Manchester United’s greatest players: No 15, Mark Hughes
Who are the greatest players in Manchester United’s history? The Athletic gave Andy Mitten the task of compiling his top 25, and we are counting them down this summer, in reverse order.
He explains his thought process here.
In 1987, Manchester United played a friendly at home and former striker Mark Hughes, who had left the club for Barcelona (for a record £2million — $2.7m at today’s rates — fee and a salary nine times higher than he was being paid at Old Trafford), was in attendance. Aged 13, I spent a couple of hours colouring in a “Sparky Come Home” banner across four sheets of A4 paper which I held up that day on the Stretford End.
My plea clearly worked: within a year, Hughes was back at Old Trafford, ready for part two of a glorious United career of 467 appearances, 16th on the all-time list between George Best and Michael Carrick. He also got 163 goals, putting him ninth on that list, right between Ryan Giggs and Paul Scholes. “Sparky” scored some of the most important goals in United’s history, chiefly in the 1991 Cup Winners’ Cup final against Barcelona.
There are twists here. For a long time after he left, United fans didn’t celebrate Hughes. The Welshman scored great goals; he was the club’s best player in 1985, didn’t cost a penny after coming through the youth system and was sold for a big profit. He came back and continued to be a hero, all factors which should have endeared him to fans who loved him, yet when he left United later on, he didn’t join the circuit of former pros talking about times gone by, preferring to go into management and talk about the future rather than the past. Which might have been wise, given he wound up in the Manchester City job.
History will be far kinder to Hughes, a magnificent United warrior but one who did it his way. For years, he was the only one from that 1990-91 team I’d never interviewed or didn’t have a phone number for. No big deal. He was quiet and introverted. But I spoke to him 30 years on from that night in Rotterdam and he was wonderful.
“They were everywhere,” he said of United fans who travelled to the Netherlands to see United take on his former club in that final. “I remember looking across to the Barcelona team when they came out, and it just started to rain again. I could see a few of them shivering and rubbing their arms. That just encouraged me.”
Hughes scored twice in that 2-1 win against Johan Cruyff’s Dream Team, the first on 67 minutes and the other seven minutes later to put United two up. For that second one, both of his feet were off the ground and somehow he squeezed the ball in from a tight angle. What did he remember about it?
“Robbo (Bryan Robson) played it through and suddenly I realised the goalkeeper had run out to me. I wondered what he was doing,” Hughes told The Athletic. “He forced me out wide but I knew at the time that I was past the last man and had an empty net. All I had to do was put it in the goal.
“For whatever reason, I just decided to really whack it from that tight angle instead of rolling it in. If you look at the replay, there were two guys busting a gut trying to get back to the line past the ’keeper to clear it. If I hadn’t hit it as hard as I did, it would’ve been cleared. I don’t know why I hit it that hard, but thank god I did.”
Hughes’ career wasn’t conventional.
“When I first saw Hughes, he was coming up to 16 and whacking a ball about in United’s indoor gym. I was less than knocked out,” his first United manager, Ron Atkinson, told me. “He looked morose and unenthusiastic, and his football was even worse. He was downright slipshod and lazy, just the opposite of the bright and lively kids I loved to banter with in training.
“I had almost given up on him when, in an instant, he left me gobsmacked. Playing for the youth team against a powerful Leeds side, he picked up the ball, beat four defenders as if they didn’t exist and smuggled the ball over for a (Norman) Whiteside goal. In a few seconds, Hughes had shown me the kind of quality that was later to become his trademark at the highest level.”
Mark Hughes attacks during a game against Tottenham in 1988 (Ben Radford/Allsport UK/Getty Images)
Whiteside, Hughes’ contemporary at United, played 274 games and scored 67 goals for the club, including the magnificent curling winner in the 1984-85 FA Cup final against Everton. He deserves an extended mention here and had signed apprentice forms on the day Atkinson joined United in the summer of 1981.
“With another yard of pace, he (Whiteside) would have been the greatest player in many generations,” ventures Atkinson. “As a schoolboy, he looked about 30 and played with equal maturity. The sad thing was that within days of becoming an apprentice, he was packed off to hospital for a cartilage operation on a knee that, 10 years later, would bring a permanent end to his career. Whiteside’s game was all about intelligence, awareness and the perceptive pass.”
The pair were key for United, then Hughes left, before re-signing in 1988 after a season on loan from Barca to Bayern Munich.
“Great news for us,” remembered then captain Robson in his autobiography. “He clearly learned a lot on his travels and returned to United a more complete player. Sparky was quiet but had a will to win. He changed personality on the pitch. He was a fierce competitor.”
Hughes (along with strike partner Brian McClair, 471 games, 127 goals) became a mainstay. McClair, a scurrying cerebral Glaswegian signed from Celtic and one of the few players to outsmart his boss Sir Alex Ferguson, had become the first in 20 years, since Best, to score 20 league goals for United.
Hughes racked up between 46 and 54 games every season between 1988 and 1995, when he was sold to Chelsea to allow the Class of ’92 to come through. Injuries were not for this Welshman who hailed from near Wrexham. Striking contemporary Gary Lineker said he had the strongest ankles in football.
In March last year, I was booked to go back to Rotterdam with Hughes to make a film about that 1991 final. But he had to pull out after accepting the job to manage Carlisle United in League Two, English football’s fourth division, at age 62.
In November, I saw that he was taking Carlisle to Southend United, after relegation to the fifth tier, a few hours after United had played at Tottenham Hotspur. Southend isn’t far from north London, so I went along, having told him I’d be going. After their 2-1 away win, he walked across the pitch and greeted me.
He said something interesting: “My personality is that I’m introverted, really. Deep down. There’s a spectrum, and I’m probably at that end of introversion, but it doesn’t stop you having a view; it doesn’t stop you understanding the game. And you can empower that knowledge and help people. That’s the part I like… and I’ll give referees b—–kings on occasions when I get excited.”
Team-mates never expected Hughes to become a manager, let alone a top one. (Besides Manchester City, he’s been in charge of Blackburn Rovers, Fulham, Queens Park Rangers, Stoke City and Southampton, for a total of 467 Premier League matches, as well as Wales’ national team and EFL side Bradford City.)
I posted a photo on social media of him at Southend. The love he received in reply was off the scale — and from fans of so many clubs, too. It was fully deserved, but nowhere was he as successful and loved as at United.