Why is ferguson called sir

Interestingly, Brazil's three-time World Cup winner Pele was given an honorary knighthood in , but he strictly cannot use the title Sir until he becomes a British citizen - at which point the honorary knighthood would then become a substantive knighthood. Liverpool legend Kenny Dalglish is one of the most recent recipients, having received the honour in Former Celtic manager Jock Stein was given the honour in , three years after he helped the Glasgow club become the first British club to win the European Cup.

Article continues below. Each week you name the topics you want to read about and here is one of your suggestions: A deep dive into why Sir Alex Ferguson received the knighthood.

Sir Alex Ferguson holds a special place in the heart of every Man United fan for how he elevated us to dominate English football for decades.

But before all that, he was just Alex Ferguson. What special thing did he do to have merited it? Even before winning the historic treble, Sir Alex had earned the reputation of being the best manager in England. After arriving at United in , he completed revolutionized the system. He successfully overhauled the youth academy, promoted youngsters and made United play better football than they did since Sir Matt Busby retired.

The answer is never, I would guess. But on Thursday morning, staring out from the front pages of the two newspapers I get delivered, there were the ruddy features of Sir Alex Ferguson, who, until his retirement on Wednesday, had been the manager of Manchester United, one of the most successful sports teams in the world. The front-page treatment was yet another landmark for Ferguson, a fiery seventy-one-year-old Glaswegian who led United to thirteen titles in the English Premier League and two victories in the UEFA Champions League, the biggest competition in soccer outside the World Cup.

I approached the encounter with some trepidation. The subject matter of my interview was another potential sore point: the takeover of United by a reclusive family of Florida billionaires, the Glazers, which had saddled the club with hundreds of millions of pounds of debt.

To say Manchester was in uproar would be stretching it. But there had been demonstrations against the American interlopers, and disgruntled fans had established a rival club of their own, F. United of Manchester, which had just started playing in the minor leagues. Ferguson, too, had been criticized. The son of a shipbuilding worker, he grew up in a tenement, left school at sixteen, and, before becoming a professional footballer, worked in the local shipyard, where he was briefly a shop steward in a trades union.

I spotted him in the lobby chatting with a couple of players. He was wearing a tracksuit and clutching a plastic bottle of water. When we sat down in an interview room, I quickly realized he was an intelligent man, with the wide-ranging knowledge of an autodidact. But there was something about his piercing blue eyes, and the way he paused before answering my questions, that was a bit intimidating.

In , during the halftime of a game against its rival Arsenal that Man United was losing, Ferguson got so furious he kicked a stray boot that hit David Beckham above the eye and created a gash that needed stitches.