This is not the end, only a temporary separation – that was the self-consoling message coming out of Säbener Strasse after Bastian Schweinsteiger’s “personal Schwexit from the Bavarian currency union to pound sterling” (Süddeutsche Zeitung). Previous heroes such as Franz Beckenbauer, Karl-Heinz Rummenigge and Paul Breitner left Munich only to return a few years later, as players or officials, to play pivotal roles again at FC Bayern, a source close to the board pointed out on Saturday night. Rummenigge, the Bayern CEO, had tempered public discontent among 60,000 supporters about their favourite player’s departure to Old Trafford at the team’s official presentation, without Schweinsteiger, a few hours earlier by promising that the Germany captain would be offered the chance of a second career after his time on the pitch was over.

That’s the future. Right now, however, a feeling of sadness pervades Munich, a city that has lost its patron saint and very own football god. He’ll be missed in his Glockenbachviertel, the fashionable quarter at the heart of the Bavarian capital, and in Schumann’s Bar where he’d pop in after a big Champions League night, downing a beer amid reverential near-silence.

You will no longer spot him playing football with friends in the Englischer Garten park, as he did wearing Frank Lampard’s red shirt from the 4-1 World Cup win in Bloemfontein. No more early-morning jaunts to the River Isar, to cool a swollen ankle in icy waters, either.

Schweinsteiger, born and raised at the foot of the nearby Alps, a skier so talented he nearly turned professional, stubborn but always friendly, confident but never haughty, was the first truly Bavarian leader of Bayern since Breitner’s retirement in 1983. With Philipp Lahm he was also the key player behind his club and country’s return to the footballing elite in the last five years after a decade or so in the wilderness.

Last summer he won the World Cup with Germany, spending almost as much time lying on the Maracanã pitch as running 15km, more than anybody else in the final. Argentina had singled him out for rough treatment but he was “so full of adrenaline” he hardly felt the pain in Rio, he later said. And in any case he didn’t mind: “You live for these games”.

A year before he had won the Champions League with Bayern at Wembley, at the third attempt, paying homage to the former Bayern left-back Bixente Lizarazu with a re-enactment of the Frenchman’s “driving the cup” celebration after Bayern’s European triumph in 2001. A year before that he had missed the decisive penalty in the ill-fated Champions League “final at home” against Chelsea, his anguished face a picture of million-fold despair. And two years before that, the Bayern manager, Louis van Gaal, had solved an old, vexing conundrum – where was his best position? – by converting the former attacking midfielder into a deep-lying playmaker tasked with switching the play and setting the pace. Within the space of a few months his and Bayern’s football had shot up to a new level.

Through their beloved Schweini supporters have experienced 13 years that had everything: championships (eight), DFB Cups (seven), a sports holdall of dreams broken and fulfilled. The ultras will sing his name, louder than ever, when the first Bundesliga game at the Allianz Arena comes on 14 August.

But there’s a second part to the transfer, “a rational one” that contrasts with the melancholy, Bayern’s sporting director, Matthias Sammer, explained. “Emotionally our respect for Bastian will always be enormous but rationally it’s the case that he’s been injured often recently and therefore couldn’t be a calculable factor in the last two years.”

One last dream in my career come true. I am excited about the next chapter in my life with @ManUtd. pic.twitter.com/aWnz9mnuD8 — Basti Schweinsteiger (@BSchweinsteiger) July 12, 2015

It’s a rather technocratic way of saying Bayern didn’t feel they could offer him a new contract that went anywhere near Manchester United’s three-year package in view of the player’s recurring fitness problems since Euro 2012. An only intermittently healthy, disgruntled Schweinsteiger on the bench, on a big contract, was seen as a risk they couldn’t take if the oversupply of central midfielders in Pep Guardiola’s squad are taken into account.

At the beginning of the summer Schweinsteiger was privately hinting he wanted to stay at least one more year to win an historic fourth consecutive championship with Bayern and prepare for his first tournament as Nationalmannschaft skipper in familiar surroundings. But the club leadership made no decisive attempt to extend his deal beyond 2016 and Guardiola intimating that he could live without him got Schweinsteiger thinking. On Wednesday he told Rummenigge he had an offer to reunite with van Gaal until 2018 and he wanted to leave. Bayern never put forward a counter-offer, knowing it would fall significantly short in financial and sporting terms.

Unlike the Red Devils’ boss, Guardiola was unwilling to guarantee Schweinsteiger a starting berth in his favoured position, in front of the defence. The relationship between the two had not broken down, as some reports suggested, and Schweinsteiger’s connection with van Gaal is not quite as strong as some have made out either, but the decision was a fairly easy one in the end all things considered. He’d rather embark on a new adventure in England – he’s been a fan of the Premier League for a long time – than be a deposed king in Bavaria.

“I hope you’ll understand that I’ve chosen this path,“ he said in a video message addressed to the supporters, looking happy and relaxed. “But I will never forget you and will always have you [in my heart]. Hopefully we’ll see each other soon again.”