Sir Alex Ferguson: Red Alert

The Man Utd boss has seen off his critics many times before, but now his team is out of the Champions League and he has all but conceded the Premiership title to Arsenal. He's fallen out with his friends and has a new pacemaker. Could this be the beginning of the end of a glorious reign?

When it was announced on Friday that Sir Alex Ferguson has been fitted with a pacemaker he brushed aside any notion of infirmity. "Business as usual," he declared. Words that were meant to reassure Manchester United's supporters and pre-empt any fresh media speculation had, however, an unavoidably hollow ring.

In the context of Ferguson's towering achievements, these are not normal times at Old Trafford. Last week, Manchester United were eliminated from the Champions League by a moderate Porto side, failing for the first time in eight years to reach the quarter-finals, with a subsequent loss of millions in revenue. Domestically they remain in the FA Cup, where Arsenal bar their way to the final. But in the Premiership they have fallen so far behind the rampant north London club that Ferguson has privately conceded the title.

If the look on Ferguson's face following last week's failure conveyed a sense of shock, it seemed to be touched by the realisation that his grip may be weakening. The loss to Porto was symptomatic of Manchester United's failings this season, their disjointed play debilitating proof that the force is no longer with them. Last spring, Ferguson answered emboldened critics by bringing his team from behind to shatter Arsenal in the run-in for the Premiership title. Although Manchester United could not get past Real Madrid in the European Cup it appeared that the optimism and vitality that have been central to Ferguson's career in management, indeed coloured his life, were soaring again.

Events since then have taken many twists and turns. Ferguson's increasingly difficult relationship with David Beckham, whose commercial activities were seen as the source of a slump in club form, came to an end when the England captain was ushered off to Real Madrid. In the meantime, Ferguson had fallen out with his friends, the Irish racing moguls John Magnier and J P McManus, who had verbally gifted him a share in the horse Rock of Gibraltar but not, they claimed, 50 per cent of stud fees.

Despite the emergence of Magnier and McManus as major shareholders in Manchester United and their vast financial clout, Ferguson stubbornly stood his ground, instigating legal proceedings while the Irishmen in turn launched an investigation, calling for answers to 99 questions concerning transfer activity at Old Trafford. The matter has since been settled but the effect is clearly evident in Ferguson's hard-nosed refusal to meet other than standard media obligations. Where the Manchester United manager was approachable his relations with the press are now frequently subject to emotional disturbance.

Other factors have combined to induce a siege mentality in Ferguson; the loss of Rio Ferdinand to an eight-month suspension for failing to take a drug test came at a time when it appeared that a solid defence was in place. Then there is the physical decline of the team's driving force, Roy Keane, who has most vividly exemplified the principles behind Manchester United's many successes on the field. It hasn't helped, either, that some of Ferguson's more recent forays into the transfer market have called his judgement into question.

The football manager as deity is an ancient and trusted metaphor, mocking in tone, guaranteed to get a cackling response at corporate lunches and testimonial dinners. People don't cackle at Ferguson. He did not invent a new religion, but he did improve on an old one. It is called Winning.

Winning is what Ferguson is all about, and in the context of the football boom and the climate of the times it has made him one of the most acclaimed men in the history of the game. Since 1990, following two precarious seasons when it was said that he was kept in the job only by Bobby Charlton's boardroom influence, Ferguson has brought one success after another to the club. Under his stern guidance, Manchester United have had nine championship wins and four FA Cup wins; in 1999 they won the European Cup to complete a unique treble.

Ferguson has been a winner because he has been smarter than most of his competition, because he is an unyielding perfectionist and because he imposes his will on his players with the sheer force of his personality. Raised in the tough Govan district of Glasgow, the son of a shipyard worker from whom he inherited a commitment to socialism, Ferguson started his own working life as an apprentice toolmaker, later becoming a union activist. Beginning with Queen's Park in 1958, he turned out for five senior Scottish clubs, including his boyhood idols, Rangers. Although not naturally gifted, Ferguson made his way as an effective centre-forward with a reputation for being a hard and awkward opponent on the field, as well as off it.

Along with intelligence and quick-wittedness, that hardness served Ferguson well when he became manager of Aberdeen in 1978 after cutting his teeth with East Stirlingshire and St Mirren. It had relevance. With it, he won and he showed what it takes to keep winning, successfully challenging the duopoly of Celtic and Rangers in the league and bringing the European Cup Winner's Cup to Pittodrie in 1983. At first, Ferguson was not as esteemed as highly for his intellectual qualities as for his growling temper and demanding standards. There are thousands of coaches who growl; growling did not make Ferguson an outstanding manager. There are many managers who are disciplinarians and they are a pale imitation of him. Where Ferguson has beaten most of them is in the brains department.

Until this season Ferguson was seldom exposed to the public in a vulnerable position, where he was not in control of everything within a 10-mile radius; his legendary temper was an instrument that communicated fear, frustration, passion. Thus he became the big daddy and the players his children, whose only desire was to please him. When he announced his retirement two years ago, a decision reversed by the influence of his family, the team lost its way, as though fearful of what the future might bring.

With an income greater than any in world football, plans for an extension of Old Trafford's capacity to more than 70,000 and a playing staff that feeds the national teams of seven countries, Manchester United are hardly up against it. However, if this was meant to be a transitional season, one in which last summer's signings could be blended smoothly with existing strengths, Ferguson's optimism would not have allow-ed for the present accumulation of disappointment. It is not simply that Manchester United have given up too many points in the league and exited from the European Cup. Long before last week's loss to Porto their football had lacked the trademark verve of a Ferguson team. This had the effect of causing changes in personnel, from which not even the free-scoring Dutch striker Ruud van Nistelrooy was safe.

Nobody has argued more convincingly than Ferguson that respect and authority have to be earned, not enforced by binding contracts, that it takes hard work to win things. This exists beneath the tough exterior of his tougher words, the ranting at officialdom, his raging at ills, real and imagined. From the blank expression on Ferguson's face last week it seemed that he couldn't, or wouldn't, grasp the fact that Manchester United had suffered more than an unexpected defeat. At 62, he may have sensed a loss of faith. Perhaps the end of an era.