Nemanja Vidic interview: Advice for Maguire, football becoming about the individual and earning the

Nemanja Vidic arrives to meet The Athletic by Belgrade’s parliament building on foot and holding a large umbrella. Rain is falling in the capital of Serbia and the former captain of his country suggests we eat in nearby Madera, a Serbian restaurant on the Boulevard of King Alexander where “famed urban bohemians have, for decades, chosen our restaurant as a place where they began and ended their day”.

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Heads turn as the former Red Star, Spartak Moscow, Manchester United and Inter Milan defender walks through central Belgrade. He’s the greatest Serbian footballer of recent times, but they don’t hassle him and he’s never been one to court publicity. The idea of Vidic being on social media is as likely as him managing Partizan Belgrade.

After 18 years living away from Serbia in Moscow, Manchester and Milan, the Vidics and their three Manchester-born boys came back to spend some time in their home country. Nemanja, 40, remains close to the main people at United and he travelled to England to do all his coaching badges with the English FA. He’s followed those up with a Master’s degree at the University of Limoges, the UEFA Executive Master for International Players. Vidic wants to stay in football and now boasts a skill set beyond being a former player.

He’s choosing his path carefully — maybe too carefully. He’s turned down managerial jobs, but then he also felt he owed his family some serious time after playing football for most of his – and their – lives. Vidic stays involved, watching, speaking, listening and reading about football. He attended the recent Manchester derby “as a fan, as a former player and perhaps as a future manager” and enjoyed the different perspective, if not the result.

“I sat watching Pep Guardiola,” he explains as we sit down. There was no table booked, but the best one by the window was quickly offered to him. “Guardiola was not happy at how his team was playing. He was constantly telling his wingers that they should stay wide and stretch the United defence. City didn’t do that in the first half, they stayed too narrow and made too many short passes. Guardiola wanted his players to transfer to the side, concentrate on the United defence and create problems, which they did in the second half.

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“If you watch your opponent, you can see where the threat is coming from and what he is trying to achieve. I was able to do that because I was in the stands, sitting just behind Sir Alex Ferguson and Richard Arnold. I was at United when Richard first came to the club. He’s good at his job and he hates to lose.”

“At the City game, I didn’t have the stress or pressure of being a player and it’s true that everything looks easy when you watch from the stands. Ralf Rangnick could hardly watch Guardiola like I did, he had his own team to concentrate on and United were dangerous in a few situations in the first half, but in the second City did exactly what Guardiola wanted them to.”

Vidic shakes his head as he orders Rakija, a strong, aromatic aperitif with a 40 per cent alcohol level to be taken before the meal. He doesn’t drink much – he left those days behind in Moscow before he joined United.

“The only time we had a drink at United was to celebrate winning a trophy, so we did drink together quite a lot if you think about it,” he laughs. The suited waiters stand back and smile politely but they need no encouragement when they’re asked if they like football. One peels his shirt back to reveal a huge Partisan Belgrade tattoo, the other does exactly the same to reveal their rivals Red Star.

The five-time Premier League and one-time European Cup winner talks tactics and formations. At one point he asks for a clean plate so that he can put beans on it to show different systems.

In Belgrade. Met a man who reckoned he played for Red Star. Remember anything about him? He’s a tactical obsessive (done all coaching badges, now doing a masters degree for footballers) explaining different systems using Serbian beans for players. pic.twitter.com/2fe69gR03G

— Andy Mitten (@AndyMitten) March 31, 2022

“It looks like they thought I was OK,” he says amid a flurry of replies of ‘Can he still play?’ and ‘Best central defender I’ve ever seen’. But he goes back to that City v United game, where the chairman of City sought him out at half-time to tell him about some of the Emirati investments into Belgrade’s waterfront.

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“Players are not stupid — they know the ability of their opponents, they know what is coming,” he says. “This is where responsibility comes in. You need characters who are not scared to take responsibility. Characters who understand when a game is going in the wrong direction and what they need to do about it; when and how to regroup.

“If you see that your team-mate had a problem on the right-hand side then you might run an extra 200 metres to help him through it. You don’t leave a player one-against-one if he’s having a bad time against his opponent. And he will do the same in return. That’s natural. That’s not about sports science, data or statistics. And that’s what helps create a great atmosphere in your team.”

Vidic, who speaks English, Italian, Serbian and Russian, has the paper qualifications, but he speaks of intangibles that can’t be taught in a classroom, such as “feeling”, and constantly offers his own judgements.

