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The story of Manchester United’s Treble started with a third-choice referee. Steve Bruce’s immortal winner against Sheffield Wednesday in 1993 🌜 came in the sixth minute of time added on by John Hilditch, who was only refereeing because of injuries to 🌜 John Martin before the game and Mike Peck during it. There were some late goals under Ferguson before that, but 🌜 Bruce’s header was the symbolic start of the phenomenon that would become known as Fergie Time.
“Last-minute goals encapsulate my history 🌜 at United,” said Ferguson in 2014. “I love them. I could talk about them all the time.” He loved them 🌜 for their euphoric impact – “the electricity in the dressing-room is unbelievable” – and what they signified. Ferguson aimed to 🌜 build teams in his own image, and nothing reflected his character like the furious refusal to acknowledge the concept of 🌜 defeat.
Take almost any of Ferguson’s triumphs at United, from the 1990 FA Cup final to the valedictory Premier League title 🌜 in 2012-13, and you’ll find comebacks and late goals that either saved or won a match. On the biggest night 🌜 of his career, they did both.
1. Eyeing up Everest
Sir Alex Ferguson celebrates after Manchester United beat Juventus in the semi-finals 🌜 Image credit: Getty Images
Nothing put fire in the eyes of Sir Alex Ferguson like European football. He was obsessed with 🌜 it for umpteen reasons; three in particular. It awakened the small boy in him, the one who sneaked into Hampden 🌜 Park to watch Real Madrid beat Eintracht Frankfurt 7-3 in the 1960 final. It brought a glamour and prestige that 🌜 even 13 domestic titles could not provide. And it was the acid test of his intelligence, tactical awareness and man-management 🌜 ability. Ferguson resented the cultural cringe that has been a part of English football throughout the Premier League era, and 🌜 raged against the idea that European football was intrinsically superior.
For most of the 1990s, however, he had to accept it 🌜 was presently superior. English teams were out of their depth in the new Champions League, and United had an extended 🌜 adolescence in the tournament: humiliated in 1993-94 and 1994-95, intrepid semi-finalists in 1996-97 and frustrated quarter-finalists a year later. David 🌜 Beckham said the challenge was “a bit like learning football all over again”.
By 1998-99, Ferguson knew they were ready to 🌜 compete on equal terms. Only once during the season, in the first group game, as they struggled to contain Louis 🌜 van Gaal’s Barcelona during a wild 3-3 draw at Old Trafford, did he doubt whether they were good enough to 🌜 win it. Though he occasionally tried to argue otherwise, everybody knew the Champions League was Ferguson’s Everest, his everything – 🌜 not least because he said so himself. “I’m working on it,” he said in an interview in 1994. “I’m trying 🌜 to make it the Everest in my mind, you know.”
Over the next few years, we certainly knew.
2. Targeting the Treble
Manchester 🌜 United line up prior to the 1999 Champions League final Image credit: Getty Images
The 1999 Champions League final was the 🌜 first without a Serie A side for eight years. United put out both Italian teams, Internazionale in the quarter-final and 🌜 Juventus in the semis. That was after they and Bayern had navigated the definitive Group of Death – it also 🌜 included Barcelona and Brondby, with only one team guaranteed to qualify. In the end, United went through as one of 🌜 the two best runners-up behind Bayern, with both matches between the teams ending in a draw.
Bayern, like United, were aiming 🌜 to become the first team from one of Europe’s five big leagues to do the Treble. (Celtic did so in 🌜 1967, Ajax in 1972 and PSV Eindhoven in 1988.) They were in the final of both the DFB-Pokal and the 🌜 Champions League. For the first time, the final was contested by two teams who were not champions the previous season; 🌜 Arsenal and Kaiserslautern won the title in England and Germany in 1997-98, though United and Bayern had regained it by 🌜 the time they went to Barcelona.
They had another thing in common – both were missing two of their better players. 🌜 Roy Keane and Paul Scholes were suspended after receiving second yellow cards against Juventus; Keane’s absence meant Peter Schmeichel would 🌜 captain United in his last game for the club. Bixente Lizarazu, the World Cup-winning left-back who Ferguson later tried to 🌜 sign, and the excellent Brazilian forward Giovane Elber were injured for Bayern.
United were 11-10 favourites with Ladbrokes, with Bayern 15-8. 🌜 Those odds owed as much to giddiness and goodwill than a dispassionate appraisal of the merits of each team. The 🌜 match was played on what would have been Sir Matt Busby’s 90th birthday, and there was a pervasive sense of 🌜 destiny in the pre-match coverage.
The match was the last of United’s 11-day trilogy. On 16 May, they beat Spurs 2-1 🌜 at Old Trafford to win the Premier League title, pipping an utterly magnificent Arsenal team by a point. On 22 🌜 May, four days before Barcelona, they beat Newcastle 2-0 in the FA Cup final. The disparity between the sides was 🌜 such it felt like a pre-European Cup final friendly. When the United centre-back David May went in at half-time, with 🌜 his team leading 1-0, he said to Scholes: “I am not even tired. I can't believe this is a cup 🌜 final.”
Ole Gunnar Solskjaer and Ronny Johnsen celebrate the second leg of United's treble Image credit: Getty Images
United’s win completed their 🌜 third Double in six seasons. They had celebrated with gusto a week earlier after regaining the title; this time the 🌜 party was low-key – mainly because they were so close to Barcelona, perhaps also because the win had been so 🌜 undemanding. On the Sunday they went to Bisham Abbey, the England training complex, to begin preparations. That evening they practised 🌜 penalties after training before watching a 40-minute video highlighting the most important points from the two group games against Bayern.
The 🌜 next day they flew by Concorde to the peaceful seaside resort of Sitges. Ferguson always placed huge importance on preparation 🌜 for a cup final. He was ridiculed by some when, in his most recent autobiography, he said one of the 🌜 main reasons United lost the 2009 Champions League final defeat to Barcelona was because they picked a poor hotel. Yet 🌜 18 years earlier, when they beat Barcelona 2-1 in the Cup Winners’ Cup final, he said the quality of their 🌜 Rotterdam hotel was a major factor in their victory.
He was equally happy with the Meliá Gran Hotel in Sitges, and 🌜 everyone agreed the atmosphere was extremely relaxed. Beckham later said it felt like they were there for a fortnight. There 🌜 were a few minor stresses – Nicky Butt’s main memory was of having to write 50 names and addresses of 🌜 people who wanted tickets, and Ferguson had to discourage Beckham from sunbathing a couple of times – but that was 🌜 all. “The mood,” said Andy Cole in Andy Mitten’s book Glory Glory!, “was almost like the preparation for a third-round 🌜 Milk Cup tie at some third division club.”
Ferguson’s good cheer was briefly interrupted when he administered the hairdryer to a 🌜 group of fans who were around the hotel and, in his eyes, interrupting the players’ preparation. He later apologised.
On the 🌜 Monday night, the group who would later become known as the Class of 92 sat on the hotel balcony discussing 🌜 the historical significance of what would happen in 48 hours’ time. Giggs was the eldest at 25, Phil Neville the 🌜 youngest at 22. It wasn’t even four years since they were told kids couldn’t win anything; now they had the 🌜 chance to win everything.
May and Teddy Sheringham, who shared a room, were like detectives trying to spot clues as to 🌜 the XI for the final – and, specifically, whether they would start. Both thought they had a good chance; both 🌜 were wrong. The announcement of the XI was the first of three team talks given by Ferguson and his assistant 🌜 Steve McClaren in the two days before the game. The second focused on Bayern’s tactics, which Ferguson felt were to 🌜 score and then shut the game down, and the third covered set-pieces for and against.
The absence of Keane and Scholes 🌜 left Ferguson with a giant hole in the centre of the pitch. Nicky Butt, who had gone from substitute to 🌜 MVP, was not even allowed a place on the subs' bench for the FA Cup final. Most assumed Butt’s midfield 🌜 partner would be Ronny Johnsen, the Norwegian centre-back, who had played there in the second leg of the quarter-final against 🌜 Internazionale. Giggs and Beckham were the other main contenders, with Phil Neville an outside option. If Johnsen played, May would 🌜 come into the defence.
Ferguson had already decided that he could not go into the game without some penetration from central 🌜 midfield. Usually that came from the passing of Keane and Scholes, and the late runs of the latter. With both 🌜 unavailable, Ferguson’s first instinct was to use Giggs in the centre. At that stage of his career he had played 🌜 only a handful of games in that position – but he was usually impressive, and his dribbling was even more 🌜 devastating when he started from a central position. Ferguson wanted Giggs to attack Lothar Matthaus, Bayern’s 38-year-old sweeper, who had 🌜 been harassed into mistakes for both of United’s goals in the group game in Munich.
