“Sir Alex Ferguson Saved My Career Before It Began”: Danny Higginbotham Opens Up On Footballing Career
It was 26 years ago, but for Danny Higginbotham, it may as well have been 26 hours ago. The day that his football career nearly ended before it had even begun.
Born in Manchester, England, Higginbotham’s initial footballing trajectory was marked with strife and adversity. Growing up in nearby Altrincham, Higginbotham passed his 11+ exam but was denied entry into Altrincham Grammar School for Boys. Instead, he ended up joining Manchester United’s academy in 1994, where, after struggling to convince across the first year of his apprenticeship, he broke his femur during a match against Preston North End’s reserves. Whilst all of his mates spent their summer partying in Ibiza, the 17-year-old focused his energy on driving 35 minutes (later cycling) from Altrincham to United’s Cliff training ground to undergo his arduous recovery and work his way back to full fitness.
His sacrifice was not in vain: after signing a two-year professional contract, Higginbotham made his professional debut on May 10, 1998, in a 2-0 win at Barnsley. But rather than stick around at Old Trafford, Higginbotham was sent out on loan to the Belgian second tier with Royal Antwerp, who had recently announced a partnership with United.
Dreams and Nightmares in Belgium
Higginbotham was immediately inserted into the starting line-up on the left side of defense, giving away a penalty on his debut in a 1-0 loss at RWD Molenbeek and playing the full 90 in a 2-0 loss vs. Dessel Sport and a 5-0 defeat at KFC Herentals, before returning to the Bosuilstadion, where he was greeted by a horde of Antwerp supporters. Honored to see so many fans at the stadium, Higginbotham decided to disembark the team bus and talk to them. What he found wasn’t so much a group of supporters as a cluster of middle-aged men frothing at the mouths, shouting Flemish insults and telling him to leave their club, and it wasn’t until the wife of manager Regi Van Acker stepped in and got between them that he was able to survive being physically assaulted. Higginbotham had seen enough: he informed Regi that he wanted out of Belgium. Regi invited him to dinner at a seafood restaurant, where he asked him to stick around for three more matches.
“I wanted to go home, I didn’t feel prepared for that, even though I had a working-class upbringing, I just felt very isolated,” stated Higginbotham in an exclusive R.Org interview. “He said, ‘Please, just give me three games. If things don’t turn around in these three games, I will pay for your flight ticket to go back, and we’ll shake hands, and we can walk away. I decided to stay and play the three games; we ended up winning our next 12 games (apart from two draws), and in our second win vs. KMSK Deinze, I walked into the dressing room, and all of a sudden, you can hear this noise, but you have no idea where it’s coming from. I’m looking around, everybody’s celebrating, because we’ve started to hit this wave where everything is just going according to plan, it just clicked.”
“I still couldn’t figure out where this noise was just coming from, but it felt like it was from above me. I looked up and realized it was a glass roof, and there was a guy on there who was one of the ones who went for me after the Herentals defeat. He’d taken all of his clothes off apart from his underwear, and he was covered from neck to toe in Royal Antwerp tattoos, and he was there on the roof apologizing to me.
We walked outside, and he just came up to me and gave me the biggest bear hug you could imagine and said, ‘I’m so sorry.’ This was a huge learning curve, because all of a sudden, I’d gone from this kid, where it’s like ‘You’re coming here, you should be changing everything around’ to where they had a lot of goodwill towards me. I’m a 19-year-old left-back. I’m not gonna change things on my own, but everything clicked, and after that, the way that the Antwerp fans were with me was just absolutely phenomenal. I love them, they were just sensational.”
Higginbotham helped Antwerp qualify for the Belgian Second Division play-offs – a series of playoff matches to decide promotion to the top-flight held between 1974 and 2015 – where, after losing and drawing to KFC Turnhout, they hosted La Louviere in a must-win match on May 23, 1999. Antwerp were forced to play the match behind closed doors, in the middle of a forest; the game was scoreless until the fifth minute of injury time, when the visitors started a counter and threaded the ball to Frédéric Tilmant, who, despite being five yards offsides, was allowed to slot home the winner.