“Bernardo Silva or David Silva would not have been signed by many clubs because their stats were not impressive, but they have been two of City’s best players,” he says. “A good coach should be able to spot talent like that, but a coach is not responsible for everything — Guardiola couldn’t get his players to do what he wanted in the first half, for instance. But the message came through in the second. Half-time was vital, but it’s still about the players.

“You can have the best 11 players on the pitch, but if you don’t have a clear vision and you don’t work together and depend on each other then you don’t have a chance of winning any trophies. You might win a few games but without resilience and players who will take responsibility, you don’t have a chance.”

He’s talking about United because it hurts him to see the team he captained sitting seventh in the league table.

I tell him that a United player from the generation before him said that his team was like a band of brothers who played together and drank together; that if one player was hurt then the rest would help. Were his team?

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“No,” he replies. “Do you think that I loved all 24 of my team-mates in the dressing room? I didn’t. That doesn’t matter, we hardly went out together. We didn’t have a drinking culture either, apart from after the trophies. And they were great times — not just for me, but my family too. They came to see me in Moscow for the final in 2008. My father was mesmerised not by the players who’d just become European champions, but Bobby Charlton. He followed him around; he’d watched him on television in 1966 when United played Partizan in the European Cup semi-final. That’s how good the football teams were in Yugoslavia back then — and more recently when Red Star won the European Cup.

“Mum didn’t really care about football, but Dad knew about Charlton from the Munich air crash and the World Cups. Everyone in Serbia knows about the plane crash because United had played Red Star and the plane took off from Belgrade before stopping in Munich. And here was my dad standing staring at Bobby Charlton, with me having to come and translate as he told him how great he thought he was!”

Vidic was United captain, but no social convenor.

“I had a family and they didn’t see enough of me because I was spending more time with my team-mates than my family,” he explains. “We were playing two, three games a week for United and then I was playing for the national team. It was very intense for years. I saw enough of my team-mates, I respected them and understood them, but I didn’t need to see them even more.

“I was also proud — and I know Ferguson was — that we had 12 nationalities in the dressing room. Of course, the French go well with the French, the Spanish with the Spanish speakers, the Portuguese with their speakers, the English with their humour.

“My family were made to feel welcome in this environment. At Carrington, they asked if I wanted Serbian food. On matchdays, my family came to watch me play. My wife recently said to me that she missed going to games. She would bring my sons to Old Trafford, there would be excitement and tension. If we won a game, then it was a happy time not just for the team but for the family too. She misses it. What could I say? I miss it too. We have happy memories of United and Manchester — our kids were all born there.”

And Vidic did socialise. A bit.

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“Rio (Ferdinand). Edwin (van der Sar). Robin (van Persie). Michael (Carrick),” he says when pushed. “I went out with them socially a couple of times for dinner. I came to United as a mature person. I’d done my discos in Serbia and Moscow. At the biggest club in the world, it was important not to spend time on the stupid things. I wanted to show the whole world how good I was in the most important years in my career and I was lucky to play eight years for Man United.

“My point is that we all had the same target then. We were there to play for the biggest club in the world and we knew what the aim was — to win the biggest trophies. We had to play well, week in, week out, but there were always setbacks. I had many times where I played when I didn’t feel well or sharp, but my team-mates would see that and help me. We had an incredible team spirit and that helped us win trophies — and trophies are the only way to get recognition for Man Utd.

“At smaller clubs, you don’t have the same aims, but you still have aims and expectations, but at Man United, where every team plays 100 per cent against you, you should always play like it’s your last year: 90 per cent is not enough and the current players should play like that. You should be scared that you’re not going to be there next season and you have to fight to stop yourself going because it’s only when you leave Man United that you realise how big Man United is.”

Vidic isn’t as damning of the current players as some fans.

“They are good boys but the way to win is in the collective and team spirit in a world which is becoming increasingly individualised. Players have individual social media accounts, but football is not an individual sport – like most sports are. Respect, trust and help for your team-mates is so important.”

What builds trust and what destroys trust?

“Trust doesn’t come easily,” he says. “You have to earn it, work for it and I think you have to believe first of all what you’re doing. You have to be in the same path, you have to have the same targets — targets to be successful, to be professional, to be better every day, to improve, to question yourself. That’s how I built trust with the people I had success with.

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“You’re chasing perfection and when you see someone next to you is doing the same, you slowly start trusting, you open up.