David Beckham and Ryan Giggs in 🌜 the 1999 FA Cup final Image credit: Getty Images
A tackle from Gary Speed changed everything. It put Keane out of 🌜 the FA Cup final in the first few minutes, forcing a United reshuffle. Beckham moved into the centre of midfield, 🌜 Ole Gunnar Solskjaer went to the right wing and Sheringham came on up front. Beckham played with such class and 🌜 authority, controlling the match with his short and long passing, that Ferguson changed his plans. He considered the size of 🌜 the Nou Camp pitch and the quality of Stefan Effenberg’s passing in Bayern’s midfield, and decided he wanted an equivalent 🌜 to “control the passing momentum”.
Ferguson knew Bayern were worried about United’s width – they lobbied successfully to have the pitch 🌜 made narrower, to the exact specifications of their own pitch in Munich – and wanted two genuine wingers. Jesper Blomqvist 🌜 had never really played on the right, whereas Giggs had done so on a few occasions that season – most 🌜 notably when United hammered Brondby 6-2. Giggs said he was “comfortable” playing on the right, though he has more recently 🌜 spoken of his irritation at not being picked in the centre of midfield.
The team that Ferguson picked was a bespoke 🌜 solution to a bespoke problem. Indeed, in his first three Champions League finals at United, he picked an XI that 🌜 had never played together before, and would never do so again.
Manchester United (4-4-2): Schmeichel; G Neville, Stam, Johnsen, Irwin; Giggs, 🌜 Beckham, Butt, Blomqvist; Yorke, Cole.
Bayern announced their team two days before the match, with the coach Ottmar Hitzfeld happily telling 🌜 everyone that Markus Babbel had been picked at right-wing-back because of the threat of Giggs. As it turned out, he 🌜 was up against Blomqvist.
Bayern Munich (1-4-2-3): Kahn; Matthaus; Babbel, Linke, Kuffour, Tarnat; Effenberg, Jeremies; Basler, Jancker, Zickler.
3. The final countdown
Sir 🌜 Alex Ferguson talks to Roy Keane on the eve of the match Image credit: Getty Images
It’s probably fair to assume 🌜 Roy Keane’s internal monologue was not an easy listen in the build-up to the game. He, Scholes and the injured 🌜 Henning Berg – whose two goal-line clearances in the quarter-final against Internazionale probably kept United in the competition – could 🌜 watch but not take part on what should have been the biggest night of their careers. Keane later described the 🌜 kick-off in Barcelona as his worst moment in football. “It’s astonishing how out of things you feel if you’re not 🌜 playing,” he said in his first autobiography. “It’s as if a glass partition descends between you and the players who 🌜 are in the side.”
Keane was sharing a room with Denis Irwin, a dubious idea given one was playing and one 🌜 not. He had a few drinks with Scholes and some United fans on the Monday night before sneaking to bed. 🌜 On the Tuesday, as the team trained at the Nou Camp, Ferguson sensed reality had landed one between Keane’s eyes. 🌜 Ned Kelly, United’s head of security, remembered Ferguson coming to see him about Keane during training. “I think it’s just 🌜 hit him how big a game he’s missing out on, and I don’t want to have to deal with any 🌜 dramas,” said Ferguson. “Keep an eye on him.”
Kelly selflessly sat drinking until 4am with Keane, Scholes, Berg and some of 🌜 Keane’s family and friends. If you feel out of it, as Keane did, you might as well get out of 🌜 it. Ferguson’s intuition had been right; Keane later said it was during that training session that he fully realised what 🌜 he was going to miss out on.
For others, the night before was when they fully realised what they were about 🌜 to take part in. Cole’s internal organs started to inform him this wasn’t a Milk Cup tie after all, while 🌜 Blomqvist – who had been given three weeks’ notice by Ferguson that he would be playing in the final, but 🌜 had barely kicked a ball in that time – walked round his hotel room reading aloud motivational slogans in an 🌜 attempt to boost his confidence.
It may have been Christmas Eve for Beckham, whose boyish love of football was evident in 🌜 everything he did, but he was soundly asleep by 10.30pm. He’d left training with an ice pack on his thigh, 🌜 which made for some scare stories in the English press the next morning, but knew he would almost certainly be 🌜 fit to play.
Ferguson wore a roundnecked 1960s United shirt during that training session, drawing an unspoken connection with the club’s 🌜 only previous European Cup win 31 years earlier. The historical context was inescapable. Bayern had not won the tournament since 🌜 1976, and no English side had been in a final since the Heysel disaster of 1985. United were the first 🌜 English team to win the European Cup in 1968; in a sense, following England's period of exile, they had another 🌜 chance to become the first to win it.
4. A 'nightmare' start
Sir Alex Ferguson at Camp Nou Image credit: Getty Images
The 🌜 United party did have one problem with the hotel facilities: the clocks ran too slowly on the day of the 🌜 game. The match did not kick off until 8.45pm local time, and the players had to find ways to kill 🌜 time and control their increasing nerves. Stam tried a John Grisham novel, until he realised he wasn’t reading so much 🌜 as looking at words.
The players had a siesta after lunch, but Stam’s snoring was such that his room-mate Ole Gunnar 🌜 Solskjaer couldn’t sleep. He tried to watch one of those new Digital Versatile Discs but couldn’t concentrate, so called his 🌜 best friend in Norway to ask where he’d be watching the game. His friend, a nurse, was on the night 🌜 shift and told Solskjaer he’d only be able to watch the first 75 minutes. Solskjaer suggested, politely but firmly, that 🌜 he find someone to fill in for an hour. “I had this feeling something big was going to happen to 🌜 me,” said Solskjaer in the Manchester United Opus. “It's hard to explain. I just had a premonition I was going 🌜 to do something that night.”
Everyone on the coach knew it was the biggest game we’d ever played
When an impatient Stam 🌜 arrived early in the lobby for the trip to the ground, half the squad were already there. Keane noted that, 🌜 during the coach journey, even the usual jokers, Butt and Giggs, hardly said a word. “The manager was palpably uptight,” 🌜 said Keane. “This was not just another game. Everyone on the coach knew it was the biggest game we’d ever 🌜 played.”
The atmosphere in the dressing-room walked the line between subdued and focused. Ferguson told his team they had nothing to 🌜 worry about, that Bayern were not as good as the Arsenal team they had seen off in the Premier League 🌜 and FA Cup. He also reminded them that Bayern’s gameplan would be to score early and shut the game down.
The 🌜 warning was delivered with feeling because United had made a habit of handicapping themselves during their European run. They conceded 🌜 the opening goal after 11 minutes away to Bayern, after six minutes at Juventus in the semi-final, and after 49 🌜 seconds against Barcelona in the group stages.
In the final they went behind after six minutes. The game hadn’t settled down 🌜 when Beckham miscontrolled a difficult ball in midfield and Bayern counter-attacked. Carsten Jancker was challenged clumsily on the edge of 🌜 the area by Johnsen, and Mario Basler stroked a simple free-kick into the bottom corner. It was the second time 🌜 Schmeichel had conceded a free-kick at that end of the Nou Camp in the Champions League that season; the first 🌜 was from Rivaldo in the group game against Barcelona. Each time, the ITV commentator Clive Tyldesley said the free-kicks were 🌜 deflected. But neither were. On both occasions, Schmeichel wrongfooted himself by taking a presumptuous step in the wrong direction. Basler’s 🌜 free-kick, which was relatively tame, went straight into the corner. Schmeichel complained that he couldn’t see it because of the 🌜 jockeying of Basler, Butt, Jancker and Stam on the edge of the wall. “I think,” said Cole in his autobiography, 🌜 “that p****d off a lot of the chaps.”
Mario Basler scores against Manchester United in the 1999 final Image credit: Getty 🌜 Images
The match situation was not unusual to United, but the gravity of it was. They had never been behind in 🌜 a game of such importance and for most of the match they laboured for an equaliser, never approaching their best.
