SOUTHAMPTON’S success reflected well on me as the manager.

It resulted in a number of job offers which, apart from one, never made it into the newspapers or the boardroom. They included approaches and offers from Everton, Leeds United and my boyhood favourites Newcastle United.

Arsenal also contacted me but that approach reached the ears of my chairman George Reader. It was a tentative approach from Arsenal that I dismissed as too tentative to consider until I received a call one evening from our chairman.

The old boy could be quite gruff when he wanted or needed to be.

“Manager,” he said. “Talk about Arsenal.”

I was shocked he knew I had been contacted, though I should not have been. I pretended to know nothing and that is almost true.

The chairman added: “If we don’t want you to go, they’ll never take you.”

He was telling me there was a special relationship between Southampton and Arsenal through directors like our chairman and extraordinarily well-connected directors such as Sir George Meyrick.

Ipswich Town were also life members of the three-club clique with their boardroom friendships.

Arsenal never developed beyond the one distant contact and the warning call from Mr Reader.

The Newcastle approach came directly through the club’s chairman Lord Westwood who was blind in an eye he covered with a black patch. I am told by a friend that during one desperately poor performance from Newcastle my mate looked towards the directors box to see Lord Westwood switch the patch from his good eye to the bad. Unlikely? Not if you knew his Lordship, who was a great character.

He wanted me and offered me the job to replace Gordon Lee. I thanked Lord Westwood and said no. It was down to timing. There is no way I could seriously discuss moving from Southampton when Lord Westwood’s approach came between our FA Cup semi final and the final in April 1976.

Manny Cussins, the chairman of Leeds United, tracked me down to California where we were on holiday with another family. His call came through to our hotel with a definite request to join him at Elland Road.

Everton sent a representative of the board run by John Moores Senior of the pools company. The man Moores sent was a stranger to me. He found my address, knocked on my door and was matter-of-fact in his approach and polite in the extreme.

“Can I ask you a question, straight to the point?” he asked. “Would you be interested in taking over as manager of Everton Football Club?”

Each positive contact I considered and on each occasion decided I had a satisfying job. I was happy and my family was happy so why should I leave? What would the benefits be? We were better than them and continuing to progress. Three were genuine up front offers (Arsenal’s was a half-try) and all were declined.

These contacts have never been made public. Why should they have been?

The one approach and offer that made the headlines was the one I received from Manchester United in 1981.

Martin Edwards made contact by phone on behalf of the club and offered me the job.

They Southampton directors were determined to keep me. They threw the fact at me that I was under contract and then those ‘benign’ olde-worlde gentlemen directors reiterated that I had to continue as manager of Southampton FC. They expected me to honour my contract. No messing.

In 30 years they had to deal with two managers, Ted Bates and myself. They were not easily swayed by insubordination.

They looked after you so you must look after them. That was their creed. They saw all the talk about Old Trafford as an aggravation they did not need and would not tolerate.

I did not have to be educated on how big a club United were, massive compared to any I had been involved with. Sheffield Wednesday was big when I joined them in the Sixties but United was an institution.

That meant the manager would have so many things other than pure football matters to contend with. I thought I could have handled that despite it being the hardest aspect of the job, the one managers found most difficult to cope with.

For me it would also have meant uprooting the family but that comes with the job. We were used to so many moves in a relatively short space of time from Gateshead to Sheffield to Doncaster, Grimsby and Southampton.

Potential trauma At that stage our elder son Chris would have been 19 and while the others were not babies it would have meant a huge amount of organisation for Anne, Sean and Alison.

The security of my family and their rights as youngsters in the middle of their education – the potential trauma involved in changing school – was an important factor in my decision.

I never talked money with Martin. I assumed money would not be a problem. It would have been the best of everything.

That is the way the club is and continues to be.

It was a family thing. I did not want to put the children through what would be a dramatic change at the very time they needed stability and both Anne and myself as a presence in their lives.

I was proved right when I later foolishly left Southampton for Sunderland, a move that had a serious effect on my family.

I agree that managing United could have been the highlight, the pinnacle, the peak of a career if you had been successful – and you would have to have been that.

I could have taken the family to Manchester overnight and stayed in the best hotel suites or a rented house. That was not the problem. It was the effect on your family life of moving on after being in one place for eight years. We had formed friendships as a family and living on the south coast is a bit different.

It was not fear of the job; I wasn’t chickening out.

I understand the question remains; can a football person turn down Manchester United?

You would have to say only one in a hundred would. But I didn’t need United to satisfy my ambitions.

As I saw it I could continue successfully at Southampton.

We were a top six club dabbling in Europe and I felt we were good enough to hit the heights.

Ted Bates, wily fox that he was, put it in perspective for me. He asked if I could achieve with United that I couldn’t at Southampton.

He said I would get greater satisfaction from winning the league with Southampton than I would with United. While people may laugh at the assertion now, it should be remembered we did finish second in the league while I was at Southampton.

What he said struck a nerve; it made sense.

The consolation I had in turning them down was that each year after that we finished higher up the league than Manchester United, having beaten them at Wembley.

As a professional do I regret it?

Well, I wonder how far I could have taken them.’

Lawrie McMenemy A Lifetime's Obsession My Autobiography, RRP £18.99, Trinity Mirror Sport Media. On sale now from Amazon http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1910335282/ref=s9_simh_gw_g14_i1_r?pf_rd_m=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE&pf_rd_s=desktop-2&pf_rd_r=0DT7RNDBE69NKVHSYE14&pf_rd_t=36701&pf_rd_p=867551807&pf_rd_i=desktop

Meet Lawrie McMenemy at St Mary's Megastore on Saturday (9 April) at 11.30am signing his new book.