Sir Alex Ferguson celebrates European success with United in 1999

THE grieving over Sir Alex Ferguson's retreat from the coalface will be most keenly felt at Manchester United but it turned the whole of football into a community of mourners. Not for nothing did Sky Sports News clear the decks yesterday, converting itself into a gushing channel of rolling adulation. Ferguson has been the daddy of the Sky football generation and the station duly converted itself into an outlet for worship. They had reporters standing outside Old Trafford, outside Carrington, outside everywhere. By tea-time they were showing a montage of Ferguson that they had set to opera music. When Geoff Shreeves came into the studio he wore a black tie.

English football will roll on but it is about to enter a new era. Year zero, after Fergie. The day there was change in the United dug-out would always amount to a punctuation mark for the whole of the game and yesterday it arrived. It was as if the entire Barclays Premier League did not quite know what to do with itself, shaken out of its unchanging comfort zone like a driver whose car has veered on to the pavement.

How to react? Supporters have become uninhibited with their emotions in recent years but yesterday was not a day for laying wreaths or tying scarves to the gates. Everyone talked about Ferguson without knowing exactly how to process the fact that he's off. Here was a man who kept clocking in after they had knighted him, after they had named a stand after him, after they had built a statue of him outside Old Trafford. All the while he kept on tapping his watch, shouting at referees, shooting out of his seat in celebration of another United goal. Only a couple of months ago he pushed his kit man out of the way to get from the dug-out to the trackside to explode about a United player being sent off. At 71, Ferguson is still a manager on full throttle.

He gave St Mirren one trophy, Aberdeen 10, and United 38. Okay but, to paraphrase The Life of Brian, what did he ever do for the rest of us? Well, where to start? He expanded the game's entire lexicon, for one thing. Who springs to mind when anyone talks of a team building a "siege mentality", or using "mind games"? He is the one who came up with "squeaky-bum time", "noisy neighbours" and "football, bloody hell". He is synonymous with hairdryers and chewing gum and flying boots and "Fergie time". He knocked Liverpool off their f****** perch. Even "you can't win anything with kids" was directed at him. He did, of course.

His feats at United ensured he was woven into the tapestry alongside the aristocracy of Scottish managers: Sir Matt Busby, Bill Shankly and Jock Stein. Over time he eclipsed them all, although he would modestly claim that each was greater than him. He was mentored and inspired by Stein, invited him to Gothenburg for Aberdeen's finest moment, served under him with Scotland and was a devastated witness to his death during a World Cup tie in Cardiff in 1985.

He served under United club president Busby for seven years, knowing the delicious satisfaction of delivering the club's first league title in 26 years while Old Trafford's grandee was still around to witness and enjoy it. Ferguson first took his place in a dug-out for East Stirlingshire in August 1974, the very month that Shankly led out a Liverpool team for the final time. His connections with Stein and Busby were intimate but he was just as tied to Shankly in terms of maintaining a bloodline of working-class Scotsmen who grew into figures of genuine managerial excellence. Their background was coalmining, his was shipbuilding. He is the only manager to win all the major trophies in Scotland and England, just one of his umpteen distinctions.

The caricature always will be the explosive, angry Scot, a touchline Taggart ranting and raving against anyone with the audacity to oppose him or his team. Of course he ruled by fear, although that aspect diminished as he became relentlessly successful with young, multi-millionaire players who had to be manipulated and controlled through more sophisticated techniques. His man-management was generally brilliant. Ferguson's own DNA remained unchanged: hard, confrontational, brave and insatiably competitive. The breadth of his intelligence and his uncanny photographic memory were qualities which tended to be overlooked, as is the physical stamina which has allowed him to control all aspects of running arguably the world's biggest club into his seventies.

What he did with Aberdeen was a career in itself, overthrowing the Old Firm to haul the Scottish football power base to the north-east. Aberdeen won more trophies in eight years under Ferguson than they have in their other 102 without him. Pound-for-pound, beating Real Madrid in 1983 could never be eclipsed by any triumph at United.