There 🌜 were a few reasons for that. One was fatigue – half the team were carrying injuries, and the match was 🌜 United’s 63rd of the season. They were without Keane, whose radiant mental strength and relentless, progressive passing sparked their famous 🌜 comeback against Juventus in the semi-finals. There was also a bit of stage fright. “We were too inhibited,” said Giggs 🌜 in his autobiography. “I hate to say it, but the occasion got to us a bit.” He wasn’t the only 🌜 one who felt that way. “We never turned up for the final,” said Cole in the Manchester Evening News. “I 🌜 was very disappointed with my performance. It’s one of my few regrets in football that I didn’t do the business 🌜 in the biggest game I started.”
Blomqvist felt his own legs “weren’t responding as normal … they were like jelly.” Apart 🌜 from a 90-second spell early in the second half, United did not threaten to overwhelm Bayern until right at the 🌜 end of the match. And though Bayern never had any sustained pressure of their own, they did create the clearer 🌜 chances on the break. Even Ferguson, who will argue until his dying day that United were the better team because 🌜 their intent was so much greater, accepted they created almost nothing. “I honestly can’t think of anything exciting or significant,” 🌜 he said in The Unique Treble, “until those last three incredible minutes.”
It’s not that United were battered by Bayern. They 🌜 weren’t even outplayed. They had more possession, more corners and more shots on target. But their touches were slightly heavy, 🌜 their decision making slightly awry and their tempo well below the usual quick-quick-quicker approach. Tyldesley summarised it neatly when he 🌜 said, late in the first half, that United were “creating openings rather than chances”.
We were plunged into a nightmare
Aside from 🌜 Beckham, who overshadowed Effenberg in midfield with and without the ball, United’s attack struggled. Giggs provided plenty of electricity but 🌜 most of the things he tried didn’t quite come off. Blomqvist had the kind of anonymous game he feared, while 🌜 Yorke – who in the 1998-99 season was the best forward in European football along with Andriy Shevchenko – was 🌜 the biggest disappointment of the lot. Ferguson thought he had never seen him look so nervous on a football field. 🌜 Or, presumably, off it.
The redeployment of Giggs and Beckham, and Blomqvist’s struggles, meant there were no crosses of any quality. 🌜 “We were plunged,” said Ferguson in Managing My Life, “into the nightmare of chasing the game against opponents who could 🌜 emphasise their strengths and hide their limitations by applying a policy of unambitious containment.”
It may have been unambitious, but it 🌜 was also accomplished. There was a resilience and authority to Bayern’s defending that was not always evident at the other 🌜 end, where Johnsen and Schmeichel were very jittery for the first half hour. United were grateful for the majestic Stam, 🌜 who was a nose ahead of Beckham as their outstanding performer. The best player on the pitch was the youngest, 🌜 the 22-year-old Ghanaian Samuel Kuffour. He and his fellow marker Thomas Linke nagged United’s forwards incessantly, while Jens Jeremies did 🌜 the same in midfield. Matthaus, who started as a sweeper, was asked by Hitzfeld to move up into midfield where 🌜 possible so that Jeremies could push up closer to Beckham. It meant that Bayern flitted between two formations, 1-4-2-3 and 🌜 a 4-1-2-3.
After Basler’s goal neither side created a clear chance in a scruffy first half, though Bayern had the better 🌜 half-chances and deserved to lead. Zickler shot wide from Basler’s cross and headed a bouncing ball too close to Schmeichel 🌜 from 12 yards. The closest United came was when a long throw from Neville almost fell for Cole on the 🌜 six-yard line. He was about to shoot when Linke’s desperate tackle diverted the ball off him and just wide.
5. Turning 🌜 the tide
Sir Alex Ferguson gives Teddy Sheringham his final instructions Image credit: Getty Images
The only thing United could really claim 🌜 in the first half was the moral high ground. They did not think much of Bayern’s attacking approach, which partly 🌜 involved feeding off long balls forward to Jancker. Sheringham said they played “like Wimbledon”. That was a little harsh – 🌜 there was an order and purpose to Bayern’s counter-attacks, especially when Basler was carrying the ball. They also had one 🌜 of Europe’s best passers in Effenberg, even if he did have a quiet game.
During half-time, Ferguson told Stam to win 🌜 the ball back quicker and more aggressively, and for the players to pass the ball quicker and more aggressively. He 🌜 then gave a short speech inspired by the Scottish striker Steve Archibald. He had played under Ferguson at Aberdeen, when 🌜 they had an affectionate but tempestuous relationship, and later played for Barcelona under Terry Venables. Archibald still lived in the 🌜 city and came to see United train the night before the game. He told Ferguson that one of his abiding 🌜 memories of the 1986 final, when Barcelona lost to Steaua Bucharest on penalties, was that at the end he had 🌜 to walk right past the European Cup knowing he could not touch it.
Don’t you dare come back in here without 🌜 giving your all
Ferguson liked the story but only wanted to accentuate the positive to his players before the game. At 🌜 half-time, however, things were getting desperate. “If you lose you will be six feet away from the European Cup, but 🌜 you won’t be able to touch it, of course,” he said. “And I want you to think about that fact 🌜 that you’ll have been so close to it and for many of you it will be the closest you’ll ever 🌜 get. And you will hate that thought for the rest of your lives. So just make sure you don’t lose. 🌜 Don’t you dare come back in here without giving your all.”
Ferguson spoke to Sheringham at length during the break, telling 🌜 him that he would come on after 20 minutes of the second half if it was still 1-0. “That p****d 🌜 me off,” said Solskjaer in an interview with FourFourTwo in 2024. “I thought, ‘I’ve scored 17 goals for you this 🌜 season, mostly coming on as sub – aren’t you going to speak to me?’”
Sheringham secretly hoped United wouldn’t score so 🌜 that he’d have the chance to play in a European Cup final. He had little to worry about. The match 🌜 drifted along with little goalmouth incident, although the buzzing atmosphere made the game feel more exciting than it was. Blomqvist 🌜 missed United’s first good chance in the 56th minute, scooping over the bar from six yards after stretching to beat 🌜 Babbel to a speculative cross from the right by Giggs. Ferguson gave Sheringham the call to replace Blomqvist after 65 🌜 minutes and spent a couple of minutes talking to him on the touchline. “Come on,” said an impatient Sheringham. “Get 🌜 me on now.”
Sheringham’s introduction meant a change of shape for United, whose freestyle formation was closest to a diamond midfield 🌜 – Butt deepest, Giggs on the left and Beckham right, with Yorke behind the front two and Sheringham also pulling 🌜 left. It left them dangerously exposed to counter-attacks, but Ferguson was always of the view that you may as well 🌜 be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. “We could never have started with that line-up; it would have been 🌜 brave going on suicidal,” said Gary Neville in his autobiography, Red. “A final twenty minutes of desperation was another matter.”
Bayern 🌜 responded to United’s substitution by bringing on Mehmet Scholl for Zickler. It was a clever move which allowed Scholl, a 🌜 defter, smarter player, to exploit the enormous space in front of the United defence. “We were living on the edge 🌜 and we knew it,” said Cole. “Time, and patience, were running out in equal measure.”
Mario Basler infuriated the United players 🌜 with his antics Image credit: Getty Images
Patience was running out in more ways than one. A number of United players, 🌜 especially Sheringham and Stam, were irked by what they saw as showmanship from Bayern, and one player in particular. “When 🌜 Basler took Bayern’s corners he was an absolute disgrace,” said Stam in his autobiography, Head to Head. “He was posing 🌜 and milking the applause, believing he was the man of the moment, having scored what he thought was the winning 🌜 goal.”
Basler was almost a caricature of the arrogant German footballer. He strutted around the field like he had been given 🌜 his own TV show for the night, with an audience of 200 million. In the first half he tried to 🌜 score with a free-kick from an absurd angle on the right. In the second half he twice tried to chip 🌜 Schmeichel from the halfway line. On another occasion, when he broke dangerously down the left and was cut off just 🌜 inside the area by Stam, Basler cockily led Stam all the way back into his own half before playing the 🌜 ball even further back to Kuffour. He turned what was essentially a superb piece of defending from Stam into a 🌜 demonstration of his own assumed superiority. He might as well have been blowing a dog whistle at Stam.
I’m going to 🌜 hit the arrogant w****r if he carries on
For all the showboating, Basler was one of the few attackers on either 🌜 side who was invigorated rather than inhibited by the occasion. At one point, as he munificently accepted more applause for 🌜 his very existence, Stam turned to Johnsen. “I’m going to hit the arrogant w****r if he carries on,” he said. 🌜 Before Johnsen could respond, Stam heard somebody else shout, “You’d have to get in line.” He didn’t specify whether the 🌜 comment came from a United or Bayern player.
