ALEX McLEISH

As a player with Aberdeen, a young Alex McLeish was nurtured by Alex Ferguson – under whom he lifted three Scottish titles and the 1982-83 European Cup Winners’ Cup, the Dons vanquishing Real Madrid in that final.

After 16 years as a hero at Pittodrie, McLeish claimed a stack of silverware in the dugout. Having cut his teeth at Motherwell and Hibernian, the Scot was responsible for two final-day title wins at Rangers, one in their Treble-winning campaign of 2002-03. He spent several years as a Premier League gaffer, too, and stunned Arsenal to capture the League Cup with Birmingham before moving to the Blues’ rivals, Aston Villa.

McLeish also managed Scotland in two different spells, having already represented his country at three World Cup finals – and yet he’d had to wait to be discovered as a player, and even considered a career in accountancy.

“When I was about 15, my friends signed schoolboy forms for Rangers and Celtic,” he explains to FourFourTwo. “It made me more determined. In the end, I enjoyed a wonderful career.”

And it all began in the north-east of Scotland, with a firebrand Fergie giving McLeish his shot with Aberdeen. Soon, they were taking Europe by storm...

How good was the Aberdeen team you played in? Did they get the credit they deserved?

craigmurphy1977, via Instagram

We were one of Europe’s top teams in the early-80s. We beat Bayern Munich and Real Madrid to win the European Cup Winners’ Cup in ’83, then defeated Hamburg to win the Super Cup. It was quite an amazing journey – one of the greatest achievements of any small club in the world. I don’t think it will happen ever again.

I’d already realised that we were achieving something special in 1980, when we won the club’s first league title for 25 years. I can still remember Sir Alex running on the pitch towards our goalkeeper Bobby Clark, who was a legend but hadn’t won the league in his 15 years with the club. The two of them were crying, jumping and hugging each other. I realised how special our achievement was in that beautiful moment.

What was it like to play under Fergie? Did you take anything you’d learned from him into management?

@spursdab, via Twitter

He really drove us. Today, we analyse games with data and video – but he managed those small details with his tongue. When we played at Rangers and Celtic, he’d tell us to take free-kicks and throw-ins quickly, because they were expecting smaller teams to slow the game down and just waste time. It was almost as if we were putting their players