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Almost 10 years ago, on New Year’s Day 2002, Sir Alex Ferguson believed he had finally retired from the greatest job in English soccer: manager of the most legendary sporting club of all, Manchester United. Ferguson, who had already achieved everything he could in the game he lived for, had celebrated his 60th birthday the day before. Now he was at home, taking a nap after a long lunch, when his wife, Cathy, kicked his foot to wake him up. When he opened his eyes, Cathy was standing in front of him backed by his three adult sons. “We’ve decided you’re not retiring,” she said. And that was that.

This incident is remarkable for a couple of reasons. For one, it disproved the most indelible rule of sport — that there is no such thing as a second act, still less an encore. You have to know when to quit. In the decade since he withdrew his notice of retirement, Ferguson has renewed and enhanced his club’s status as the most valuable sporting brand in the world, and eclipsed all younger pretenders. More important, the incident is perhaps the only recorded occasion in which Ferguson, the embodiment of both an irresistible force and an immovable object, has allowed himself to be told what to do. Cathy, his childhood sweetheart and wife of 45 years, had her reasons: “When he’s under your feet, it’s a nuisance,” she has said. “If he’s here too long, he gets in my road.”

Ferguson celebrates 25 years in charge at Manchester United in November — the average tenure for a coach of one of England’s premier clubs is just two years — and all reports of retirement continue to be greatly exaggerated. Having taken on all comers for a quarter of a century, and most often prevailed, Ferguson seems to have set his unbreakable will against aging and mortality. You wouldn’t necessarily bet against him. He has already defied the laws of physics by creating what’s known as Fergie Time, a phrase now common in England that describes the elastic interval that ensues after a match or event is supposed to have ended, but which, in fact, continues. Ferguson created “Fergie Time” out of sheer force of will. His mere presence on the sideline, staring obsessively at his watch, has often caused officials to create nonexistent seconds and minutes to allow Manchester United further time in which to prevail.

In those minutes, magic often happens. The pattern was set in 1999 in what was, to those who witnessed it, the most extraordinary sporting turnaround since Muhammad Ali knocked out George Foreman in the jungle. Ferguson’s team, competing in the European champions’ League final, the most coveted of all club titles, was losing by a single goal to the German side, Bayern Munich, and the match had all but ended. In desperation, Ferguson introduced two substitute players, as a last hopeless gamble. Within a properly miraculous minute, both players had scored, the adamantine German team had crumbled, and Manchester United had been crowned champions of Europe. As he left the field, with a television camera in his face, Ferguson gave the quotation for which he will forever be remembered. “Football, eh,” he said, “bloody hell.”

Maybe not the most articulate phrase that Ferguson, who is often capable of a certain gruff poetry, has ever uttered, but one that encapsulates his philosophy neatly enough: that greatness in sport is not about the possible, but about the impossible. English soccer is, as another famous manager once noted, “not a matter of life and death, it is much, much more important than that.” And if any team represented that fact, it was Manchester United.

The mythology of the club, a mythology that’s been constantly renewed in Ferguson’s years, lies in its special ability to exact triumph from disaster. This spirit took root in what happened to the Busby Babes of the 1950s: perhaps the greatest generation of young football players ever assembled at one club, by the manager Matt Busby. The team, mostly in their late teens and early 20s, and led by Duncan Edwards, arguably England’s greatest young player, was already a legendary force when tragedy immortalized them. Taking off from an airfield in Munich in 1958, the plane on which they were traveling crashed, and eight of the young players, including Edwards, were killed. Busby, who was on life support for several days, survived, along with the talismanic player Bobby Charlton, still a director at the club. Out of that wreckage, Busby eventually rebuilt a mesmerizing team around Charlton, which went on to triumph in the European Cup a decade later.

Subsequent managers were left to live up to that legend. Until Ferguson came along 20 years later, all had found different, dismal ways to fail. Fergie was handpicked for the role of second coming by Sir Bobby Charlton, now knighted, and the octogenarian Sir Matt Busby, then still at the club in an ambassadorial role. In the years since 1968, the club’s fortunes had not only declined but, worse, those of its greatest rival, Liverpool FC, had risen. Ferguson — a working-class Scot, like Busby — came from Glasgow’s Govan docks, the toughest quarter of what is consistently among the most violent cities in Europe. He arrived with one overriding ambition, which was to knock Liverpool off its pedestal. At the time the idea seemed laughable. United’s rivals had won 16 national titles and five European titles compared with their own seven league titles and single European Cup win in 1968. This summer, however, Ferguson finally made good on his ambition, securing United’s 19th domestic title, surpassing their intercity rivals by one. They remain two trophies behind Liverpool in Europe, and it is widely believed that Ferguson will not rest until that record is also put right.