Bayern might have scored four times between the 73rd and 84th minute. They 🌜 created a series of opportunities on the counter-attack, mostly after intercepting weary passes from United players. Schmeichel made good saves 🌜 from Effenberg and Scholl, who also hit the post with a gorgeous disguised chip from the edge of the box. 🌜 That came after a swaggering run from deep inside his own half by Basler, who twisted Johnsen inside out on 🌜 the edge of the area without touching the ball before then giving it to Scholl. As the ball sailed over 🌜 Schmeichel’s head, his heart sank, because he knew it was in and it was over. Instead it drifted just enough 🌜 to hit the post and bounce straight back to Schmeichel.
Five minutes later, Jancker hit the bar with an overhead kick 🌜 from close range. By then Bayern had substituted Matthaus, who had almost nothing left. “After 75 minutes I told the 🌜 coach I was feeling tired,” he said in FourFourTwo. “I’d been making different runs in midfield than when I’d played 🌜 sweeper, where I didn’t have to run as much. I didn’t tell the coach that he had to take me 🌜 off – only that I was tired and if he did want to substitute me, I would agree.”
Most of the 🌜 United players' legs were going, too, but they were given a bit of impetus by the arrival of Solskjaer in 🌜 the 81st minute. His reputation as a deadly substitute had been established that season, especially with the injury-time winner in 🌜 the FA Cup against Liverpool and an absurd four goals in 11 minutes at Nottingham Forest. His irritation that Ferguson 🌜 had not spoken to him at the break was still in his mind, but so was another half-time team talk 🌜 11 days earlier. United were drawing 1-1 in their final league game at home to Spurs, a match they needed 🌜 to win to regain the title. “Don’t worry lads, keep playing like you are and you’ll get your goal,” said 🌜 Ferguson. “And if we haven’t scored with 15 minutes to go I’ll just put Ole on.”
Solskjaer wasn’t needed, as Cole 🌜 scored the winner early in the second half, but his confidence went through the roof and stayed there, even when 🌜 he was p****d off.
When Solskjaer came on in Barcelona, he attacked the game like a man who’d had a premonition 🌜 it was going to be his night. His first touch, 22 seconds after coming on, was a good header that 🌜 forced a decent flying save from Oliver Kahn – the first serious save he’d had to make in the match.
They've 🌜 gone. We've got them
Whether it was fatigue, nerves, Solskjaer’s introduction, the removal of Matthaus or a combination of all four, 🌜 the match underwent a character change in the 87th minute. Bayern, who had kept United at arm’s length with almost 🌜 disdainful ease for most of the game, suddenly fell off a cliff. United created four opportunities in barely 90 seconds. 🌜 Sheringham’s shot was saved by Kahn after a backheel from Solskjaer; Yorke headed Beckham’s cross too far in front of 🌜 Sheringham and then missed an excellent chance, miskicking desperately after a low cross from Gary Neville. Finally Kahn danced across 🌜 his line to make another comfortable save from Solskjaer’s header.
On the bench, Keane turned to the reserve team coach Jimmy 🌜 Ryan. “They’ve gone,” he said. “We’ve got them.” In his autobiography, Keane elaborated on that observation. “For a team with 🌜 their reputation Bayern were by now a shambles, as bad as bad can be: they were actually ‘bottling’ it big 🌜 time.”
A United goal was palpably in the post, but there were only a few minutes for it to arrive. The 🌜 German television commentator Marcel Reif wasn’t alone in thinking they’d left it too late. "Maybe I shouldn't say this, and 🌜 I promise never to say it again, ever,” he began. “Football, as Gary Lineker once said, is a simple game; 🌜 22 men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans win."
Beckham’s impatient foul on Effenberg in 🌜 the 89th minute allowed Bayern to waste more seconds by replacing Basler with Hasan Salihamidzic. “Basler and Matthaus left the 🌜 pitch as though they had just collected Oscars,” sniffed Stam, who like approximately 100.00 per cent of Dutch footballers did 🌜 not hold their German counterparts in the highest regard. “After watching those tossers proclaim themselves as winners I was even 🌜 more determined to find that extra bit of energy in my cramping legs. I wanted to beat them move than 🌜 any other opponent I’d faced.”
Jaap Stam in action against Bayern Munich Image credit: Getty Images
Beckham remembers looking to the touchline 🌜 during that break in play and seeing the European Cup trophy with Bayern ribbons attached to it. Ferguson had made 🌜 peace with the result and was thinking about what he would say to the press. “I was already composing myself,” 🌜 he said, “to take defeat with dignity.”
The press had already had their say about him. Most panned him for taking 🌜 one gamble too many on the biggest night of his life by moving Giggs and Beckham from their natural positions. 🌜 The story goes that Ferguson later amused himself by getting copies of all the match reports that never saw the 🌜 light of day because they were desperately rewritten at the end of the game. The view that Ferguson messed up 🌜 tactically is a little simplistic. There were plenty of times in his career when he tinkered too much but on 🌜 this occasion he was placed in an invidious position by the absence of Keane and Scholes. “It is fair to 🌜 say the team shape didn’t work great, but I don’t think the manager could have done much different,” said Neville. 🌜 “It was just a tired performance by us… As a team we had been sprinting so hard for so long.”
Though 🌜 Beckham’s crossing was missed, he was easily United’s best attacking player among the starting XI. “I didn’t need a European 🌜 Cup final to prove to myself that I could play centre midfield at the highest level,” he said, “but it 🌜 was still great to do it.” He would end the year as runner-up to Rivaldo in both the Ballon d’Or 🌜 and the FIFA World Player of the Year.
There wasn’t such consensus over Giggs’s performance. He was a threat, if an 🌜 erratic one, and Ferguson heard the left-back Tarnat call for help on a number of occasions. Ferguson argues the strain 🌜 of repelling Giggs contributed significantly to the fatigue which suddenly overwhelmed Bayern at the end of the match. Giggs doesn’t 🌜 necessarily agree. “I did as he asked,” said Giggs in the Daily Mail earlier this year. “I kept going at 🌜 Tarnat but kept losing the ball. To be honest, I was s**t that night.”
6. 90+1'
Teddy Sheringham celebrates his goal Image 🌜 credit: Getty Images
Giggs, Butt and Neville were among those who thought the game was up. “I kept looking up at 🌜 the clock,” said Neville in his Times column. “It was ticking down towards the end of the second half and 🌜 I just thought that the Germans had gone and done us again.”
But thinking you’ve lost and giving up are two 🌜 different things entirely. In the 90th minute, as the board went up to show three added minutes, Babbel played a 🌜 loose pass back towards Linke. He was pressured by Solskjaer into conceding a throw-in on the left wing, at which 🌜 point Neville sprinted across the field to take a long throw. “I was absolutely knackered,” he said. “I’ve wondered a 🌜 few times since, ‘Why did I do that? What was I doing running all that way?’ And it’s simple, really: 🌜 it’s what I’d been taught to do since I was a kid at United. You keep playing, you keep trying, 🌜 you keep sprinting until the death.”
As Neville gathered himself, the board went up to show there would be three additional 🌜 minutes. His throw was headed clear towards Beckham, one of the few players on the pitch who still looked fresh. 🌜 He beat Scholl to the loose ball and then evaded his attempted challenge before playing a good pass to release 🌜 United’s left-winger: Gary Neville. He was still in position from the throw-in; as he ran towards the ball and prepared 🌜 to cross with his left foot, every step betrayed a furious concentration not to cock it up. He did enough 🌜 to keep the ball alive: his low cross hit a Bayern defender, deflected into the area and was put behind 🌜 by the stretching Effenberg.
With Beckham preparing to take the corner, Schmeichel charged past the halfway line. “Can you f*****g believe 🌜 him?' said Ferguson to McClaren. This wasn’t on the chalkboard when Ferguson asked his assistant to run through set-pieces before 🌜 the game. The last time Schmeichel had done something similar, against Arsenal 14 months earlier, he pulled his hamstring trying 🌜 to get back and missed the European Cup defeat to Monaco three days later. Schmeichel’s gesture was in keeping with 🌜 Ferguson’s philosophy that United might as well lose 2-0 as 1-0. Perhaps Ferguson’s unimpressed response was because he felt it 🌜 compromised the dignity with which he wanted to accept defeat.
It was only when Sheringham saw Schmeichel that he realised how 🌜 little time was left. As Beckham watched Schmeichel galumphing forward, his brain registered two things. The first was all the 🌜 b*********s he received from Schmeichel as a young player during training if his crosses weren’t up to scratch; the second 🌜 was that instead of whipping the corner as he usually did, he should float it towards Schmeichel in an attempt 🌜 to cause maximum havoc.
