James Lawton: If Ferguson does bow out at Wembley, his legacy is not safe with Jose

Mourinho, of course, has formidable assets, but could United's following learn to love his football?

(AP)

if the question was asked with such force back in 1999, when he was a mere stripling of 57 years dashing down the touchline of the Nou Camp with his arms reaching out to the sky, how much louder will it sound at Wembley later this month if, with his 12th Premier League title in his pocket, Sir Alex Ferguson finds a way to win his third European Cup?

In the year of his 70th birthday, what football man would not say: no, there could be no more perfect point of exit, no deeper validation of a career which has broken so many rules except the one that insists on winning?

The overwhelming received wisdom is that almost all of them would say that – except Ferguson.

They would say it because, principally, they would be cutting deals with their careers' fate rather than changing the very rhythm of their breath.

Ferguson has been here before and stepped back into the game in a state of some alarm. He hated that the furniture of his life might be so violently, irrecoverably rearranged.

If you are making odds, they have to be in favour of a similar reaction whatever the course of the next few weeks. There is no shortage of circumstantial evidence. Ferguson has been fighting his wars with all the old furies this challenging season. While all his younger rivals have shown various degrees of strain, at times he has seemed to grow even stronger at the scale of his challenge.

Yet could this extraordinary re-statement of ferocious energy, a re-immersion into controversy that has been conducted at times with something suspiciously like pleasurable zeal, just signal something other than an interminable love of battle? Might it just be evidence of release, a dawning of the fact that the race has been run, and that just as the ageing Sir Matt Busby gave him his seal of approval as a natural-born successor, Ferguson also believes that his legacy can be placed in appropriate hands?

It was certainly not hugely hard to see an inkling of this in what seemed like an extraordinary endorsement of Jose Mourinho at a time when many have argued that his credentials for the United succession have been irreparably besmirched.

If Mourinho, ejected from the Champions League in the most shaming circumstances, attacked by Real Madrid's most legendary figure, Alfredo di Stefano, described as an "arrogant lout" by Champions League double winner Ottmar Hitzfeld, needed some kind of psychological nourishment, it was surely provided by Ferguson.

Mourinho's input, said the United manager, would be highly valued in the build-up to the final against Barcelona game. They spoke frequently. Ferguson liked Mourinho's tactical feel, his ability to read weaknesses in the opposition.

For some months now the word from Old Trafford has been that Mourinho's arrival was locked down, that it merely awaited the word of Ferguson and a point of mutual convenience, and here was the manager, the creator of an era of unprecedented success, publicly installing the man some see as the enemy of football as a friend of Old Trafford; indeed, a working ally.

It is intriguing, to say the least – and for some who believe most fervently in the idea that United, for all the problems of their ownership, represent something beyond the mere details of power and wealth and win and loss, also alarming.

Above all, these devotees would say, Manchester United is about a way of playing football, about reflecting in it a tradition shaped by the Busby Babes, Best, Charlton and Law and all those players, from Robson and Keane to Scholes and Giggs, who over the last two decades have said that it is a club which has celebrated more than anything the force of individual talent.

Whatever else that can be said about Ferguson, no one has been more in sympathy with such an attitude. Of course, there have been many fights, and brutal partings, but only the other day he was underlining his debt to a tradition of great players. Can we imagine Mourinho at any point making such a proclamation?

After recent events in Spain, it is harder than ever. Mourinho, of course, has formidable assets, but could United's following learn to love his football? Perhaps it is more likely today than ever before. Maybe the need to win, in any way possible, has never been more oppressive.

Maybe the only unchallenged credential that Mourinho carries, the one that proclaims his ability to succeed in most any circumstances, has become the only one that matters.

We will see soon enough, of course. In the meantime, and whoever it is who one day attempts to follow in Ferguson's footsteps, it should not be a hardship acknowledging the most extraordinary fact. It is that once again football's oldest warrior has won the right to leave precisely when he chooses.