Sir Alex Ferguson(1941–)

Alexander Chapman Ferguson was born on 31 December 1941 in Govan, the shipbuilding district on the south bank of the Clyde, the son of a worker in the yards. He grew up in a Govan Road tenement in a hard, close, industrial Glasgow, served an apprenticeship as a toolmaker, became a shop steward and helped lead an apprentices' strike. The qualities that work bred into him, discipline, loyalty, an absolute refusal to be beaten, are the qualities the football world would later put a single word to: Ferguson.

He made his living first as a player, a quick and combative centre-forward, through the 1960s and into the 1970s with Queen's Park, St Johnstone, Dunfermline Athletic, Rangers, Falkirk and Ayr United. He scored prolifically at Dunfermline, finishing as the joint top scorer in the Scottish league in the 1965 to 1966 season with thirty-one goals. It was a respectable career. It was not the one that would carry the name down the century. That began when he stopped playing.

He took his first management job in 1974 at East Stirlingshire on next to no money, moved within months to St Mirren, rebuilt them around bold young players and won the Scottish First Division in 1977. In 1978 he took charge of Aberdeen. Scottish football in that era belonged almost entirely to the Old Firm of Glasgow, Celtic and Rangers; no club from outside the two had taken sustained control of the championship in a generation, and most of the game assumed none ever would again. Ferguson set out to break that hold, and broke it.

Aberdeen under Ferguson won the Scottish Premier Division in 1980, 1984 and 1985, took four Scottish Cups and the League Cup, and in 1983 produced one of the great European campaigns by a provincial club. They knocked out Bayern Munich with a famous Pittodrie comeback, and on 11 May 1983 in Gothenburg they beat Real Madrid two to one after extra time to lift the European Cup Winners' Cup, John Hewitt heading the winner. The European Super Cup against Hamburg followed months later. A team from the north-east of Scotland had become a winner of European silverware, and had done it by beating the most storied club in the world.

He turned down bigger names to do it, and when Jock Stein collapsed and died at the touchline after Scotland's match in Cardiff in September 1985, it was Ferguson who stepped in, steadied the national team and took Scotland to the 1986 World Cup in Mexico.

In November 1986 he crossed to Manchester United. It was, then, a fallen giant: a club of vast history and vast support that had not been champions of England since 1967, drifting in mid-table with a culture that had gone soft. Ferguson tore it down to the foundations and built it again, overhauling the youth system, the scouting, the training and the standards before the results came. The pressure on him in those early years was intense and very public. He answered it first with the FA Cup in 1990, then the European Cup Winners' Cup against Barcelona in 1991 and the League Cup in 1992.

Then the dam broke. In the 1992 to 1993 season, the first of the new Premier League, Manchester United were champions of England for the first time in twenty-six years. It was the first of thirteen English league titles Ferguson would win at the club. He won the Double of league and FA Cup in 1994 and again in 1996, the second time with a side built around a homegrown generation, Giggs, Scholes, Beckham, Butt and the Neville brothers, that a famous pundit had said you could win nothing with. They won everything with them.

The summit came in the 1998 to 1999 season. United took the Premier League on the final day, won the FA Cup, and on 26 May 1999 at the Camp Nou in Barcelona met Bayern Munich in the European Cup final a goal down with the match in injury time. Teddy Sheringham equalised; Ole Gunnar Solskjaer won it. League, cup and European Cup in a single season, a Treble no English club had ever achieved. Ferguson was knighted within weeks.

He did not stop, and the proof of his greatness is that he did it more than once with more than one team. Through the 2000s he rebuilt repeatedly and kept winning, and in the 2007 to 2008 season took a third great side to the Premier League title and a second Champions League, beating Chelsea in Moscow, adding the FIFA Club World Cup that December. He retired in May 2013 having won the league in his final season, his thirteenth at the club and his twenty-seventh in management.

No one in the history of British football has won more. Across Aberdeen and Manchester United, Sir Alex Ferguson assembled a record of trophies, longevity and serial reinvention that stands alone, and is held by many across the game to make him the greatest manager it has produced. The main stand at Old Trafford carries his name and his statue stands outside the ground. The Ferguson name, an old Scottish clan name carried out of a Govan tenement by a toolmaker's apprentice, became one of the most recognised in world sport, a byword for will, for endurance, and for the building of teams that win.