Teddy Sheringham scores past Oliver Kahn Image credit: Getty Images
Beckham’s corner skimmed off the head of Linke, 🌜 who was under pressure from Schmeichel, and reached Yorke beyond the far post. He headed it back towards the centre, 🌜 where the substitute Fink sliced what should have been a routine volleyed clearance straight to Giggs on the edge of 🌜 the area. Giggs may have been comfortable playing on the right wing, but he was less comfortable on his right 🌜 foot. He mis-hit a shot to such an extent that it span like a leg-break past Linke and straight to 🌜 Sheringham. He swivelled to drag the ball into the net from six yards, becoming the first person to score a 🌜 goal in the European Cup final with his tibialis posterior muscle. Or, as he put it more evocatively in the 🌜 Times last month, “it was a scruffy scuff off my sock”.
Sheringham’s first instinct was to check whether he had been 🌜 flagged offside, even though he knew he wasn’t. Bayern were instantly flattened. “I just thought, ‘I can’t do this any 🌜 more’,” said Babbel in the Sunday Times. “It wasn’t the body saying that, it was the mind. Something faded in 🌜 me, in the whole team. The truth is that right then, at that moment, at 1-1, I knew we would 🌜 lose.”
In the 58 seconds between the equaliser and the kick-off, the United players went through all kinds of emotions. Beckham 🌜 “felt like crying”; Solskjaer was chuffed because he would get to play another 30 minutes in a European Cup final; 🌜 a shattered Butt started running round to try to get the blood going in his legs. Sheringham looked up, trying 🌜 to comprehend the vastness of the stadium, the occasion and what he had just done. As he did so, Schmeichel 🌜 ran back to his goal. When he got there he started breathing demonstratively in an attempt to focus and get 🌜 his pulse down. He needn’t have bothered. He’d already had his last touch of the ball as a Manchester United 🌜 player.
Teddy Sheringham scored five goals in the 1998-99 campaign. It was his least prolific season between 1986 and 2007. He 🌜 hardly played until April – partly because of injury, partly because of a desperate hangover from a miserable end to 🌜 the 1997-98 with United and England. When he was picked in a big game, away to Bayern in the group 🌜 stage, he played very well – and then scored a last-minute own goal while trying to redeem a mistake from 🌜 Schmeichel. At the start of 1999, with Sheringham’s morale through the floor, Ferguson told him his chance would come at 🌜 the business end of the season. It did. He started the astonishing FA Cup semi-final replay against Arsenal, making the 🌜 opening goal for Beckham, and then became an unlikely pillar of the Treble. “Life,” he said after the game, “feels 🌜 pretty good right now.”
7. 90+3'
United celebrate Solskjaer's late winner Image credit: Getty Images
McClaren interrupted the celebration of Sheringham’s equaliser to 🌜 implore Ferguson to restructure the team so that they weren’t so exposed defensively. The short-lived Golden Goal rule was in 🌜 use, which meant the first goal in extra-time would be the last. “Steve,” said Ferguson. “This game isn’t finished.” He 🌜 started shouting at the players to get back to the halfway line so that the game could resume as quickly 🌜 as possible.
There were 26 seconds between Bayern kicking off and Solskjaer winning a corner for United. Beckham ran across to 🌜 take it, again struggling to make room because the photographers were so close to the pitch. This time there was 🌜 no Schmeichel, so he whipped an inswinger to the near post. Sheringham, who had a free run, thought he was 🌜 going to score again. He jumped a fraction too early, however, and knew he would not be able to steer 🌜 a header at goal. In a split-second he went to plan B: hang in the air for as long as 🌜 possible and divert the ball across the six-yard box.
When Sheringham flicked the ball on, Stam at the far post thought 🌜 he was about to score the winner. Instead Solskjaer instinctively stabbed the ball into the net from a few yards. 🌜 It was a tap-in in name, but not in nature; this was an unusual and deceptively brilliant finish, because the 🌜 only place he could score was the roof of the net. “Pure instinct,” he said later. And even purer ecstasy. 🌜 “I don’t believe it, but it’s happened,” said the commentator Alan Green on Radio Five Live. Belief was the word 🌜 of the night: United’s in the face of apparently inevitable defeat, and the disbelief of those who were watching. “Unbelievable,” 🌜 said Terry Venables on ITV. “That word is used too frequently, too easily, but that was unbelievable.”
Ole Gunnar Solskjaer watches 🌜 his shot fly into the net Image credit: Getty Images
Solskjaer’s first thought, like Sheringham, was that he might be offside. 🌜 He wasn’t – there were two men on the line – but the only person in his peripheral version was 🌜 his marker Kuffour. As the corner was taken, Kuffour had a firm grip of Solskjaer’s shirt in the six-yard box. 🌜 Then Kahn shoved Kuffour out of his personal space. Had he not done so, Sheringham’s header would have been cleared 🌜 by Kuffour. Instead it unwittingly created a gap for Sheringham’s header to reach Solskjaer.
Cole missed what happened, his view obstructed 🌜 by the spring of anticipation from the bench. Phil Neville was celebrating even before the goal was scored, and led 🌜 a charge of the United bench, straight down the touchline to jump around with the other players. “The celebrations begun 🌜 by that goal,” said Ferguson, “will never stop.”
Once he knew he wasn’t offside, Solskjaer mimicked the knee-slide with which Basler 🌜 had celebrated earlier in the match. It’s sometimes suggested that Solskjaer’s celebration was the root cause of the knee injury 🌜 that kept him out for almost three years in the mid-2000s, but that’s a myth. He did however strain ligaments 🌜 and miss a couple games from Norway that summer. “It was worth it.”
8. Ole
Ole Gunnar Solskjaer celebrates his goal Image 🌜 credit: Getty Images
It was rare to see Solskjaer celebrate a goal with such abandon. His attitude to finishing never really 🌜 changed: it was his job, he was good at it, and to go wild when he scored would be like 🌜 a postman celebrating delivering the mail. When Solskjaer signed for United in 1996, Ferguson told him he would spend six 🌜 months in the reserves to acclimatise to English football. But he was so good in training that Ferguson put him 🌜 on the bench for the third league game of the season, when he came off the bench for his debut 🌜 to slam a late equaliser against Blackburn. The speed of Solskjaer’s progress, and the savage precision of his finishing, took 🌜 everybody by surprise – except himself.
“I’m a humble lad,” he said in an MUTV interview in 2024, “but I don’t 🌜 think there’s any better finisher than me, still.” The most impressive things about Solskjaer’s finishing were the context of his 🌜 goals, the range – any distance or angle, any of the three main body parts – and the sheer expertise. 🌜 Most of his finishes, as his team-mate Jordi Cruyff observed in Glory Glory!, looked like they had been calculated by 🌜 a computer. “I never really tensed up when I got chances,” said Solskjaer. “For me there’s no such thing as 🌜 a great save, it’s just a bad finish.”
Solskjaer prided himself on the intensity and authenticity of his finishing practice. “In 🌜 training, even though it looks stupid sometimes, I always do things at match pace,” he told the Manchester United Opus. 🌜 “[If] you take one, two, three, four, five touches, fanny about and score a goal… there’s no point. Do it 🌜 as if it’s a game. Do things at match pace.”
Do it as if it’s the last minute of the European 🌜 Cup final.
When United beat Ipswich 4-0 in September 2001, Solskjaer sliced a cross into the net from a tight angle. 🌜 He could easily have claimed that he meant it, and he had scored enough unique goals in the past to 🌜 make that a credible scenario. Instead he walked off with an air of mild disgust.
I wasn’t as nice on the 🌜 pitch as I am off it
The secret to Solskjaer’s popularity, apart from his innate decency, is his ability to combine 🌜 qualities which, if not quite mutually exclusive, are hard for most human beings to synchronise. He’s friendly and upbeat, yet 🌜 nobody’s fool. He’s modest yet charismatic. And he’s a nice guy with an edge. Would you clap in Stuart Pearce’s 🌜 face after he scored an own goal, as Solskjaer did in 2001?
“I had the eye of the tiger,” he said. 🌜 “I wasn’t as nice on the pitch as I am off it.” It’s sometimes forgotten that it was Solskjaer who 🌜 effectively ended Beckham’s career at Old Trafford by developing into a high-class right-winger – an excellent crosser, if not in 🌜 Beckham’s class, and a Thomas Muller-style space invader who provided a superior goal threat. It was especially cruel that, at 🌜 the start of the 2003-04 season, when he was finally a regular, Solskjaer suffered the knee injury that kept him 🌜 out for the best part of three years.