Higginbotham was so irate with the decision that he walked over to the old-school advertising hoardings that encircled the pitch and struck his boot through the sign, causing him to spend considerable time extricating his foot and his shoe, before taking his shirt off, throwing it on the ground, and heading into the tunnel, where they found both sets of players fighting, before making his way to the dressing room, where he found fellow United loanee Ronnie Wallwork separating the club’s goalkeeping coach and the officials. He dragged his compatriot away from this heated altercation and then entered the bus and returned to the hotel, where they were informed that they had both been indefinitely banned.
Sir Alex Comes to the Rescue
As a FIFA-licensed referee, Amand Ancion’s word was taken as gospel. He claimed that Wallwork had headbutted him and pinned him up against the wall, and that Higginbotham also grabbed his neck and choked him; Wallwork was banned sine die by the Belgian Football Association, whilst Higginbotham was handed a one-year suspension. It seemed both players’ footballing careers had been permanently tarnished; little did they know it, but they would benefit from a powerful friend in Sir Alex Ferguson. Fresh off leading United to the treble, Ferguson flew to Brussels to serve as a character reference, before returning to Manchester, inviting both players into his office, and offering them the chance to sign four-year contracts, which they obliged.
Ferguson wasn’t the only one who threw his support behind them: Antwerp supporters held up banners each game, demanding both players’ exonerations. Higginbotham tried to go about his business as usual, but he’d often have to cut short his training session after suffering a stress-induced nosebleed, which would last around 2.5 hours. Whereas Higginbotham and Wallwork’s footballing careers screeched to a halt, Ancion started off the 1999/00 season by being interviewed after a high-scoring season opener and saying that he was still having nightmares about the ‘assault’. After a controversial 1-0 result, Ancion decided to seek psychiatric help, with the players’ bans being quashed the following day, 46 days after the original sentence.
“Sir Alex Ferguson saved my career before it began, and that’s the ultimate compliment that I can give to him as a manager. He didn’t have to do what he did; he’d just won the treble with a team of Manchester United’s stature, and when he could have been out signing players, he flew over to Belgium to save our careers. It wasn’t for the purpose of, ‘These two are gonna be playing week in, week out for us,’ but because of the goodness of his heart to see that there was a wrong that had been done, and he wanted to right it. I will be forever grateful to Sir Alex. There were just so many things that I couldn’t believe they bought into.
There were a lot of things that worked in my favor, because as I was walking into the tunnel, I took my shirt off, and I threw it on the floor, and he predominantly said he knew it was me by the number on my shirt. I had 16 witnesses that said I did nothing, I had 7 or 8 character references that all stood up and said what they had to say, but I think the power that he had at the time gave him the benefit of the doubt.”
Higginbotham returned to action and made six appearances across four different competitions: the Premier League, UEFA Champions League, EFL Cup, and the FIFA Club World Championship (now FIFA Club World Cup). Desperate for regular minutes at the senior level, Higginbotham decided to join Derby County in 2000 for a £2 million fee, where he enjoyed a seamless adaptation to a left-sided center back. And on the penultimate day of the season, Higginbotham helped Derby secure their spot in the top-flight with a famous win at Old Trafford. He continued to make his mark in the Rams’ backline, winning the fans’ Player of the Year, but he was unable to keep them afloat in the Premier League.
He spent the first half of the 2002/03 season in the second tier before returning to the Premier League with a January move to Southampton, where, once again, he got a taste of top-flight football as well as relegation, followed by a move to fellow Championship side Stoke City. Higginbotham excelled in the Potters’ backline and was even given the captain’s armband, as Stoke narrowly missed out on a playoff spot, before deciding to submit a transfer request to force a move to Premier League side Sunderland.
He played one year at the Stadium of Light before heading back to newly promoted Stoke City, where he helped them consolidate their presence in England’s top-flight, racking up 14 goals and 8 assists in 128 appearances. Higginbotham departed Stoke in January 2012, playing for Championship sides Nottingham Forest and Ipswich Town, before dropping down to League One with Sheffield United in January 2013. He spent eight months at Bramall Lane before joining Conference Premier side Chester, followed by a short spell at Altrincham, the club that he had grown up supporting alongside United.
