Eyebrows were raised at Manchester United’s decision to hand Michael Owen a new one-year contract earlier this week, but the former England forward can credit Sir Alex Ferguson’s admiration of AC Milan for his extended stay at Old Trafford.
Despite naming Owen in his Premier League starting XI just once last season, Ferguson believes that the 31 year-old’s experience at the highest level is an invaluable quality and one which overrides his limited involvement on the pitch.
With Edwin van der Sar and Paul Scholes this week following Gary Neville into retirement, Ferguson has lost a collective well of experience totalling 1,544 Manchester United appearances from his first-team squad.
Which is why Owen has been retained for a further year and a key factor in Ferguson’s attempts, ultimately futile, to delay Scholes’s retirement for 12 months.
The United manager’s philosophy is that knowledge and experience outweigh minutes on the pitch when determining the ongoing contribution of his senior professionals and it is one he has adopted as a result of his respect for the approach taken by Milan.
While many clubs dispense with players approaching their mid-30s in favour of youth and potential, Milan have consistently bucked the trend, with the likes of Paolo Maldini, Alessandro Costacurta, Cafu and Clarence Seedorf all performing central roles for the rossoneri during their domestic and European successes in recent years, despite being into their mid-30s and beyond.
Ferguson, who has also ensured that United follow Bayern Munich’s blueprint of appointing former players, such as academy director Brian McClair, first-team coach Mike Phelan and former reserve coach Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, to key internal positions, believes Milan have led the way in exploiting experience by relying on seasoned performers more readily than their rivals.
Ryan Giggs, at 37, continues to justify Ferguson’s faith, but while Owen is unlikely to disturb the Wayne Rooney-Javier Hernandez strike partnership next season, Ferguson believes that the mere presence of the one-time European Footballer of the Year alongside the likes of Hernandez, Danny Welbeck and Federico Macheda will prove as valuable as any goal he scores next year.
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