Duncan Ferguson admits his dream move to Rangers arrived too soon — and the scars of his Ibrox struggles stayed with him throughout a fiery career that would see him earn a share of the English Premier League’s unwanted red card record.
The former Everton and Newcastle striker was speaking on The Overlap, where he reflected candidly on the early career pressures, growing pains, and street-fighting mentality that shaped his time at Rangers — and beyond.
“There’s a few red cards between us,” Ferguson joked, when asked about his disciplinary record. “I don’t like joking about it but I got eight.”
The towering Scot shares the Premier League’s all-time red card record with Patrick Vieira and Richard Dunne, a tally that was sealed by his infamous clash with Wigan Athletic's Pascal Chimbonda — an incident that landed him a seven-match suspension.
But for Ferguson, the root of that edge lay in his struggles at Ibrox, where the weight of expectation and the glare of the spotlight proved overwhelming for a young forward still finding his feet.
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Ferguson, who joined Rangers under Walter Smith in 1993 from Dundee United for a then Scottish record fee of £4million, confessed the switch came too soon for him.
“My move to Rangers was too early for me, as I wasn’t ready,” he admitted. “There were a lot of great players at Rangers at the time, and I wanted to move from Dundee United as I had problems with the manager and was always getting fined. I was always skint, I had nothing.
“I was getting fined for daft things. I’d take the manager’s car as he’d told me to wash it, so I used to take it and drive it into a car wash — and next thing you know, there are four or five of us in the car driving around Dundee. The police would stop us, it was nuts. That's what we did.”
Ferguson’s reputation as a street-wise, tough-tackling centre-forward would become his trademark — but at Ibrox, he felt the strain of expectation.
“There was massive pressure on me to do well at Rangers and I felt it,” he revealed. “I was getting terrible stick for it. I had minders everywhere I went — whether I went to Stirling or Glasgow — I had to have people with me. I was a young guy who’d come good, from a local area, so people didn’t want to see me happy, they wanted a shot at me.
“It was tough for me, as a young lad, to walk away [from confrontations]. If only I’d just walked away, but sometimes you get backed into a corner and you’ve got to come out swinging. I did that a few times. Between 17 and 19-years-old, I had three or four assaults against me.”
“I was called in at Rangers and told that Everton were up and that they’d thrown my hat into the ring,” he said. “I started crying my eyes out – I’d failed. I got my big dream move and I failed at the end of the day.
“Everton were in the Premier League, which had just begun, and the daft thing is, I knew a lot of Scottish players had played for them, but they played in blue, which I liked, so I went to Everton. And that was it, I got my move to Everton.”
Long before his Rangers chapter, Ferguson was spotted as a teenager by Smith — then assistant to Jim McLean at Dundee United — who quickly identified the raw potential lurking beneath his lanky frame.
“There was a great man – Walter Smith – he pushed me," Ferguson recalled. " He was at Dundee United as an assistant at the time. He spotted that – he said, ‘Who’s that big skinny kid on the left?’ And it was me. He only took 15 minutes to spot me and that’s when I went up to Dundee United, but then Walter moved to Rangers under Graeme Souness, so I missed Walter.
“Walter then became the Rangers manager, and that’s when he took me [to Rangers].
"From about 15/16, I started to grow taller. Nobody fancied me as a player that was going to kick on – I was slow and thin – and behind everybody else. It wasn’t until I got to 17/18/19, I started to fill out. The testosterone started to kick in! I had no hairs on my body until I was 18. I was a late developer but then I kicked on a wee bit. I got a bit of pace and my man strength."