The Bayern goal did not earn Solskjaer the adoration of United fans; it 🌜 validated what they had seen for the previous two and a half years. There’s an innate humility in Scandinavian culture, 🌜 and Solskjaer says he felt a connection with Manchester people. “We don’t think we’re something we’re not, we just want 🌜 to work hard,” he said. “I feel Mancunians are mentally strong.” He loved being at United, even if it meant 🌜 being an irregular starter, and turned down a £5.5m move to Spurs in August 1998 when he heard it was 🌜 the board, rather than Ferguson, who had sanctioned the deal.
Teddy Sheringham and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer celebrate the win Image credit: 🌜 Getty Images
He started United’s first Champions League group game a month later, the 3-3 draw at home to Barcelona, but 🌜 between that and the final he made only two substitute appearances in the competition, both against Brondby. When United played 🌜 Bayern at home in the group stage in December, he wasn’t even on the bench. “I felt important anyway because 🌜 I played in the FA Cup and League,” he said. “ I scored quite a few goals that season.”
Solskjaer gets 🌜 all the credit for scoring the winner against Bayern, yet he deserves more praise for changing the mood of the 🌜 game. It feels like a statement of the bleedin’ obvious to say a player should attack the game when they 🌜 come on and their team is losing, yet there are millions of examples of a match passing a substitute by, 🌜 no matter how willing they may be. Solskjaer studied opposing defences from the bench and developed the ability to blend 🌜 seamlessly into the match.
He was involved seven times against Bayern, and six of those were impactful. There were two headers 🌜 at goal and a backheel to create another chance for Sheringham; he pressured Linke to concede the throw-in that ultimately 🌜 led to the first goal; he won a corner straight after the equaliser; and then he gave all Manchester United 🌜 fans the greatest moment of their sport-watching lives.
“I do believe some subjects simply cannot be encapsulated in words,” wrote Richard 🌜 Kurt in United! Despatches from Old Trafford. “The seconds before you touch a new lover for the first time, the 🌜 harmonies on ‘Pet Sounds’, the sight of 600 United ‘boys’ steaming through a cordon… and now you can add Solskjaer’s 🌜 goal.”
9. Football, bloody hell
Pierluigi Collina tries to lift Samuel Kuffour to his feet Image credit: Getty Images
Many of the Bayern 🌜 players didn’t even want to kick off. The referee Pierluigi Collina went round trying to persuade them to get off 🌜 the floor, literally if not metaphorically. He started to lift the devastated Kuffour, who then flopped back to the ground. 🌜 When the game did resume there was time for one last long ball forward, a clearance from Butt and then 🌜 three deliciously theatrical peeps on the whistle from Collina.
It’s hard to believe that, in the entire history of association football, 🌜 there have ever been such extremes of collective emotion as there were in that moment. Bayern were hit by the 🌜 sort of raw trauma that makes a mockery of the word ‘sport’, while a number of United players collapsed on 🌜 the floor in a combination of exhaustion, exhilaration, confusion and gratitude. Giggs fell on his front and wept on a 🌜 football field for the only time in his career. “I’ve never known anything like the emotion that spilled out in 🌜 that moment,” he said, “and I never will again.”
Gary Neville collapsed on his back for the second time in a 🌜 minute. He had done so when Solskjaer scored, because he was too exhausted to run half the length of the 🌜 field. “That’s an out-of-body experience, that,” said Neville of the final whistle. His fatigue was particularly understandable; he was the 🌜 only United player to start each of the last 10 games of the season. In all, he started the last 🌜 28.
There was one exception to the widespread fatigue. Beckham just kept running, all the way down the other end of 🌜 the field to the United fans. “I don’t know if I’ll experience moments, or see celebrations, quite like those ever 🌜 again," he said. Everybody recognised straight away that this was seismic stuff, and not only because of the fury with 🌜 which a devastated Kuffour was pounding the ground.
I can’t believe it I can’t believe it
In the last 20 years, million 🌜 of words have been spoken and written in an attempt to contextualise the miracle of Barcelona. None have done it 🌜 as much justice as the three that came out of Alex Ferguson’s mouth when he spoke to ITV’s Garry Newbon 🌜 less than two minutes after the final whistle. “I can’t believe it I can’t believe it. Football, bloody hell. But 🌜 they never give in – and that’s what won it. I’m so proud of them.”
There is a lovely moment just 🌜 before that interview, a split second when a frazzled Ferguson inhales extravagantly in an attempt to compose himself. Everybody knew 🌜 what it meant for him. “Europe had become a personal crusade,” he said in The Unique Treble. “I knew I 🌜 would never be judged a great manager until I won the European Cup.”
Sir Alex Ferguson leads the celebrations Image credit: 🌜 Getty Images
He always thought he would win it one day. But not as part of a Treble, and not with 🌜 two goals in injury time at the end of a season full of epic matches, death-defying comebacks, unbelievable drama and 🌜 exhilarating football. Ferguson’s managerial career was complete. He won another 15 major trophies after that.
Throughout the 1990s, as United took 🌜 a crash course in European football, Ferguson spoke with wonder about the suddenness of opposition attacks, how sophisticated teams like 🌜 Barcelona could kill you with a Hitchcockian thrust of the dagger. It was quite a twist on that theme for 🌜 his side to then score twice in 101 seconds to win the European Cup.
This was the summit of unreality
That’s how 🌜 long there was between Sheringham and Solskjaer’s goals – and the ball was in play for only 28 of those. 🌜 Two goals in 28 seconds of playing time: there has never been such a sudden, savage twist in a game 🌜 of such importance. Rinus Michels, the godfather of Total Football, was asked afterwards if he had seen anything comparable. "Of 🌜 course," he said. “In my dreams. This was the summit of unreality. Neither I nor any person involved in this 🌜 extraordinary game have ever, or will ever see such a finish."
It was a short enough period for one fan to 🌜 enter London’s Blackwall Tunnel with United 1-0 down and emerge when they were 2-1 up, though quite what he was 🌜 doing entering a tunnel at that moment in time is another matter. It was a short enough period, so legend 🌜 has it, for various dignitaries including Lennart Johansson, Gerhard Aigner and Franz Beckenbauer to miss both goals after entering the 🌜 lift in the bowels of Nou Camp to go down for the presentation.
George Best also missed the ending, having left 🌜 the stadium with a couple of minutes remaining. Eric Cantona, who lived in Barcelona at the time, couldn’t even get 🌜 into the stadium after walking into the wrong jobsworth before the game.
10. A triumph in Ferguson's image
The Bayern players can 🌜 only watch as United lift the trophy Image credit: Getty Images
“Tonight it was not the best team that won, but 🌜 the luckiest,” said Matthaus after the game. “It’s bitter, sad and unbelievable.”
The match is a rare example of history being 🌜 written by the losers – not just Bayern, but the millions of supporters of Liverpool, Manchester City, Leeds, Arsenal and 🌜 the rest – and the neutrals. The legend of the 1999 Champions League final is that Manchester United fell over 🌜 their own feet for 90 minutes and then scored twice. “I’ve never wasted a second worrying about our performance in 🌜 the first 88 minutes,” said Neville in Red, his autobiography. The United players all felt the same, and will happily 🌜 point any naysayers in the direction of the final score: Expected Goals 0-3 Actual Trophies.
Ferguson saw things differently. He said 🌜 “Bayern tried to back into the winners’ enclosure” by killing the game when they went ahead. “Some of the stuff 🌜 written about how Bayern outplayed us was weird. So were many of the assessments of Beckham and Giggs. Beckham was 🌜 the star of the midfield show and Giggs worried them plenty.” It wasn’t an exclusively Fergusonian viewpoint. On ITV’s coverage, 🌜 Ruud Gullit said, not entirely without relish, that Bayern’s approach was “absolutely c**p”, while in The Sun Jimmy Greaves took 🌜 a similar line. “This was not just a triumph for Manchester United but for football in general. It was a 🌜 triumph of good over evil.”
It wasn't an accident
It would absurd to suggest that United were not fortunate. Bayern had the 🌜 better chances – by far the better chances – and Sheringham’s equalising goal could have been sped up and accompanied 🌜 by the Benny Hill theme. But there’s no point receiving luck if you don’t know how to ride it, and 🌜 the way United won the game was entirely consistent with the personality and achievements of that particular team. "It wasn't 🌜 an accident," said Ferguson to UEFA in 2024. “That team did it so many times that season. They had a 🌜 fantastic desire to win and a great team spirit.” They came from behind to win or draw 17 matches in 🌜 the Treble season; to prove it wasn’t a fluke, they did it 16 times in 1999-2000.