“I was lucky that I had two partners. Rio Ferdinand was the more famous one and we played so many years together. But for Serbia there was Mladen Krstajic (eight years his senior and managed Serbia in the 2018 World Cup finals) and we had great success. We broke the record by conceding only one goal in the qualification for the World Cup finals in 2006. We finished top of a group with Spain, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Belgium below us.

What would he do about United’s defence currently?

“The best defensive partnerships develop because they play together all the time. If you change defence all the time it’s difficult to build trust. Rio and I played together all the time. We had good and bad days, in games and in training. But we always spoke to each other and processed what had happened in a game and training and how we could improve. We would ask each other what we were thinking. That didn’t happen straight away, but after 6-12 months.”

Vidic and Rio were always talking about the game. “90 per cent of the conversations I had in my life with Rio were about football. Rio was keen and driven, he wanted to talk. He’d not won any trophies for three years as a United player before I arrived and he was desperate for a partner.”

What role should the manager have in building trust?

“A very important one. He has to be clear what he wants from each of the players, present a clear vision of how he wants his team to play. He must detail what he wants from each defender, for instance. Then, on the pitch, communication is important and everyone has to be on the same path. Players have to know where each other are at all times and one way of working at that is to play together a lot. You can do drills in training – playing 5 vs 4, 3 vs 4 and this all helps, but match practice is best.

Vidic returns to the question of responsibility. “A manager should coach the principles but then trust the players to take responsibility, to not be afraid, and carry them out. Football is not chess; there’s continual movement and a full-back should know when it’s time to go forward.

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“I took responsibility throughout my career. I’d tell Patrice (Evra) to go forward – and that meant I could cover him behind. If Patrice went forward then he was free to go. The space he left was then my responsibility and he would be right to blame me if there was a problem. It took time to get like this but the trust did build.

“I never had a problem if a player lost the ball. The problem was how we reacted after the player lost the ball to make sure we won it back. And then, when we got it back, what options were we giving to the players to pass to. Modern football is all about movement off the ball. It doesn’t matter how good a passer a player is if he doesn’t have a player in space to pass to. If a team is concentrating on movement and the timing of when to move, that’s where a team can get an advantage.”

What else is important at a club like United?

“Hierarchy,” he says. By this time we’ve eaten all kinds of Serbian food. It’s wonderful. “Everyone should know their place. The structure was clear when I was there. David Gill. Alex Ferguson. Even among the players. We knew who was who.”

Vidic laughs when asked where he sat in the pecking order.

“When I started I was very low down. Reserve level. In one game, not even that — I was taken off for the reserves after I’d just arrived. But I worked hard, was a team player and slowly rose to become captain of Manchester United. Even with my ability, you can become captain of United; you have to work hard enough.”

You’ve spoken about building trust. How do you lose trust?

“If you have 24 players, they’re not all going to be team players. That’s impossible. So you look for a core of maybe 14 players and not necessarily all in the first 11. Maybe seven should be on the pitch and then some older and younger players on the bench.

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“As for those who are not team players — the individuals. Well, that’s OK too, if they are good enough and providing for the team, making the difference. You can run an extra mile for players like that because you know they will provide. If they don’t provide, there will be consequences. Consequences from the players who say: ‘If you’re not scoring then you have to come back’. And for there to be consequences, you need a manager who is good enough and strong enough to drop a player if necessary. Football is give-and-take.”

Vidic believes that large areas of the culture he considers so important are missing in the United first team. “It’s important for the culture that you have personalities at the top. People shouldn’t be easy to talk to at Man United, it should be difficult. There should be people who put the club first and I hope that the next generation of players at United come close to this.

“If players can’t understand it then they should be taught and guided and given a path — a real path. I needed that. When I was 22 I was a very different person to when I was 30 but I trusted Ferguson, for example, because I trusted his big personality. Someone has to implement this at United with humility, resilience, hard work, trust and understanding.”

What does the next United manager need to bring?

“He needs the players to play as a team. It brings me back to the point of players needing to think about the team and not the individual. And he needs knowledge, with a clear idea of what he wants from the players on the pitch. He needs to be able to improve the players because there are players there who need improving and have a chance to improve if they have an open mind.

“There are some good players at United. If you look at Liverpool’s players, they wouldn’t suit the style that United have been playing and United’s players wouldn’t suit Liverpool’s or City’s style. The coach has to see what players he has, which ones he wants to bring in and get a clear strategy. It’s easy to say this, but the players must have an open mind towards the new coach.”

This has not been a good season for United, especially for captain Harry Maguire who plays in a position that Vidic usually occupied. How does he get out of his situation?

