“Don’t expect to recognise me from those pictures on the pitch 30 years ago,” Michael Knighton advises on the telephone before our meeting in a Pennines hotel. “I’m an OAP now. You’ll be looking for a fat, balding little man in his late 60s.”

In the event there are no problems with identification. Oddly enough, no one else in the Yorkshire village happens to be dressed in immaculate three-piece suit, collar and tie. Knighton will always be recognisable anyway, because the manner in which he introduced himself at Old Trafford provided an image just as iconic and easily recalled as anything else from the turbulent and eventful year of 1989.

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Knighton still has no regrets about that day, even though the subsequent collapse of his takeover left him open to a degree of ridicule. “I think I have generally been perceived as a charlatan or a circus act, someone who didn’t have the money when it mattered,” he says. “To which I would reply: ‘Why on earth would anyone like that be accepted as a director of the club?’”

It is because one of his grandchildren found the footage on the internet and asked if he was really “that football man” that Knighton agreed to a longstanding pledge to allow a particular writer to tell his side of the story. The result is a book, Visionary, by Phillip Vine which might be a little hagiographic and uncorroborated for some tastes – the author suggests the brief working relationship between his subject and Alex Ferguson laid the foundation for the vast Manchester United trophy haul that would follow and at one point describes Knighton as Mozart to Martin Edwards’s Salieri – though there can be little doubt now that the title is bang on the money.

Like it or not, visionary is exactly what Knighton was in 1989, even in a borrowed United kit performing keepie-uppies on the pitch.

No one else had the gumption to work out that the most famous club in England could be bought for a mere £20m – £10m for Edwards’ controlling shares and another £10m for the necessary Stretford End rejuvenation the club was fretting about being able to afford – and few others shared his breezy confidence that the United brand could be put to work to soon make those sort of sums look like chicken feed.

In 1989, no one was in the habit of referring to football clubs as brands, and that was where Knighton was years ahead of his time. The hinge that allowed the beached-whale United of the 1970s and 1980s to turn into the financial juggernaut of today was not actually Ferguson’s arrival from Scotland, it was the intervention of a former schoolmaster turned property developer who showed the club how it ought to be making money.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Michael Knighton juggles a ball at Old Trafford on 19 August 1989. Photograph: PA

“I think history has proved without question that in 1989 I knew what the future held for the whole industry, not just Manchester United,” Knighton says. “Everyone I talked to back then was sceptical about satellite television but I knew it would be a gamechanger. I could see that football, and particularly English football, would soon be worth billions as a global product.

“It seemed obvious to me to get hold of one of the greatest brands in the sector would be like owning a gold mine, but at the time I was pretty much alone in that view. The Financial Times asked me why I was buying a club that had just announced a loss of £1.3m and was only turning over £7m a year. I said I was buying potential, that I thought it should be possible to turn United into the world’s wealthiest club.”

The twist in the Knighton story is he did not derive any personal wealth from seeing the future so clearly. Edwards went from a perennial overdraft to the Sunday Times Rich List once he was allowed to keep hold of his shares. United make so much money these days they can even afford to service the monstrous debt incurred by the Glazer family’s buyout, yet after a few years on the Old Trafford board Knighton has watched the transformation from the sidelines, faintly irritated by the popular assumption that in 1989 he was a chancer without the wherewithal to fund his big ideas.

Does he now get a glow of righteous satisfaction each time United announce a new noodle partner or mattress tie-in? “It’s fine to make money but it needs to be spent wisely,” he says. “I would currently question the executive team, because I don’t think an accountant should be running a football club. I would rather have a football man, someone who understands the game and knows everything about it. Ed Woodward is paying himself £4m a year and I think anyone doing that needs to be pretty switched on.

“The finances might be in good shape but the team is underachieving again on the pitch. Since Alex left it has been a bit of a disaster, and they need to get this right quite quickly or they will never catch up with the likes of [Manchester] City, Liverpool and Chelsea. In terms of results United are pretty much back where they were when I came along.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Michael Knighton says: ‘I would have liked a more public acknowledgment that I did in fact have the funds to buy the club.’ Photograph: Gary Calton/The Guardian

The obvious question to ask is whether, knowing what he does now, Knighton would have done anything differently 30 years ago. “I have thought about that a lot,” he says, with a pause for comic understatement. “If you had asked me 20 years ago I would have said no, because I was reasonably happy with the way things turned out. I didn’t have to own the club, after all, I just wanted to show a way forward and I was quite content when I was invited to join the board.

