Barry Ferguson
Barry Ferguson is a Scottish football coach, former player and pundit who was most recently manager of Scottish Premiership club Rangers.
Ferguson spent most of his playing career at Rangers, in two spells either side of a £7.5 million transfer to English club Blackburn Rovers. He totalled 431 games and 60 goals for Rangers, whom he captained between 2000 and 2003 and again between 2005 and 2009. Ferguson won the Scottish Premier League, Scottish Cup and Scottish League Cup five times apiece for Rangers, including a treble in 2003, which earned him the honour of SFWA Footballer of the Year. He also helped Rangers to reach the 2008 UEFA Cup final.
Ferguson made 45 appearances for the Scotland national team, starting from 1998. In 2009, following behavioural incidents while on national duty, he was stripped of the captaincy of Rangers and told he would no longer be considered for international selection.
Later in his career, he returned to England with Birmingham City, Blackpool and Fleetwood Town. Towards the end of his playing spell with Blackpool, he served as caretaker manager of the club. Ferguson was appointed player-manager of Clyde in June 2014; he resigned from this position in February 2017. He became manager of Kelty Hearts in October 2018, and he left them in May 2021 after guiding them to promotion to the SPFL for the first time. Ferguson then became manager of Alloa Athletic soon after, but left the club on 14 February after a run of one win in eleven games. In February 2025, he was appointed interim head coach of Rangers.
Early life
Born in Hamilton into a Rangers-supporting family, Ferguson's older brother Derek played for the club in the same midfield position in the 1980s, with the younger sibling often being invited behind the scenes at Ibrox Stadium as a child.Around the age of 8 he began playing for Mill United in Hamilton. In his early teens, although highly rated, he made it into the last thirty or so candidates for the Scotland Schoolboys squad at trials in Largs only to be rejected due to his stature.
Having trained with Rangers since 1991, Ferguson signed a professional contract upon finishing his education at Brannock High School in 1994. Aside from his brother, Ferguson's idol was Ian Durrant, who was still an important player when he joined the club.
Playing career
Club
Rangers (first spell)
Ferguson was promoted to the first-team squad for the 1996–97 season. He made his debut on the last day of that season against Hearts on 10 May 1997. He made a number of sporadic appearances the following season under manager Walter Smith's policy of easing him into the first team.Ferguson became a regular fixture in the first team during the 1998–99 season under new manager Dick Advocaat. The Dutchman soon secured Ferguson on a long-term contract as he became an important member of the squad. He scored his first career goal in a League Cup match against Alloa Athletic on 18 August 1998, and played against his brother on three occasions during that season when Rangers faced Dunfermline Athletic, with a 20-year-old Ferguson scoring his first league goal in the match at East End Park. His brother, then 31 years old, made his last appearance at Ibrox in the reverse fixture. Injury prevented him from being involved in the 1998–99 season run-in as the club achieved the treble; Ferguson watched the 1999 Scottish Cup final from the stands as Rangers won by a single goal, scored by Rod Wallace three minutes into the second half.
Ferguson was so influential the following season that he was given an extended six-year deal at Rangers in October 1999. He was named the Scottish Football Writers' Association Footballer of the Year for 1999–2000, a season in which Rangers retained the Premier League and Scottish Cup, beating Aberdeen in the final.
Ferguson received minor facial injuries after engaging in a drunken hotel brawl following a 6–2 defeat to Celtic in August 2000. After being sent off in the match, he had made obscene gestures to the crowd and then went drinking in Bothwell in his club tracksuit. When the club crashed out of the UEFA Champions League group stage at the hands of AS Monaco, largely because of a mistake by captain Lorenzo Amoruso, the Italian was stripped of the captaincy and it instead went to the 22-year-old Ferguson. An incident in which two bags of ice were thrown at the Celtic dug-out during a 2–0 defeat at Ibrox in September 2001 was attributed to Ferguson, who was criticised for his petulance and immaturity. Celtic manager Martin O'Neill played down the incident, saying he thought the ice had been thrown by his club's doctor. The young Ferguson went on to successfully guide his team to a League Cup and Scottish Cup later that season under manager Alex McLeish, who had replaced Advocaat in December 2001. In the latter final, another Old Firm clash, Ferguson tied the score at 2–2 with a free kick.
During their second season together, 2002–03, Ferguson captained the side to a domestic treble. After scoring 18 goals from midfield, he also won Scottish Football Writers' Association Footballer of the Year and Scottish PFA Players' Player of the Year.
