How will Utd cope without Fergie?

Critically, he used the time to overhaul the entire ethos and culture of the club, to develop a youth system that would bear unprecedented fruit.

Whichever way you choose to define sporting greatness, Ferguson -across almost 1,500 games at Manchester United and plenty more before his migration south - has constructed a case as incontestable as any coach in world sport.

At the end of a reign as sustained and successful as his, it can be easy to forget how hard-won the initial victories were, how unlikely the domination that followed.

Ferguson may have out-lasted prime ministers, popes and dictators while combining the charisma, drive and zeal of all three, but on 6 November 1986, his new club two decades without a league title, success of any sort required a seismic change.

If England at large was an unrecognisable place from now (a mobile phone was one with a long cord, a tablet something you took for high blood pressure), so too was football. On that autumn day, three of
the bottom four places in the First Division table were filled by Manchester United, Manchester City and Chelsea.

Everton would be champions, Liverpool were the dominant force. Oxford, Luton, Wimbledon and Coventry all sat comfortably above United in that league table.

Establishing United as champions in that landscape was an achievement many thought impossible. But it was in maintaining that success over the subsequent years that explains why Ferguson will retire with the epitaph of his country’s greatest ever manager.

There are the numbers: 1,498 games in charge, only 267 defeats; 527 Premier League games won - at least 161 more than any other manager; 13 league titles, five FA Cups, four League Cups and two Champions
Leagues. When he took the job 9,680 days ago, 17 players in United’s current squad had not even been born; by the time he left 1,146 other managers had been and gone from the top four divisions.

There are the immediate challengers seen off, the rivals who dared take away titles only to be subsequently overtaken themselves: Leeds, Blackburn, Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester City.

There is the consistency (in the last 22 seasons, United have never finished outside the top three and only three times outside top two), and then there is the constant revolution. By most pundits’ reckoning, Ferguson has now built six distinct teams, all of them championship winners.

It is a dominance with precious few parallels in modern sport. Empires come and go, some lasting longer than others, but all of them crumbling even as Ferguson was rebuilding again and again.
In the time he has been at Old Trafford, cricket has seen the hegemonies of the West Indies and Australia arrive and depart, Formula 1 the rise and fall of Williams, McLaren and Ferrari; rugby union four different champions in four World Cups.

Other great managers have dominated British football. Herbert Chapman took an unfancied Huddersfield side to three successive top-flight league titles before repeating that feat with Arsenal.
Bill Shankly rebuilt a club over 16 years, winning three league titles and two FA Cups before Bob Paisley extended the Liverpool empire with six league titles in nine years and three European Cups.

Sir Matt Busby preceded Sir Alex with 24 years, five league titles, two FA Cups and a European Cup. Brian Clough’s two European Cups at Nottingham Forest appear more alchemic with every passing year, while north of the border, Jock Stein not only guided Celtic to that remarkable nine successive Scottish League championships but also
made them the first British side to lift the European Cup.

Appetite for success
Ferguson first matched their achievements and then surpassed them.
“He never feels like he’s got to the top of the mountain,” explained former United stalwart Gary Neville. “He always feels he has to go further and higher.” What of coaches from outside these isles? Real Madrid’s legendary Miguel Munoz won nine La Liga titles, two Copa del Reys and the European Cup twice during his 14-year reign from
1960.

In just 11 years Ferguson’s great rival Jose Mourinho has bagged seven league titles in four different countries and two Champions Leagues; Pep Guardiola, another man who is surely not finished, has the same European successes and three Spanish titles.

These are titans of the game, magicians of the managerial world. Ferguson’s statistics transcend theirs all the same.