To look back now at Sir Alex Ferguson's first brief television interview as Manchester United's new manager in November 1986 is to be struck by dizzying differences, between then and his leaving of the empire 27 years later. Besides the obvious – the beguilingly fresh face of fortysomething Ferguson, his need to explain why Manchester United are a bigger football prospect than his previous club, Aberdeen – Old Trafford, behind him, frames a different age.

The old ground, still then about the grandest in English football, looks tired, a little bleak, and nakedly free of the all-around branding in which the Theatre of Dreams™ is draped now. Britain was halfway through the tenure of Margaret Thatcher, whose Conservatives Ferguson has always tribally opposed, and the atmospheres at football clubs the economic gloom and rancour into which the north had been plunged.

It is a historical sight, after so many years of all-seat stadiums in the top two divisions, made compulsory following the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, to see Old Trafford's neat rows of terracing then, beneath the K Stand seats, the United Road paddock, and the famous Stretford End.

The brief shot of that huge terrace, on which fans could stand to watch Manchester United for around £3, shows passionate, loud adherents, markedly younger than the more comfortable middle-aged who can afford the price of United tickets now. In front are the fences, still a shock to recall, installed to keep fans off the pitch, which turned into killers when 96 people could not escape the lethal crush at Hillsborough in 1989.

Where to start with the changes, in football and around it, which Ferguson's time embodies and charts? He arrived when today's communications, internet and mobile phones would have seemed an improbable tomorrow's world, then when his resignation finally came, it was announced to worldwide millions on Twitter.

In 1986, English clubs were banned from European competition for hooliganism, after 39 Juventus supporters were killed at Heysel the year before, following a charge by some Liverpool fans before the European Cup Final. Ferguson leaves the season in which England will host the European Champions League final as Uefa's tribute to the Football Association's 150th anniversary, at the new, all-seated £757m Wembley, arched symbol of the game's reinvention.

United's stars had won the FA Cup in the famous 1985 final, yet there was a well-documented drinking culture among players whose capacity for beer was legendary. It was a large part of Ferguson's early work to drain that out, and several of the players with it, and his time spanned a training revolution, involving nutritionists, performance analysis, statistics technology. Ferguson marshalled United's big men of the 1980s at the Cliff, the workaday Salford training ground where kids could freely hang around pleading for autographs. United's multimillion pound secluded complex now, down that endless single-lane farm track in the green belt of Carrington, fields as he said in his leaving statement: "training facilities amongst the finest in global sport".

United and the English game whose style changed so much, greatly due to Ferguson, are truly global now, watched live in 200 countries, followed on Twitter, befriended on Facebook, an expression of western glamour like Hollywood. United were world famous before, of course, propelled by football's universal appeal and the special sympathy attracted to the club after the Munich tragedy in 1958.

Yet in the 1980s United made no feverish effort to financially exploit its followers, abroad or at home, where there was a single souvenir shop, given to Sir Matt Busby himself as a leaving present. Megastores, superstores, online ordering, lines in the accounts boasting of merchandising millions and global sponsorships, are an industry of Fergie time.

He, the old-school football man, drove United into becoming dominant on and off the field in the Premier League era, the club itself symbol and pioneer of football's sudden obsession with money. In 1986, the club was still majority owned by the family of Louis Edwards, once a starstruck fan, who began buying shares and joined the devastated board the day after the Munich disaster.

Now the club is owned by a family who had no connection with United, in the US, the one country never seduced by soccer's charms. They loaded United with the £525m they borrowed themselves to buy it, and have now registered the club, based on Sir Matt Busby Way, Old Trafford, in the Cayman Islands tax haven.

Ferguson, the Labour man, has never raised a word even of regret about that, or the £550m so far the Glazers' takeover has cost United in interest and bankers' and professionals' fees. The announcement of David Moyes as Ferguson's successor was made to the New York Stock Exchange, on which the Glazers have listed the famous Man United.

These are great changes, but the motor of football's commercial reinvention is a core, 150-year-old constant: the love and passion people instinctively feel for a great and simple game. Ferguson personified that, kept those fires burning, while his own club became the corporate billboard for football's financial exploitation.

Many of the game's lifelong supporters will look at that footage of Ferguson's first interview and feel regretful, that not all these changes have been for the best. There is anger and alienation, a belief that the improvements and pay TV boom could have been managed to serve supporters and the sport's all-round health, not the bank balances of players, managers, agents and chief executives.

In 1986, for all football's problems, it was deeply loved and fervently supported. That is why there were 54,000 people at Hillsborough, a ground commissioned by the FA unfit to host them. There were four divisions of the Football League, through which money – £44m from the last, 1988-92 TV deal – was shared quite evenly. Now there is a Premier League, which broke away so that the top clubs would not have to share the pay TV cash due to roll in from the next deal. Several of the men who engineered that breakaway have since made millions selling the shares in their clubs.

In the eulogies to Ferguson, many reflected that he built United into one of Britain's greatest institutions; the northern Premier League football clubs are now oases of glittering success, contrast to the post-industrial, post-banking slump around them. That makes it strange that so few in football, politics or business worry about what it says of our country, that this English institution could be so easily thrown to a leveraged buyout, and be registered in the Cayman Islands for its US owners' personal tax convenience.

The European final at Wembley will feature two football institutions from Germany, where the Bundesliga has grasped pay TV's financial turbo-charge, but been more attentive to protect the game's traditions. Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund are still controlled by their supporters, and retain thousands of affordable tickets for raucous young fans like those long priced off the Stretford End.

English football could have had this boom, without selling everything. Ferguson, the former shipyard trade unionist, might have suited that even more, working for a genuine club, rather than serving the Glazers, who bought the Old Trafford club with debt and will sell it one day for a mighty Cayman Islands profit.