Sir Alex Ferguson is widely regarded as one of the greatest football managers of all time, but even a career as decorated and successful as his contains at least one call that hasn’t aged particularly well — a decision that ultimately handed Rangers one of the finest strikers in the club’s history.
Ferguson’s legacy is built primarily on his achievements at Manchester United, where he retired in 2013 having spent over two decades transforming the club into a dominant force in English and European football. During that time, he won 13 Premier League titles, five FA Cups, and two Champions League crowns, cementing his status as the club’s longest-serving and most successful manager. Before crossing the border into England, he’d already established himself as one of Scottish football’s most gifted young managers during a hugely successful spell at Aberdeen, where he broke the Old Firm’s stranglehold on major honours, winning three Scottish top-flight titles, four Scottish Cups and a European Cup Winners’ Cup.
Less discussed, but no less important in shaping his managerial development, was Ferguson’s earlier spell in charge of St Mirren. Between 1974 and 1978, he led the Paisley club to the Scottish First Division title — the second tier of Scottish football at the time — laying some of the early groundwork for the managerial reputation he’d go on to build at Aberdeen and, eventually, Manchester United.
It was during that formative period at St Mirren, though, that Ferguson made one decision that, viewed with the benefit of hindsight, looks like a rare miscalculation. In the 1970s, a young forward who would go on to become a genuine Scottish football legend was on Ferguson’s radar — only for the future Rangers icon to be knocked back.
That player was Ally McCoist, who would eventually go on to become Rangers’ all-time record goalscorer, netting an extraordinary 355 goals across a 15-year spell at Ibrox after returning to Scottish football in 1983. McCoist’s time in England, prior to his Rangers move, hadn’t gone particularly well, but he found his true footballing home back north of the border, where he developed into one of the most talented players ever to represent the club. Alongside his remarkable scoring record, he collected ten league titles and nine League Cups during his time at Ibrox, establishing himself as an unquestionable Gers legend. His impact wasn’t confined to club football either — McCoist went on to become one of the finest strikers ever to represent Scotland at international level.
McCoist himself has since spoken openly about Ferguson’s decision to turn him away, revealing that the reasoning given at the time centred entirely on his physical stature. According to McCoist, Ferguson told him directly that he simply wasn’t big enough to make the grade. Reflecting on that verdict years later, McCoist has been able to see the funny side, pointing out — with a fair amount of justified pride — that his subsequent career suggests it was, in his words, a genuinely poor decision. He’s since made a habit of reminding Ferguson of the call whenever their paths cross, needling his old adversary about it with the confidence of a player who went on to prove the initial assessment emphatically wrong.
It’s a moment of light-hearted historical trivia, but it also raises an intriguing hypothetical: had Ferguson taken a chance on the young McCoist at St Mirren, there’s a reasonable argument that he might eventually have found his way into one of Ferguson’s genuinely great teams in England, whether at Aberdeen or later at Manchester United. Instead, that particular path never opened up, and McCoist built his legendary status entirely within Scottish football, becoming a totemic figure at Rangers rather than sampling the kind of continental success Ferguson would go on to deliver elsewhere.
For all his brilliance as a talent-spotter and squad-builder throughout his career — reputations built on unearthing and developing young players who went on to become genuine stars — this particular episode stands as a reminder that even the very best judges of footballing talent get things wrong from time to time. Ferguson’s assessment of McCoist as simply too small to make it as a professional forward turned out to be spectacularly incorrect, and McCoist’s subsequent goalscoring exploits at Ibrox stand as lasting proof of exactly how wrong that early judgement was.
Ultimately, though, it’s a story with a happy ending for all involved. McCoist went on to enjoy a career that firmly established him among the greatest players in Rangers’ history, while Ferguson’s own career needs no defending — his achievements across St Mirren, Aberdeen and Manchester United speak for themselves, and one rejected teenager from the 1970s does nothing to diminish that extraordinary body of work. If anything, the story has become one of Scottish football’s more charming footnotes: a reminder that even legendary judges of the game can occasionally get it wrong, and that McCoist, for his part, has never been shy about reminding Ferguson of exactly that whenever the opportunity arises.