Making his Mark as a Commentator
At the time, Higginbotham was only playing non-league football and getting ready to transition to a new career. In fact, he had already started writing his own column in The Sentinel newspaper. But then he got a message on Twitter from his uncle Allen Bula, who had served as Gibraltar’s first-ever national team manager from 2009 to 2015. After having to play against teams from England and Spain’s lower divisions, Gibraltar was finally accepted by the UEFA Congress in May 2013, and Bula wanted his nephew to be a part of the action. Whilst he qualified via his maternal grandmother, Higginbotham had only been to The Rock once, when he was just six years old. Nevertheless, he decided to represent Los Llanis in their first-ever official international match, a 0-0 draw vs. Slovakia on November 19, 2013, before starting in their next two friendlies vs. Faroe Islands and Estonia in March 2014 – the final two matches of Higginbotham’s footballing career.
Since bidding farewell to a glamorous career that saw him make 451 senior club appearances (210 coming in the Premier League) across 16 years in England and Belgium, Higginbotham has honed his trade as a writer for outlets like The Independent as well as a TV and radio pundit for Talksport, BBC Radio 5 Live, BT Sport, ESPN, Sky Sports and NBC Sports, as well as releasing his autobiography “Rise of the Underdog: My Life Inside Football” in 2015.
Higginbotham made the move across the Atlantic in December 2020, joining as Philadelphia Union’s new color commentator, before being selected as part of MLS’ all-encompassing Apple TV+ team alongside the likes of Kevin Egan and Brian Dunseth. Higginbotham balances his time between commentating MLS matches for Apple TV+ and Premier League matches for NBC while raising his two sons, Joshua (14) and Jacob (12), with his wife in New Jersey. He’s been able to stay connected with the beautiful game in more ways than one, but there is one thing that he hasn’t done since retiring: watch his beloved Manchester United win the Premier League title.
“I think there’s been progress under Rúben Amorim, but it’s their lack of consistency that they need to work on. I commentated their 4-4 draw vs. Bournemouth – you want to introduce someone to football, get them to watch that game, because it was unbelievable. But if you watch Manchester United at the moment, the first 30 minutes, they’re incredible, they look as though they would be title contenders, and more often than not, they score the first goal like against Bournemouth, West Ham, and Wolves. As a player, you have to know when the tide is turning, you have to be able to smell that danger, so whereas other people say, ‘No, that’s up to the manager, he’s got to do this and do that,’ if you’re a player that’s playing for Manchester United, regardless of where they are in the league at the moment, you have to be a good player. It’s as simple as that.
You’re not just playing for Manchester United because you won a competition; you’re a very good player, you understand the game, and you can read the game. But what happens is, the first 30 minutes, they could be 2 or 3-0 up, and more often than not, it just stays 1-0. And then the tide starts to turn as the opposition starts to grow into the game, but United continue to play the same way instead of sitting back a little bit in order to not get caught in transition, wait for things to calm down, and then go again.”
“I like Amorim, but what you can’t continue to do is rinse and repeat. They’ve done it for so long since Sir Alex Ferguson left: a manager comes in, a manager spends money, a manager gets sacked, those players are left surplus to requirements, but nobody else wants them, so the new manager comes in and wants his own players. It’s just a vicious circle, and you end up with a group of players from 3-4 different managers, and that can become a problem, because they know they’re not wanted at the football club, but they’re not going to necessarily leave because they’re earning this amount of money.
I think we’re seeing progress under Amorim in terms of the transfers. Matheus Cunha and Bryan Mbuemo are two great signings, but Benjamin Šeško, we don’t know yet, because he’s obviously been in and out with injury. Defensively, they have problems, but going forward, only Manchester City have scored more, and the goalkeeper Senne Lammens looks really good as well. I know he’s under a certain amount of pressure at times as well, because they’re not defending well, but it’s just about having more control in the game. But I’m positive about it, because I do see the team progressing, and there are periods in games where you have to get the consistency now, but they’ve had periods in the game where you’re like, ‘Wow, they look like a team now. Hopefully that can continue, but it’s not gonna be overnight, it’s gonna take time, for sure.”