Tales of Becks, Keane and Ronaldo

The official club magazine has just released its landmark 400th issue, and as part of the celebratory content within the collector’s edition, staff members from down the years have collected together some of their inside stories working on the club publication from the early-1990s onwards.

One such staff member was Rebecca Newton – these days an employee of the club as Manchester United Foundation’s head of communications, but back in the late-90s and early 2000s the magazine’s editorial co-ordinator, charged with setting up Q&As with first-team stars.

“I was pretty much given a free rein to wander around The Cliff and then Carrington to ensure I could arrange the interviews and photoshoots,” she remembers. “When it came to nailing down a ‘yes’, ‘no’ or ‘maybe’ from a player, I spent many a lonely hour hanging around their car park.”

More often than not it was a ‘yes’ from players, eager for an appearance in the magazine – the biggest-selling football mag in the country at one time – or with something they wanted to communicate to United supporters through its pages. And when it came to presenting those interviews in the magazine, there was usually a creative treatment of some sort dreamed up for this or that close encounter with a Reds player – even if some ideas came with a little risk!

“I’ll always remember nailing a brilliant Christmas cover for the magazine one year,” Rebecca recounts in the new special edition. “I’m not sure where photoshop was in 2002, because the snow that gently fell down on Roy Keane, Ruud van Nistelrooy, Ryan Giggs and Seba Veron involved me and a colleague standing on ladders and throwing artificial snow on their heads! Keano looks festively cheerful on the cover – that’s not the look I got in between takes!”

Another story from back in the day involves David Beckham – one of Becks’s last interviews, in fact, before the iconic no.7 departed the club for Real Madrid in 2003.

“Once David Beckham was having shots done while being interviewed, and to add some colour to the feature I waltzed out with a birthday cake and we serenaded him with a really awkward rendition of Happy Birthday. He was very gracious and made sure he took his cake home with him.

And once we photographed a young Cristiano Ronaldo in the Carrington laundry room. The headline was a pun on a washing powder advert, ‘New and improved’.”

To read some of the other inside stories told in the magazine – involving Roy Keane’s jumper, Becks’s Porsche and Sir Alex’s ire – you will need to pick up a copy of the collector’s edition, which is on sale now in shops and newsagents, at Old Trafford on home matchdays, and available online here.