I saw Sir Alex Ferguson's Man United hairdryer treatment make Cristiano Ronaldo cry - 'You think you’re a superstar'

Rio Ferdinand has revealed that Sir Alex Ferguson's legendary hairdryer treatment left Cristiano Ronaldo in tears.

Fergie's rollickings at underperforming stars became a thing of legend, with plenty of footballing icons finding themselves on the receiving end - in David Beckham's case quite literally, as a boot was infamously kicked at the future England captain. And speaking in a preview clip for the BBC documentary Sir Alex, which airs on Boxing Day, Fergie's former skipper at Old Trafford, Rio Ferdinand, has spoken about a young Cristiano Ronaldo finding himself feeling the full force of the manager's fury.

The Portuguese superstar joined United from Sporting Lisbon as an 18-year-old in 2003, but it took him time to settle - and Fergie was keen to stamp out any issues with the forward's ego at an early stage. Speaking in the BBC documentary, Ferdinand explained: "We’d been to Portugal and played a couple of games and Cristiano hadn’t played well. He was young and tried too hard, I remember that we played Benfica and the manager ripped into Cristiano. He said ‘who do you think you are’ and told him ‘you’re coming here trying to prove everybody who you think you are, you think that you’re a superstar’.

"I remember Cristiano in tears in the changing room. And I was like woah, this manager doesn’t care who you are. But then you look at the player that Cristiano became. He needed moments like that, and the manager knew that he could be soft and nice with him. But that he had to be hard with him as well to get him to where he got to, as the world’s best player."

Fergie's relationship with the Portugal star was a special one, with Ronaldo telling United's website in 2021: "There were so many beautiful moments that we had