Interview Chris Flanagan
YOU ASK THE QUESTIONS
“It was 6am, and if I didn’t leave the Wales team hotel within half an hour, Bobby Gould was going to call the police and remove me”
Robbie Savage is deep inside Macclesfield’s Moss Rose ground, showing us the photograph of the Class of ’92 on his office wall. His part in that Manchester United FA Youth Cup-winning side was the start of a journey that took him to 346 Premier League appearances – and pantomime villain status in tow – with Leicester, Birmingham, Blackburn and Derby.
Today, on top of his punditry roles with TNT Sports and as Chris Sutton’s sparring partner on BBC Radio 5 Live’s 606 phone-in, he is the director of football at Northern Premier League promotion-chasers Macclesfield, the phoenix club formed after Macclesfield Town folded in 2020. He was invited to take a role by owner Robert Smethurst, who had previously lured him out of retirement at the age of 45 to make a solitary appearance for Stockport Town. “I’m here every day,” explains Savage. “I’ve learned so much about running a football club, dealing with agents, the safety officer, the number of stewards – even how many toilet rolls we’ve got in the building. I love it.”
The former midfielder has also been watching his son, Charlie, progress in the professional ranks. The 20-year-old joined Reading in the summer from Manchester United, and made his Wales debut in October. If his career is half as eventful as his dad’s, it will be worth watching. Now, Robbie discusses his own time in the game with FFT…
If you had to describe your time as a young player at Manchester United with one word, what would it be?
Timo Lu, via Facebook [Pauses to think] Failure. I was in the Class of ’92 and my time there was unbelievable – there’ll never be a group like that ever again, with that many players going on to what they did. We won the FA Youth Cup and we were a tight group: a lot of us were in digs and we’d go and do extra training together, we were so close. I learned so much under Eric Harrison.
But when you’re at Manchester United, your aim is to play for the first team. My son did it – he played in the first team, so he achieved his goal. If you’d said to me all those years ago, “Your son will play in the first team but you won’t
