'I cried when Rangers wanted to get rid of me - there was too much pressure to succeed'

The 53-year-old moved to Rangers in 1993 for a British record transfer fee of £4 million, but played just 38 times for the club before moving to Everton, originally on loan, where he went on to become a club legend for the Toffees.

Ferguson, who now sports an Everton tattoo on his bicep, has opened up on his playing career, his affection for Walter Smith and why he feels his time at Ibrox didn’t work out in an eye-catching interview with the Stick To Football podcast.

“My move to Rangers was too early for me,” said Ferguson. “I wasn’t ready. 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 managers 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.

“There was a great man – Walter Smith – he pushed me. 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. He then became the Rangers manager, and that’s when he took me [to Rangers].”

Just 22-years-old at the time of his big-money switch to Rangers, the big Scottish striker conceded that his dream move” to Govan added too much pressure to his shoulders at a young, even admitting it made him feel like a “failure” when the club wanted to move him on just two years after his megabucks transfer.

“There was massive pressure on me to do well at Rangers and I felt it,” Ferguson told. “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.

‘Backed into a corner’

“It was tough for me, as a young lad, to walk away [from people starting on me]. If only ‘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’ve thrown my hat into the ring. I started crying my eyes out – I’ve 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.”

Duncan Ferguson was speaking on the Stick to Football podcast, brought to you by Sky Bet . The full podcast can be listened to here.