There was an almost identical 🌜 victory four months before Bayern, when they came from 1-0 down to beat Liverpool 2-1 in the FA Cup, with 🌜 Yorke scoring in the 88th minute and Solskjaer striking an injury-time winner. It was, Ferguson said later, “the first sign 🌜 we might be on a momentous roll”, and United’s ability to score late goals started to gather the power of 🌜 a judicial precedent.
To those on the inside, United’s modest performance against Bayern enhanced rather than diminished their legend, because it 🌜 revealed the depth of their collective character. It was the ultimate triumph of the human spirit.
A lot was made of 🌜 Ferguson’s half-time team talk, when he told the players they would not be able to touch the European Cup if 🌜 they did not win. It was a lovely line – but it had very little to do with the result. 🌜 Gary Neville can’t even remember Ferguson saying it, though others confirmed he did. There was no sudden epiphany for the 🌜 team. The comeback was because of the culture that Ferguson had meticulously created over 13 years at the club – 🌜 a culture in which standards of excellence and especially hard work were non-negotiable and where, in Ferguson’s words, “the only 🌜 time to give up is when you die”.
It's often said that great sports coaches deal in the 1 percenters that 🌜 give their team an advantage. In reality, they are more like 0.0001 percenters. There were hundreds of thousands of infinitesimal 🌜 actions from Ferguson, spread over a number of years, which culminated in the Treble. The aside about Solskjaer in the 🌜 dressing-room 10 days earlier; advising Ryan Giggs, two days before the FA Cup semi-final replay against Arsenal, to run with 🌜 the ball more because it scared the life out of defenders; his judicious use of the hairdryer and what he 🌜 calls the two most powerful words in the English language, “well done”. It all adds up.
Sir Alex Ferguson celebrates with 🌜 Ole Gunnar Solskjaer Image credit: Getty Images
Ferguson wasn’t perfect, but he got more right than anyone else. He made the 🌜 players better than the sum of their parts and the team better than the sum of its parts. And his 🌜 players were devoted to him. “Ultimately, this was his achievement,” said Keane, who at that stage was effectively Ferguson’s player-assistant-manager. 🌜 “I could easily lay aside my personal disappointment at missing the final, for in truth it was an honour to 🌜 captain the team that delivered for a great manager and a great club.”
Solskjaer cherishes a picture of him and Ferguson, 🌜 taken in the dressing-room after the game. “I will always remember thinking at that moment: ‘You deserve this – you 🌜 deserve so much to win the Champions League’. We did it for him, as a manager. You almost well up 🌜 when you think about it. He was that kind of manager.”
My whole approach to life could be boiled down to 🌜 101 seconds of injury time
Even Ferguson, who had started to accept defeat, didn’t quite realise the power of the culture 🌜 he had created. But he knew exactly what he had created – a football team that doubled up as a 🌜 mirror. “If I had to pick drive or talent as the most potent fuel, it would be the former,” he 🌜 said in Leading. “To me drive means a combination of a willingness to work hard, emotional fortitude, enormous powers of 🌜 concentration and a refusal to admit defeat.”
For Ferguson, adversity was the greatest opportunity: to prove people wrong, to shut them 🌜 up, to demonstrate how good he was. “My whole approach to life,” said Ferguson, “could be boiled down to 101 🌜 seconds of injury time.”
That approach came less from a love of success and more from a fear and hatred of 🌜 failure. "I hope that part of the result of that is that 20 years from now, when they talk about 🌜 the chief characteristic of this particular team, they will always be remembered for their last-minute goals, for never giving in.”
And 🌜 for keeping their nerve. One of the reasons United were so successful at the end of a match is that 🌜 they really panicked. They would gamble by pushing more men forward but they rarely altered their way of playing. In 🌜 the very first Premier League match, as United unsuccessfully chased an equaliser at Sheffield United, Ferguson was shown shouting a 🌜 message to Denis Irwin. “Denis! Denis! Keep playing football.”
Ferguson helped his players realise the stresses and strains – physical and 🌜 especially mental – that the opposition suffered when defending for their life against United. And the whole thing perpetuated itself.
11. 🌜 Recrimination and celebration
Lothar Matthaus walks past the trophy Image credit: Eurosport
Jaap Stam said Matthaus and Basler left the field like 🌜 they had just collected Oscars when being substituted. The Bayern coach, Ottmar Hitzfeld, deserved one for his acting performance after 🌜 the game. He took the defeat with remarkable grace, betraying not a flicker of anger or bitterness. “It could take 🌜 days or even weeks to recover from this,” he said, “but I must say that Manchester are great champions.”
His players 🌜 couldn’t or didn’t bother trying to hide their feelings. When Matthaus received his losers’ medal, he took it off immediately. 🌜 Basler didn’t even want a medal – he walked straight down the tunnel and had nothing to do with the 🌜 presentation. “I cannot find the words,” said Effenberg, possibly for the first time in his life. “I find it hard 🌜 to describe. Can football really be so brutal?”
The players who took it hardest were Jancker, who wept uncontrollably on the 🌜 field and was physically sick when he saw the goals on TV later that night, and Kuffour, who provided one 🌜 of the defining 
of the match when he slammed his fist repeatedly into the ground. Scholl, the substitute who 🌜 almost won it for Bayern, cracked when he reached the door of the team coach. He put his hands over 🌜 his face and started to shout. “S**t, this is unbelievable! This is unbelievable! I should have won this!”
A few journalists 🌜 approached Scholl, who elaborated on his frustration at not scoring a second goal. As he did so, Kahn ran down 🌜 the steps and shoved the journalists away. “How can you do this?” he said to Scholl as he bundled him 🌜 onto the coach. Scholl was later fined after saying Matthaus “always goes off when it gets tight”, as was the 🌜 unused substitute Thomas Helmer for unfurling the middle finger of both hands after the game. He presented them in the 🌜 general direction of the crowd; it was quite a coincidence that Hitzfeld happened to be walking past at that precise 🌜 moment.
Effenberg eventually found the vocabulary to call Matthaus a “quitter”. Few people knew what it was like to play in 🌜 a European Cup final at the age of 38, and Effenberg and Scholl never found out. Effenberg last played in 🌜 Qatar at the age of 35; by the time Scholl was 38, he had retired and was coaching Bayern’s Under-13s.
A 🌜 distraught Samuel Kuffour after the final whistle Image credit: Eurosport
No tale of a German defeat would be complete without the 🌜 word ‘schadenfreude’. There was plenty going around the United team, especially among those who had been irked by Bayern’s showboating. 🌜 Stam saw some Bayern players looking at the trophy as they walked past it. “Great,” he thought. “Have a good 🌜 look but don’t touch it. It doesn’t belong to you.” There was a bit of sympathy for Bayern from the 🌜 man who inserted the dagger. "To lose in that way must be terrible," said Solskjaer. "To win it that way 🌜 is that much better."
The European Cup final of 1999 produced two miracles: United’s victory, and Bayern’s response. Most teams would 🌜 have suffered irreparable psychological damage. Two days after the final, Hitzfeld gave the longest speech of his career. The gist, 🌜 in his words, was: 'There are two possibilities now. Either we can drown ourselves in our own private grief or 🌜 we can show how we react.'
They lost that season’s German Cup final on penalties but within two years they experienced 🌜 the purest catharsis. They won the European Cup in 2000-01, dismissing a fading United with ease along the way. Most 🌜 of the players from 1999 were involved when they beat Valencia in the final – but not Matthaus, who is 🌜 one of the greatest players never to win the European Cup. And not Basler, who was sold to Kaiserslautern a 🌜 few months later after one indiscretion too many. He was involved in a fracas in restaurant, which reportedly started when 🌜 Basler took offence because somebody tried to take a photo of him. While he was sitting in a chair, which 🌜 was on a table, with a bottle of wine balancing on his head.
Manchester United celebrate their win at the Nou 🌜 Camp Image credit: Getty Images
The hour after the match, when United stayed on the pitch to celebrate first with each 🌜 other and then the supporters, has stayed with every player. Many of them, including Stam and Cole, made a point 🌜 of taking a step back to try to take it all in, and to register unique 
in their mind’s 🌜 eye. David May didn’t worry about any of that. “I saw the trophy on a chair and thought, ‘I’m having 🌜 that’,” he said in Glory Glory! “So I picked it up and the rest is history, I ended up in 🌜 half the pictures.”
