Alan Hansen showed his greatness as a pundit after legendary playing career

Hansen’s punditry career began not long after he ended his playing career in the early 1990s. Those early years included an infamous moment at the start of the 1995-96 season, when he dismissed the chances of Alex Ferguson’s youthful Manchester United squad.

“I think they’ve got problems,” Hansen said after United lost to Aston Villa on the opening weekend of the campaign. I wouldn’t say they have got major problems.

“Obviously three players [Paul Ince, Andrei Kanchelskis and Mark Hughes] have departed and the trick is buy when you are strong. So he [Ferguson] needs to buy players. You can’t win anything with kids.”

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Of course, United quickly showed they could indeed win with kids. Academy graduates David Beckham, Ryan Giggs, Gary Neville and Nicky Butt each racked up 30 appearances or more as United won the league, with all four playing their part three seasons later in the Treble success.

Hansen, for his part, owned the misjudgement. “It was the line that made me,” he would later say. “I’d be at Euston station or Heathrow airport and they’d be shouting it at me.

“To this day, I stand by that line,” he added. “How many times have you seen a manager pick experience over youth, it happens all the time.”

Nearly 20 years later, Hansen was bowing out at the top. He had remained a big part of the BBC’s football coverage, for domestic football and at international tournaments, with that journey ending in 2014.

“Match of the Day is such an important show and you always felt that what Alan Hansen said was the final word, that was the authority,” Gary Neville said when Hansen called it quits. “You almost forget he was a player with how important he has been to television.”

Jamie Redknapp, like Neville, moved into punditry after his football career and looked to Hansen as the gold standard. “If Alan were to say after a game ‘Jamie Redknapp played well’ I was so happy,” he said. “That made me feel a million dollars. It was an acknowledgement that you had done well, it would mean so much.”

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