Blackburn Rovers
On 29 August 2003, Ferguson joined Premier League club Blackburn Rovers for a fee of £7.5 million. With Everton also chasing Ferguson, Rangers had initially denied that he was leaving. He made his Blackburn debut in a Premier League match against Liverpool on 19 September at Ewood Park, and scored his first goal against the same team, also at Ewood Park, during a League Cup match on 29 October.Graeme Souness made Ferguson captain of Blackburn in July 2004 and he seemed to be adapting well to Premiership football, despite the team still struggling and a managerial change, which saw Mark Hughes replacing Souness. However, after 16 months at the club, including a lengthy period out through injury after fracturing his kneecap in a Premiership match against Newcastle United, during the January 2005 transfer window, Ferguson submitted a written transfer request, admitting that the draw of playing in the Premiership and a Lancashire derby could not compare with an Old Firm match, nor could the team's desire to win be matched.
Rangers (second spell)
After much discussion between the clubs, a fee of £4.5 million was agreed and Ferguson rejoined Rangers just before the close of the transfer window. Ferguson later said that the fee Rangers paid was actually £100,000 plus the fees Blackburn owed from the original transfer. Ferguson's second debut for Rangers came in a League Cup semi-final victory over Dundee United. He was a 69th-minute substitute for Alex Rae during the 7–1 win. His first goal after his return was the opening goal in a 1–1 draw against Inverness CT on 5 March 2005. Ferguson played in the 2005 Scottish League Cup final and was part of the Rangers team that won the league title on the last day of the season.Image:Barcelona vs Rangers.jpg|thumb|Ferguson playing for Rangers against Barcelona in a UEFA Champions League match in 2007
At the start of the 2005–06 season, manager Alex McLeish re-appointed Ferguson as club captain. McLeish had not wanted to remove the captaincy mid-season from Fernando Ricksen. Ferguson played the latter part of the season carrying an ankle injury as Rangers ended up in a third-place finish in the Premier League. At the end of the season, Ferguson revealed that he had snapped ligaments and confessed that he should have undergone the surgery sooner.
After an incident in the dressing room at Caledonian Stadium, Inverness, on 27 December 2006, it was announced on BBC Radio Scotland's New Year's Day broadcast of Sportsound that Ferguson had been stripped of the Rangers captaincy after a meeting with then manager Paul Le Guen. He was also dropped from the squad for the next match. Later Le Guen claimed Ferguson was undermining him. "I'll go on record as saying I never had one bust-up with him, never had one argument with him. I don't know where all this comes from," explained Ferguson eleven years later. "No disrespect to Inverness Caley – they had good players, no doubt – but we're Rangers here. We were dropping points against teams that we should be beating. So, I let it out a wee bit. There was no arguments, nothing in the dressing room. After I had said that, we flew back down to Glasgow. We were playing Motherwell next, I think, and I came in the day of, or the day before, the Motherwell game. I came in, put my bag down, Yves Colleu, who was the assistant manager, comes in and says, 'Paul wants to speak to you'. I went into his office and went to sit down, and said, 'Don't sit down. That's you finished; you won't play with Rangers again.'"
The match at Motherwell was won 1–0 by Rangers, and goalscorer Kris Boyd reportedly showed solidarity with the deposed skipper by holding up six fingers, in reference to Ferguson's shirt number. Following the resignation of Le Guen as manager on 4 January, Ferguson was re-instated to the Rangers side by caretaker manager Ian Durrant and was also re-appointed as captain. Later that year, sports journalist Graham Spiers published Paul Le Guen: Enigma, documenting his tenure at the club. According to Spiers, Le Guen left because he was being "undermined" by other Rangers personnel, including Ferguson and then club doctor, Ian McGuinness.
The 2007–08 season began with Ferguson scoring twice in the first SPL match against Inverness. His scoring form continued and he netted the second in a 3–0 win over rivals Celtic, as well as in the UEFA Champions League against VfB Stuttgart. The Old Firm goal was Ferguson's first against Celtic since the 2002 Scottish Cup Final.
In January 2008, he scored a controversial goal in Rangers' 2007–08 Scottish League Cup semi-final win against Hearts. He later admitted to handling the ball in the buildup to the goal but that the infringement was unintentional. Rangers went on to win both the League Cup final and the Scottish Cup final.
On 14 May 2008, Ferguson made his 400th appearance for Rangers in the UEFA Cup Final against Zenit Saint Petersburg at the City of Manchester Stadium; he captained the side to a 2–0 defeat.
The summer of 2008 saw Ferguson undergo an operation on a fresh injury problem that would see him ruled out until early November; the injury was not the same one that plagued him towards the end of the season prior. He returned to the first team on 1 November in a 5–0 league win over Inverness at Ibrox.
In April 2009, after an extended hotel drinking session with Rangers teammate Allan McGregor after Scotland's defeat to the Netherlands, followed by both players making inappropriate gestures while on the bench during the next match against Iceland, Ferguson was stripped of the captain's armband for both club and country. He recovered from this setback to help Rangers win the 2009 Scottish Cup Final against Falkirk. Rangers also won the SPL title but missed out on another treble with a defeat in the 2009 Scottish League Cup Final.
Ferguson was inducted into the Rangers F.C. Hall of Fame in 2004 at the age of 26.