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“Every player has a problem with form at some time in his career,” he says. “I did and it’s clear that Maguire is not at his best this season. I think you can do a few things and one of them is not to play every match as you try to find form again and get confidence. A coach could play him in easier games, not that there are many in the Premier League, and take him out for harder matches. The player needs to feel powerful and strong on the pitch again, not as it is now where he feels that it’s not happening for him. It’s difficult to play well when you’re under so much pressure because people are waiting for you to make a mistake. You’re asking me this and I’m replying as a coach.”

If Vidic could give Maguire one piece of advice, what would it be?

“It’s not a problem if a player says to his coach that he’s not feeling great on the pitch. If he says: ‘Give me a break, give me a couple of weeks to regroup and train well and then play again’. I had some horrible games for United and needed to find my peace and grow again.”

Maguire’s fortunes contrast with those of the second-most expensive defender in the world

“Virgil van Dijk is one of the best — if not the best — centre-back in the world. He’s good physically and in the air. He has great ability. He’s grown a lot as a player since I first saw him play for Celtic. It helps that he’s in a good team, too. His weakness is that he’s playing for the wrong club!”

At least neither must face Vidic’s compatriot Aleksandar Mitrovic, who has scored 38 goals in 37 games for Fulham this season in the Championship.

“Mitro’s on fire!” smiles Vidic. “It’s actually a shame for him that he’s not playing in the Premier League for a bigger team. He’s only 27 but he’s the all-time leading scorer for the Serbian national team and will play in the World Cup finals this year for my country. He should be going back to the Premier League and will want to show that he can score a lot of goals at that level. I’d like him to play for a top team.”

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How does he see the state of the Serbian national team, even without Nemanja Matic, who retired in 2019?

“Nemanja had a great career,” he says. “I remember him first coming to training with us. He wasn’t well known, he was playing with Kosice in Slovakia. He was tall and he had the longest legs and arms, so I was never going to forget him, but what struck me about him most — apart from him using his arms so much to play — was the way he tried to play the ball forward all the time. Most midfielders don’t do that; they play side-to-side, square passes. I liked him from that first session and he was amazing for many clubs. Even now, he gives United experience and balance when he plays. He’s very professional, a good guy in the dressing room and is someone who loves football and is very proud of his region in Serbia.”

Serbia finished top of their qualifying group ahead of Portugal and the Republic of Ireland.

“We are in a good position with a very positive coach, Dragan Stojkovic,” explains Vidic. “This is very different for Serbia. Dragan likes to play offensive football, the players believe in him and appreciate the freedom and so straight away we achieved some great results and finished ahead of Portugal, who we beat away.

“We have experienced players who play for big clubs around Europe. Dusan Tadic is at Ajax, Sergej Milinkovic-Savic at Lazio, Luka Jovic at Real Madrid. Lots of them. Most of them are in the strongest points of their careers; they are 25-30 years old. None of them play in Serbia — they have all left to play a higher level in Germany, Spain, England, Italy or France. And there is Dusan Vlahovic, only 22, just signed to Juventus and a very exciting striker for Serbia. He’s already scoring a lot of goals for the national team.

“I’m confident this tournament can go well for us, but we’re also in the same group as Brazil and Switzerland – who we were also grouped with in Russia last time. Serbia was leading against Switzerland in Russia in 2018 and they scored a 90th-minute winner (scored by Xherdan Shaqiri, who was born in what was then Yugoslavia and is now Kosovo). That goal meant Switzerland went through and Serbia didn’t. Cameroon are the other team in our group. It’s a tough one but I believe we can get through this time.”

Vidic is happy where he’s at but cherishes the memories from a city where the atmosphere at football games is among the best in the world for the derby.

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“It’s loudest in Belgrade,” he says. “And I remember Celtic Park and Anfield, the fans are close, it’s like they are breathing on the players. But there’s something I like about English stadiums that not many people say: the moments of silence in a game when the crowd fall flat. That’s the moment when the players have to earn the roar of a crowd by doing something which excites them, a tackle or a pass. They love a great tackle in England and so do I. And when you’ve earned it, it feels better than non-stop noise regardless of how you are playing.”

It is clear that Vidic thinks constantly about Manchester United, and about his future. Whether those two things will ever be linked together remains to be seen. For the moment, he sticks to the club’s current form.

“United need to be united again,” he says. “I’m always optimistic, but I’m careful because a lot of things need to be improved at United and the first thing to get back is the team spirit. If that happens, United can challenge again. Not win just yet, but at least be relevant again.”

(Top image designed by Tom Slator for The Athletic)

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