prompted Pep Guardiola to invite him into the Manchester City dressing room. Towards the end of last season Warnock spoke to a group of multimillionaire footballers, including Kevin De Bruyne and Erling Haaland, and he grins now. “The first thing I said is: ‘I bet you lot think yourselves lucky you’ve not got me as your manager, because you’d be kicking the ball from there to there and it wouldn’t be on the ground.’ They all creased up. I said a few other things that made them laugh. Afterwards Pep said he’d enjoyed it so much and that you don’t get that now in football – the humour. He said: ‘Everything’s so methodical, so data-driven, blah-blah-blah.’ He said we miss that human element.”
Warnock interviewed Guardiola for Sky Sports and, despite their mutual affection, there is an amusing clash of philosophies. Guardiola cackled through much of the interview but he looked almost bewildered when Warnock said: “We love man-marking.” After Guardiola said “You love, huh? Why?” Warnock explained that, as his teams were technically inferior, they had to try and nullify the opposition. “And the players,” Guardiola asked, “they support it? They like it?” Warnock’s immediate reaction – “well, they had to” – makes Guardiola smile again. As Warnock tells me now, “I never had a good team but I always had a good dressing room.”
Warnock was old school. “When I were manager at Palace,” he says, “Man City brought down two buses full of staff. I thought: ‘Bloody hell, I’ve never seen ’owt like it.’ I got our kit man to chuck a bucket of cold water on the floor in their dressing room to make it scruffy as possible.”
But there were occasions when Warnock was helpless. “At Cardiff we played City [in 2018] and had a couple of shots. It was 0-0 after 30 minutes and I’m thinking: ‘we’re doing well here’. Then we went in at half-time 2-0 down and after Bernardo Silva scored the second I’m saying out loud on the bench: ‘What a goal. That’s unbelievable.’ And I’m the opposition manager!”
Cardiff lost 5-0 and were relegated that season when a controversial 2-1 defeat by Chelsea hastened their demise in May 2019. “It’s a lonely job, being a manager,” Warnock says. “I felt very lonely at times and probably the loneliest was at Cardiff when Chelsea got a goal that should have been disallowed for three yards offside. I knew that would relegate us. The dressing room was desolate because the lads had given me absolutely everything. I can tell you now the linesman was Ed Smart and Craig Pawson refereeing. I can see it as if it were yesterday. I’ll be looking at that on my grave.
“I told the referee and linesman: ‘I wish you could come in my dressing room and see the desolation because you didn’t do your jobs right.’ We didn’t deserve to go down that year.”
Warnock was fined £20,000 for complaining about the officiating but now his attention reverts to Guardiola. “I noticed how much he was having to bite his tongue when you looked at the goals City conceded towards the end of last season. It wasn’t anything tactical. They were just bad mistakes. I knew it hurt him but he’s got the bit between his teeth again now. I’m going to be interested in seeing how they go this season because they’ll be a threat. Liverpool have spent all that money and Arsenal are spending as well, but Pep’s signed two or three good players. He’s the best manager since I’ve been around and I think he’ll prove it again.”
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When I ask Warnock for the top three managers he has faced, he responds with just two names. “I’d say Pep one and Arsène Wenger two because he changed the whole concept of football. Oh my God, his intelligence.” Warnock and Wenger also had an unlikely bromance. “He liked me and he respected me. It was said that Wenger never had any managers in his office after a game but he always invited me. On one occasion I even took my kids in and we had a picture in his office.” He frowns when I suggest it’s strange Ferguson has not been added to his top three. “I’d have to put Fergie in,” he says grudgingly. “But I’d have Pep and Arsène before him.”
Warnock once spoke warmly of Ferguson and how the Scot would write to him encouragingly after every promotion and relegation. But his attitude has hardened now. “I don’t really want to talk about him because I’ve not got anything good to say.” Is that because Ferguson played a weakened Manchester United side against West Ham in the final game of the season in 2007? “Absolutely. Unforgivable, in my eyes. Same with [Liverpool’s] Rafa Benítez. He played the kids at Fulham that same year.”
The pain for Warnock was intensified because Sheffield United, his boyhood team, were relegated after they lost at home to Wigan and West Ham stayed up after beating United by a solitary goal scored by Carlos Tevez, whose registration was thought to be ineligible by Warnock and many others. Has he spoken to Ferguson since that disastrous day? “No,” Warnock says with icy finality.
He is happier discussing another managerial icon in Clough. “I was at Notts County [between 1989 and 1993] and Cloughie used to walk past our little training ground to get to their 10 acres where they had a fantastic training facility. He would be with [Clough’s assistant at Nottingham Forest] Alan Hill and a black labrador. Cloughie would walk across my pitch. He never walked around it and nobody said ’owt. He looked round at what we were doing, shook his head and walked on. Brilliant!”
Warnock laughs before becoming more serious again. “We drew 1-1 at their place and at one of our lunches, he said: ‘You don’t realise, son, but it’s a remarkable job for a club like Notts County to be competing with us in the top division. It’ll never happen again, what you’ve done.’ And of course Notts County went from the old First Division to non-league football.
“I’ve had eight promotions and if I went back to these clubs tomorrow, I’d get a great reception. I got Cardiff in the Premier League. Look where they are now. To get Notts County in the top flight? If I had a fashionable name or I were a fashionable manager, I think I’d have got more acknowledgment. But they gave me an award this year at the Football League, for my contribution to the EFL.”
Warnock sinks back in his chair and smiles: “I thought: ‘Bloody hell. It’s about time!’”
Neil Warnock: Are You With Me? is at Opera House, Manchester on 29 August, London Palladium on 18 September and Ashton Gate Stadium, Bristol on 28 September. Tickets at www.fane.co.uk/neil-warnock