It is the manner in which this formidable feat has been achieved, however, that makes Ferguson such a unique figure. Though he has become more statesmanlike over the years — he acted as an unofficial adviser to Tony Blair’s Labor Party government on leadership issues, for example — he has never quite mellowed. In fact, his capacity for megalomania and anger invites comparisons with Shakespeare’s more ferocious protagonists — Coriolanus, say. United players on the receiving end of their manager’s ranting call it “the hair dryer” effect: up-close invective, most often administered at halftime, so moist and salty that it can ruffle even the most structured footballers’ coiffures. His clashes with players over the years have inspired dark sagas that have run for weeks, sometimes months, on the back pages of the newspapers, the most memorable being his standoff with David Beckham, the poster boy of international soccer. After one match in which he felt Beckham, then the team’s captain, had not earned his millions, Ferguson kicked at a stray boot in the locker room and the flying footwear hit Beckham over the eye, drawing blood. The pair had to be separated as they squared off.

Beckham, whom Ferguson had nurtured since the age of 11, but whose celebrity marriage to Posh Spice had somehow betrayed that trust, was brusquely sold to United’s Spanish rivals, Real Madrid. It says a lot for the player — and perhaps for Ferguson — that Beckham repeatedly expresses his sustained admiration for his “father figure.” That fierce loyalty is almost universal in Ferguson’s teams. Speaking to students at Dublin University last year about his management philosophy, Ferguson suggested that he divides his style into three graces: control, managing change and observation; though the greatest of all these is the first. “If I lose control of these multimillionaires in the Manchester United dressing room, then I’m dead,” he said. “So I never lose control. If anyone steps out of my control, they’re dead.” Concessions to this stance have been grudging, he said. “Tattoos, earrings. It’s not my world, but I’m doing what I can to adjust to it. . . .”

Experience suggests that Ferguson makes a few more concessions than he had allowed on that occasion. If he has an almost unparalleled ability to renew and refresh teams — no manager in British football history has achieved his sustained success over more than a generation — he has also retained a core of players in whom he places his utmost faith and, whisper it, indulgence. For a while, Beckham was one of those chosen players. Some others include Roy Keane, a hard-drinking, hard-tackling Irishman of fearsome intensity who was perhaps the closest to him temperamentally; Ryan Giggs, a supreme athlete (of whom Ferguson said when he first saw him as a 13-year-old that “he floated across the ground like a cocker spaniel chasing a piece of silver paper in the wind”); and Cristiano Ronaldo, a virtuoso Portuguese runner, full of toreador trickery on the ball, who has been key to the renaissance of the last decade, before Ferguson sold him reluctantly, again to Madrid, for a record-breaking £80 million. On the current team, the much-tattooed Wayne Rooney, a working-class hero whose spirit is matched by his skill, is the talisman.

Most vivid among all those players, though, was Eric Cantona, a Frenchman who in the five years that he played for the team (starting in 1992) did the most to reignite the legendary flame of the Busby Babes. Cantona, now director of soccer for the New York Cosmos, was the one player, Ferguson likes to say, whom he would have paid good money to watch. Cantona arrived with the reputation of being unmanageable, having “retired” at 25 from French football after memorably informing each official, in turn, at yet another disciplinary hearing, that he was “un idiot.” As well as being a player of uncanny perception, Cantona was something of a philosopher king. He had requested a transfer from his previous club with a faxed one-liner: “the salmon that idles its way downstream will never leap the waterfall.” Cantona’s time at United was a mixture of the sublime and the combustible — unable to ignore a fan’s slur about his native country, he aimed a kung fu kick at the man during a match, leaping salmonlike over the gate. Ferguson stood by him during a ban from the game, in which Cantona taught himself to play the trumpet, thinking of his player, as he once said, as a man in the mold of John McEnroe.

Cantona repaid that faith by kick-starting Ferguson’s peerless reign, and by establishing the DNA of its extremes. Over the years, there have been many outrageous feuds: with the BBC, to which Ferguson has refused to speak since 2004, over a perceived slight of his son in a documentary; with match officials (on a weekly basis); and with rival managers, particularly Arsène Wenger of the London club Arsenal, who is yin to Ferguson’s yang — deeply cultured, professorial and similarly insane to win. This maddening intractability has been more than compensated, however, with continuing moments of grace and occasional genius, and above all a life-affirming refusal to go gently. Time eventually gets called on even the greatest of sporting careers, but Fergie Time seems to go on forever.