Manager
After living in the United States for eight years, Ryan returned to England to take over as manager of the Luton Town reserve team. Following Luton's dismissal of Ray Harford in 1990, Ryan was promoted for an 18-month spell as manager, saving the club from relegation on the last day of two successive seasons. However, he was sacked at the end of the 1990–91 season and replaced by David Pleat. About a month later, Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson invited Ryan to return to the club as reserve team manager. He held the position until 2000, when he was promoted to coach the first-team. After assistant manager Brian Kidd left to manage Blackburn Rovers in December 1998, Ryan stood in as Ferguson's assistant until Steve McClaren's appointment in February 1999, even taking full charge of the side for their 3–2 defeat at home to Middlesbrough on 19 December 1998, which Ferguson missed in order to attend a funeral. Ryan was named as assistant manager again after McClaren left to manage Middlesbrough in 2001, but remained in the post for just one season until Carlos Queiroz took over. From 2002, he was named as the club's Director of Youth Football, a position he held until his retirement in June 2012.
Read more about this topic: Jimmy Ryan (footballer Born 1945)
Famous quotes containing the word manager:
“Nothing could his enemies do but it rebounded to his infinite advantage,—that is, to the advantage of his cause.... No theatrical manager could have arranged things so wisely to give effect to his behavior and words. And who, think you, was the manager? Who placed the slave-woman and her child, whom he stooped to kiss for a symbol, between his prison and the gallows?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I knew a gentleman who was so good a manager of his time that he would not even lose that small portion of it which the calls of nature obliged him to pass in the necessary-house, but gradually went through all the Latin poets in those moments. He bought, for example, a common edition of Horace, of which he tore off gradually a couple of pages, read them first, and then sent them down as a sacrifice to Cloacina: this was so much time fairly gained.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)