Poor old St Mirren bear the stigma of being the club that sacked him. Chairman Willie Todd carried the can for that but it had been a unanimous decision by their board in 1978. The following day he got the Aberdeen job, meaning he has effectively been in continual managerial employment since he started almost 39 years ago. When he claimed unfair dismissal by St Mirren he lost the case and the written tribunal findings described him as a good team boss but a bad general manager of day-to-day club affairs and "petty, immature, possessing neither by experience nor talent any managerial ability".

After the majesty of Aberdeen there was a spell of initial discomfort at United, remembered almost for its comic value these days. In 1989 the Red Issue fanzine asked: "When is Mr Ferguson going to realise that he doesn't know what he is doing and return to that quiet backwater, Aberdeen?" A fan's message scrawled on a bed sheet at a game said: "3 years of excuses and it's still crap-Ta-ra Fergie". After a 5-1 humiliation against Manchester City in 1989 there were "Fergie out" chants. Nottingham Forest fans chanted "Fergie, Fergie on the dole" when United turned up for an FA Cup tie. They had finished 11th, second, 11th and 13th between his arrival and 1990, but they won at Forest that day, went on to lift the cup, won the European Cup-Winners' Cup the following season, the League Cup a year later and then – to open the floodgates – the first of his 13 league titles in 1993.

By then the scouting was better, the youth coaching was better, the facilities were better, the discipline was better, the fitness was better, the attitude was better, the organisation was better and the players were better. All of it was down to Ferguson. If United were a vast, floundering oil tanker, he turned them around and set them on a new course.

His teams have been entertaining and stylish. They have played attacking, fast, powerful, aggressive football, true to United's traditions. He wanted width and wingers and forceful goalscoring midfielders. When possible he built teams around commanding individual leaders: Willie Miller, Bryan Robson, Roy Keane, Eric Cantona, Rio Ferdinand, Nemanja Vidic, Gary Neville.

By 2013 he had tried to win the Champions League 19 times, doing so twice and losing two other finals. United were sometimes eliminated by teams they ought to have seen off – Galatasaray, Monaco and Bayer Levekusen – and occasionally failed to get past the group stage. He got his hands on the European Cup in 1999 with that impossibly dramatic late turnaround against Bayern Munich and became the only Scottish manager to win it twice by defeating Chelsea in 2008. The lack of further wins left him unfulfilled.

Year after year at the summit meant he was eventually recognised for an entirely new quality: his ability to evolve and cope with the waves of fresh and different challenges which lapped at the Old Trafford gates from Liverpool, Arsenal, Newcastle United, Chelsea and Manchester City. He saw off George Graham, Kenny Dalglish, Arsene Wenger, Kevin Keegan, Gerard Houllier, Jose Mourinho, Rafa Benitez, Carlo Ancelotti and Roberto Mancini, plus dozens of others besides.

He has dealt with the emergence and influence of agents, Bosman, pop culture, celebrity, commercialisation and Posh Spice. Football has changed in his lifetime and he has changed with it, preserving his control not only over United but all English football.

Over the years Falkirk, Sheffield United, Wolves, Rangers, Arsenal, Tottenham, Barcelona, Inter Milan, Real Madrid, Monaco, Republic of Ireland and England were among those who made attempts to employ him but he served only East Stirlingshire, St Mirren, Aberdeen, United and – for the 10 games after Stein's death, including the 1986 World Cup finals – Scotland. His four clubs can say they had the greatest manager there has ever been.

At East Stirlingshire he told the players the local Falkirk paper was against them. In Paisley he took to the streets with a loudhailer to implore folk to come and watch his team. At Aberdeen he kept a record of how often Glasgow-based journalists deigned to travel north to see his side. People responded: every club he managed experienced big increases in attendances. United averaged 46,000 the season before he came; now they get 75,000.

In Manchester he soon went nose-to-nose with the benchmark club of the day: Liverpool. At the start of his second full season he said: "This isn't just a job to me, it's a mission. We will get there, believe me. And when it happens life will change for Liverpool and everybody else. Dramatically." He was true to his word. Ferguson was still in his 40s the last time Liverpool won a title.

Life changed for everybody again shortly after 9am yesterday with confirmation that for once the "Fergie's going" rumours were true. In the end no-one knocked him off his perch. He stepped down as the manager of the champions, the master of everything, including timing.