ALTHOUGH HE WAS unwilling to give anything away regarding when it would happen, Rio Ferdinand says that management could be an option when he decides to hang up his boots.
While the QPR defender has a magazine and fashion line to keep him busy, he told a packed Sport Summit stage at the 2014 Web Summit that he has considered a career in management, even if working under Harry Redknapp sometimes puts him off.
“I see the look on Harry’s face sometimes and think ‘I don’t need that!’
“But I think I’d enjoy managing people. I’ve had three managers in the last two years: [Alex] Ferguson, [David] Moyes and Harry Redknapp. It’s been a great two years in terms of learning.”
The 35-year old fancies himself as an old-fashioned manager and believes that too much faith is put into statistics in the modern game.
“You’ve got to have a good balance,” said Ferdinand and while the veteran believes statistics and analysis can play a role in developing training regimes, football is ultimately too fluid and the most important thing is “at the end of the day, can you get a ball from A to B?”
Caricature
Considering he was speaking at a technology event, Ferdinand was keen to talk about his own use of social media, even if it has just resulted in a three game suspension and a heavy fine.
For Ferdinand, Twitter especially gives him an outlet to bypass the “caricature” that some in the media have painted of a London “wideboy”.
“Now when I speak to people on the street, they say to me ’you’re a different type of person than I expected’. [The media] paint that picture and you see a caricature of yourself evolve and you sit there thinking ‘woah, you don’t know me.’
“For me to be able to have this opportunity and platform on social media, that’s why I embraced it.”
Even racist abuse hasn’t put the 35-year old social media but he would prefer if better systems were in place to prevent it.
“If Twitter, Facebook, etc can find away of monitoring it, that’d be great. It’s going to be difficult, but it would be fantastic.
“I say to people if you don’t have a thick skin, don’t go on there, you’ve just got to dust it off.”