“I have subsequently heard directors admit they followed my blueprint for commercial success almost to the letter, and that gives me a certain satisfaction, though I think it could have been said a bit louder and I would also have liked a more public acknowledgment I did in fact have the funds to buy the club.

“That is provable – in addition to my own money I was given a facility of up to £24m by the Bank of Scotland – though it suited everyone at the time to portray me as the fall guy. Thinking about it now, I accept I probably made a mistake. I could have got the club for £10m and I had a watertight contract with no escape routes whatsoever. I should never have handed it back.”

The reasons why Knighton surrendered the deal of the century are quite complex but he confesses he probably needed to be more ruthless in driving it through. “I was only 37 at the time, I had never had a media profile before and suddenly I was being vilified in the national press on a daily basis,” he says.

“The Daily Mirror was particularly brutal, because Robert Maxwell had been unsuccessful with a takeover bid of his own. The United directors did everything they could to disrupt the process as soon as it became public, because apart from their own ambitions to own the club it was about to become clear they had no idea of the value of the asset they were sitting on.

Martin Edwards certainly didn’t. He was delighted when I agreed to pay £20 per share [the going rate at the time being around £6] but I would have happily agreed to anything up to £80. It all became quite unpleasant very quickly and I could see the club was being damaged.

“The money did not matter to me so much; I was already quite wealthy and I had not gone into United for personal gain. I just thought I had a few bright ideas that might be of use, I did not want to be seen as the bad guy, so I did what I thought was the best thing for everyone and accepted a compromise. Some ideas are just a little bit too far ahead of their time. This one caused panic within Manchester United.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Michael Knighton greets Manchester United fans at Derby on 26 August 1989. Photograph: Colorsport/Shutterstock

If that all makes Knighton sound too saintly to be true, consider what he says his response was to pleas from Philip Green to sell on his contract, so that the Arcadia group owner could hawk it around for further profit. He says that would have been perfectly possible, and Green offered £17m to get his hands on the £10m contract that had been signed with Edwards, but Knighton considered it a dishonourable way out.

“I told Philip I wasn’t in it for the money,” Knighton recalls. “He told me, and I have witnesses, that everyone is in it for the effing money. I didn’t want to go down that route, but that £7m clear profit would have been worth close to £50m in today’s money and I would not have had to shell out a single halfpenny. What saddens me a little is that had I done that deal I would have been hailed in the City of London as a masterful entrepreneur, a deal-maker extraordinaire, because that’s how it operates.

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“I think a lot of people would have taken the money, but not Michael Knighton. I am a football fan first and foremost – that was the whole point of the stunt on the pitch. There was a huge disconnect between the United boardroom and the terraces at the time and I wanted to show the supporters I was one of them. Just a working-class football lover who happened to have made a bob or two in business.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Phillip Vine’s book Visionary is out now. Photograph: Pitch Publishing

Knighton might have been better owning United than joining its board, since he soon found himself out of sync with the attitudes of the big five clubs towards the incipient Premier League. “It was clear from the boardroom chat at that level that the top clubs wanted all of the cake to themselves, they weren’t bothered in the slightest about what they called the rump, the 80 or so clubs they believed no one was interested in watching,” he explains. “As a football purist that offended me, because I felt those clubs were community assets that deserved a share of the wealth being created. I learned a lot about human nature through my short involvement in Manchester United.”

After a couple more seasons Knighton took his egalitarian principles off to the unlikely outpost of Carlisle United, a club roughly similar in size to those he had been trying to buy into before he became aware he could set his sights much higher. Carlisle, Jimmy Glass, UFO sightings and a spell with the chairman as manager is another story.

Knighton, a remarkable individual with some staggering tales to tell, has already started work on the book.

Visionary: Manchester United, Michael Knighton and the Football Revolution, 1989-2019 by Phillip Vine is out now on Pitch Publishing