Schmeichel, captain for the night in the absence of Keane, asked Ferguson to lift the trophy with him. 🌜 The height difference made for a slightly awkward trophy share, but neither man was letting go of it in a 🌜 hurry.
Over the next hour they individually raised the trophy to the United supporters. May acted as master of ceremonies, ssshing 🌜 the crowd before each player took their turn. One of the loudest cheers of the whole night came when Keane 🌜 and Scholes reluctantly walked through a guard of honour. To this day, Keane says he did not win the European 🌜 Cup in 1999. “No matter how many people tell me I deserve that Champions League medal, I know I don’t. 🌜 In fact, you could argue that my indiscipline came very close to costing us the treble.”
Paul Scholes and Roy Keane 🌜 have their chance with the trophy Image credit: Getty Images
The on-field celebrations were the first of three parties. The players 🌜 returned to the dressing-room, all trying to make sense of what the hell had just happened. Ned Kelly, the security 🌜 manager, later recalled Ferguson sitting alone in the corner, his head in his hands, staring at the ground. The second 🌜 party took place at the team hotel, where around 300 people were waiting. The team got back around 2am – 🌜 most enlivened after quaffing champagne on an empty stomach – and started playing catch-up with their guests. “I could relive 🌜 that night every other night for the rest of my life,” said May. “Everyone was singing away, everyone was with 🌜 their families. It was brilliant.”
Cole recalled some hotel staff trying to shut things down at around 3am. “It wasn’t,” he 🌜 said, “the most diplomatic of discussions.”
Duran Duran’s Simon Le Bon and his wife Yasmin tried to get in the party 🌜 and were refused entry. Even those who hardly ever had a drink, like Beckham, tucked in like students in happy 🌜 hour. “I am happy to admit,” said Beckham, “that I was totally legless.”
Who would want a night like that to 🌜 end?
Stam described the drinking as “awesome”. It was also themed. Every player who drank shorts – like Giggs, who was 🌜 on Jack Daniels throughout – dealt exclusively in trebles. Yorke led a party that went off to explore Barcelona’s nightlife. 🌜 Gary Neville walked along the port at sunrise with some mates, commiserating with Bayern Munich fans. “Who,” he said, “would 🌜 want a night like that to end?”
The hotel staff did. They started to wrap things up at around 6am because 🌜 they needed to set the tables for breakfast.
One of the guests was Foo Foo Lamarr, a drag artist from Manchester 🌜 who was friends with some of the players’ parents. When he was asked to go on stage to give a 🌜 speech, he was heckled by James Edwards, son of the chairman Martin. Giggs’ mum raised a polite objection and was 🌜 told to shut up. Giggs, in his words, “went berserk”. He took a swing at Edwards, but by then he 🌜 had treble vision: he missed, hit a chair and fell over. Giggs and Edwards ended up on the floor, flailing 🌜 at each other, before others broke the fight up. While Giggs was being restrained, he felt his nose crunch. He 🌜 had broken it against Internazionale earlier in the season, and it started haemorrhaging blood.
Daniel Gomez, who was in charge of 🌜 security outside the hotel to stop gatecrashers, was surprised to be called inside. “When I got there, I saw Ryan 🌜 Giggs. He had a bloody nose, but was very calm. He was sat down with a very fat man looking 🌜 after him. There was another man there too. He was angry. We escorted him from the hotel. We didn't call 🌜 the police, because they had enough on their hands controlling the fans.”
David Beckham kisses the Champions League trophy Image credit: 🌜 Getty Images
Giggs got to his room around 8am and decided to rest his head for half an hour. He was 🌜 woken up by thumping on his door two hours later – it was Albert Morgan, the kit man, telling him 🌜 he was late for the coach. Giggs stirred with a broken nose and “as bad a hangover as I’ve ever 🌜 had”, and soon found out that the man he’d be fighting was the son of the United chairman. “I thought 🌜 he was an ordinary punter.”
A few days later the story reached the tabloids, who doorstepped Martin Edwards for comment. “I 🌜 can’t,” he said. “I’m late for my squash match.”
Some of the players postponed their hangovers over breakfast and then on 🌜 the flight home. As the plane approached Manchester, Keane was asked by the United secretary Ken Ramsden to lead the 🌜 team off the plane, carrying the European Cup. It wasn’t the most productive conversation. Instead, Schmeichel led United off the 🌜 plane.
A parade around Manchester was the end of the celebrations. On the Thursday night, less than 24 hours after those 🌜 101 seconds, the players went their separate ways. In those days there were no WhatsApp groups or any AOL-based equivalent, 🌜 so that was the last most saw of each other until David Beckham’s wedding six weeks later.
After the most exhausting 🌜 four months of his life, McClaren was also ready to go on holiday – until Ferguson called him in and 🌜 the rest of the staff in at 9am the next day to plan for the following season.
12. Oh what a 🌜 Knight
Sir Alex Ferguson shows off the Champions League trophy Image credit: Getty Images
Before the Champions League final, Alex Ferguson was 🌜 50-1 to be knighted. Two days later, he was 2-1. The Sun gathered all kinds of celebrity support for the 🌜 idea of Sir Alex: it came from Emma Bunton, Shaznay Lewis of All Saints, Mike Baldwin, Ronan Keating, Caprice, Chris 🌜 Evans and Zoe Ball. On 12 June, he was he was included in the Queen’s birthday honours.
During that hazy summer, 🌜 it was assumed a young United team would win multiple European Cups. "We have a great team spirit,” said Butt. 🌜 “We're young, so hopefully we can dominate for the next 10 years. We've got to try and make that happen. 🌜 We must not be one-year wonders."
But they were, at least in Europe. They won only one knockout game in the 🌜 next seven seasons; and although they won the league title by a mile in the next two seasons, they eventually 🌜 lost their domestic aura as well. There are various reasons for that, including the inability of some players to deal 🌜 with the subconscious realisation that they could never top the high of Barcelona. How do you go again after something 🌜 like that? Where do you go from the summit of Everest?
Dwight Yorke knew where he wanted to go. He was 🌜 only half joking when he asked Ferguson if he could take a year off to “get over” what he and 🌜 United had achieved. “He wanted to go round the world celebrating,” said David May in the Undr the Cosh podcast. 🌜 May didn’t seem to be joking, and Yorke also mentions it in his autobiography. Either way, he didn’t get over 🌜 it; he was never the same player again.
Dwight Yorke leads the celebrations Image credit: Getty Images
United didn’t become serial European 🌜 champions, but they did leave a legacy. The Treble has since been done in Italy, Germany and Spain, but no 🌜 side in any country has won it quite like United, and it’s hard to imagine they ever will. Hugh McIlvanney’s 🌜 words, written in the Sunday Times four days after the final, are as true now as they were then. “With 🌜 Manchester United, it is never over until the Fat Lady has a heart attack. Wherever the current representatives of Old 🌜 Trafford stand in the all-time league table of great football teams, they yield to nobody as producers of drama.”
In the 🌜 Promised Land, his definitive book of United’s 1998-99 campaign, Daniel Harris puts the case for United’s Treble being the greatest 🌜 season of all. “It’s not the success that’s truly special, but the glory,” he says. “1998–99 featured every single aspect 🌜 that could possibly be desired of any season, and there’s never been another remotely like it. Astounding, varied games, featuring 🌜 kickings, robberies, comebacks and thrillers, amazing goals, exceptional competition, absurd characters, elephantine testicles and staggering plot twists. Or, put another 🌜 way, it encompassed so much of what makes United, sport and life so compelling.”
English football was more democratic back then, 🌜 which meant United had to fight for everything. From the famous January FA Cup tie against Liverpool onwards, they played 🌜 43 hours of football spread across 28 matches. And during those 2580 minutes, they were almost always living on their 🌜 nerves. Only 318 minutes were spent with a cushion of more than one goal - and over a third of 🌜 those minutes came in the fraught Champions League tie against Internazionale, when a two-goal lead felt anything but secure.
United could 🌜 only truly relax, with a cushion of at least three goals, for 67 minutes out of 43 hours. They had 🌜 to go to the well again and again and again, and that was just in January and February. “It was 🌜 the fighting spirit that won us the Treble,” said Gary Neville. “It wouldn’t have been half the story if we’d 🌜 thrashed Bayern 3-0.”
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