Note: While reading a book whenever I come across something interesting, I highlight it on my Kindle. Later I turn those highlights into a blogpost. It is not a complete summary of the book. These are my notes which I intend to go back to later. Let’s start!

  • He told me never to let all the players’ contracts expire around the same time because it allows them to collude against the manager and the club. I’d never thought about that before Jimmy mentioned it to me but, afterwards, I paid very close attention to making sure we staggered the contracts.

  • If you are in the middle of a training session with a whistle in your mouth, your entire focus is on the ball. When I stepped back and watched from the sidelines, my field of view was widened and I could absorb the whole session, as well as pick up on players’ moods, energy and habits. This was one of the most valuable lessons of my career.

  • In my office at the Carrington training ground, I used to have a large black and white photograph from the 1930s, of 11 workers in New York, eating their lunch while sitting on a steel girder several hundred feet above street level during the construction of Rockefeller Center. It makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. These guys are sitting there, wearing their cloth hats, without any safety harnesses, and one of them is lighting a cigarette. I’d explain to the players if one of the workers got into trouble his mates would try to save him.

  • Be in a position to be able to zoom in to see the detail and zoom out to see the whole picture.

  • Youngsters think they have all the time in the world. If you are a boy who has just had his tenth birthday, your next one seems an eternity away. That’s because the single year that stretches ahead amounts to 10 per cent of the time you have been on earth. It’s a different sensation when you turn 50, because the distance to your 51st birthday amounts to just 2 per cent of the time you have been alive. As you get older and more experienced, you start to think about how you allocate time. You gradually come to appreciate that an hour–or weekend–squandered is time you will never recapture.