Ferguson scores more direct hits than Cole, is calmer under pressure than Irwin and comes up with more angles than Beckham

The first surprise is that he was, once upon a time, a footballer: the second is that he was, once upon a time, a boy. Nobody who has watched him chewing dourly in his dugout would be inclined to imagine that Alex Ferguson was actually born: it seems much more reasonable to assume that he simply arrived on the sideline fully-formed, fully-clothed and, though his grip on the English language tends to slide between "loose" and "totally unravelled", fully fluent in football-speak. There are, in truth, plenty of surprises in this rags-to-riches fairy-tale of the skinny kid from the Glasgow tenement who grew up to be the most successful manager of the most successful football club in the world. But it will come as no surprise at all, either to Ferguson's fans or to those who detest his knack of doing everything right, to discover that he has done it again. It may, at just under 500 pages, be the Vinnie Jones of soccer autobiographies, but Managing My Life scores more direct hits than Andy Cole, is calmer under pressure than Dennis Irwin and comes up with more angles than David Beckham.

With more than a little help from the soccer writer Hugh McIlvanney, Ferguson has taken his winning formula from the pitch to the page, where it sits as solidly as a flat back four: a few crumbs of controversy to get the publicity machine cranked up, plenty of self-justification to make the damned thing worthwhile, the occasional nugget of coaching common sense for the earnest young acolytes and a generous sprinkling of amusing anecdotes for the rest of us. The latter, in particular, will come as a shock to those who think of Ferguson as the sour Scot on Match of the Day. But there's a point to all these apparently self-deprecating stories, which is that they aren't actually self-deprecating at all. There's the time when, in the final minutes of a match against West Ham that United are losing one-nil, a well-dressed man with a trilby calls out to him: "Alex! Alex!" He turns to look at him and the man shouts: "F**k you," and gives him the two fingers. "It tells you something about men with hats," is Ferguson's wry comment.

There's the time he gives his difficult players a roasting for the number of red and yellow cards they've received - and then takes a look around the scowling faces and sturdy physiques assembled in his office; Ince, Keane, Hughes, Cantona, Schmeichel. "I must have been either the bravest or the daftest manager in the world." There's the time an exasperated St Mirren scout storms out of an argument, yelling back at Ferguson: "You know damn all about football!" This is a man who remembers the registration number of his first car, and he's not about to forget anybody who has ever crossed him. For the first chapter or so, it's all softly-softly stuff as we're given a vivid, if decidedly rose-tinted, view of the early years in Glasgow; streets filled with men hurrying home from the shipyards, all of them wearing the cloth caps they called "bunnets", the rattle of the tramcars, the coal merchant and his horse-drawn cart. "Maybe I was enthralled, but I felt I was in the midst of a carnival," he declares. When the football kicks in, the reader feels much the same, for his first teams are an exotic-sounding lot: Harmony Row, Broomloan, Pomadie Company. It's when he signs for Rangers in 1967 that the more familiar fighting Ferguson emerges. A Rangers fan by choice and a Protestant by baptism, his spell at Ibrox Park was, to put it mildly, unspectacular, and he is convinced to this day that the PR officer - a "diseased zealot" called Willie Allison - wanted rid of him from the start because he was married to a Catholic. If it's true - and it's sure to be swept up in the debate over the anti-sectarian outburst of the Scottish composer James MacMillan earlier this month - then it's certainly shocking, but Ferguson's reaction to the news that his ageing enemy has been diagnosed with cancer is, literally, pitiless: "I did not have a crumb of pity for him." There's no mercy, either, for enemies who have since become celebrities. The defender-turned-commentator Alan Hansen is castigated for his lack of commitment to the Scottish national cause during the 1986 World Cup campaign in Mexico. Brian Kidd, Ferguson's long-serving assistant at Manchester United, who left at a crucial moment to take up a job as manager of Blackburn Rovers, is branded a moaner, the former England manager Glenn Hoddle slammed as an "example of bad human relations" for his treatment of David Beckham during the World Cup. Gordon Strachan, once a Ferguson protege and now manager of Coventry City, simply "couldn't be trusted an inch".

But what of the triumphs? The final surprise is that, despite a number of clever hints and teases, Manchester United doesn't make an entrance on to the Ferguson stage until over halfway through the book. When it does, of course, it's all there - the drinking club he found, and smashed up, on his arrival at Old Trafford, God's appearance in the shape of Eric Cantona, last season's fantastic treble, a God-given ending, let's face it, for any author of an autobiography.

Will Managing My Life make Ferguson into the football legend he so clearly - if his achievements with Manchester United are taken as a yardstick - deserves to be? There's a telling little tale near the beginning in which, during that miserable stint at Ibrox, Ferguson is despatched to talk transfer terms with the manager of Hibernian, Bob Shankly. In the midst of the conversation, the phone rings. Shankly answers it, listens for a couple of minutes, then puts the receiver on the table and carries on. After 10 minutes or so, distracted by the steady flow of white noise from the phone, our hero points out that the caller is still on the line. "Oh, that's my brother Bill," says Shankly, unconcerned. "He rings me every Saturday and I can't get a word in edgeways, so I just lift the phone now and again and say `Aye'." Now that, in soccer terms, is legend - and whatever else he does or doesn't do in a book that will almost certainly keep the pundits arguing for months, Ferguson is smart enough to recognise it.

Arminta Wallace is an Irish Times journalist