Even students of his history as a tireless provocateur may have been taken aback last week when Sir Alex Ferguson, at 66 the only full-time manager in English league football entitled to the state pension, was credited with stirring ire and indignation in the ranks of Help the Aged. It was, of course, a case of mischief begetting mischief when The Sun asked the charity organisation to comment on Ferguson’s attempt to wind up Luiz Felipe Scolari by speculating that the Chelsea squad had become overloaded with “experienced” (ie over30) players.

Accusations of ageism came with hilarious promptness. “In 2008, age is no longer an acceptable yardstick to measure a person’s worth or potential,” said Kate Jopling, spokesperson for Help the Aged, before adding a line that suggested she might have put in a couple of shifts on The Sun subeditors’ desk: “Ageist attitudes and comments such as this should always be handed a red card.” Either Kate was joining in the tongue-in-cheek fun or it is her mental age that should be causing concern.

Ferguson is in every sense too old in the head to pay much heed to the amusing nonsense.

He must live with the reality that as he prepares to enter his 23rd season in charge of Manchester United he has reached the point of dominating the media’s agenda for football in this country more extensively and persistently than any of the game’s greatest figures of the past ever did. Whether stories are serious or trivial, substantial or frivolous, they are seen as gaining in impact from the inclusion of his name.

Obviously, somebody with his unprecedented record of trophy-harvesting achievement is bound to be subjected to incessant attention by broadcasters and newspapers and likely, therefore, to be a rich seam of soundbites and to create a gusher of printer’s ink. It is relevant, too, that both the expansion of sports-page acreage and the intensification of electronic coverage have changed reporting beyond recognition since the days of previous giants of management such as Sir Matt Busby, Bill Shankly and Brian Clough.

The doings of those remarkable men stimulated huge and sustained interest (perhaps most strikingly the deeds of Clough, whose often wild but consistently productive and compelling personality refused to let the unfashionable clubs employing him remain obscure) but none of them was the relentlessly ubiquitous presence in the headlines that Ferguson is now. While Jose Mourinho was winning consecutive Premier League titles with Chelsea, his blend of coaching brilliance, frequently offensive but unignorable utterances and rivetingly improbable behaviour inevitably made him the darling of large swathes of the media. However, even in the Portuguese comet’s most dazzling phase, the Glaswegian wasn’t exactly in the shadows.

Theirs was a well-matched rivalry - on the field, in the press and at the microphone - and Ferguson was always confident the superiority in results that Mourinho skilfully extracted from the unlimited resources provided by Roman Abramovich’s wealth would be temporary. Manchester United’s recapturing of the championship in 2007 vindicated that faith and Mourinho, having found Abramovich’s interference increasingly intolerable, was already confronting evidence of a crumbling regime when he departed with a barrowload of compensation last September. The abrupt defection and the events that followed it have left Ferguson once again splendidly isolated at centre stage in English football, competitively supreme after a Premier League-Champions League double and unchallenged as the national game’s most eagerly quoted voice.

Last week’s papers were awash with superfluous proof that much of what he says will be aimed at upsetting the other clubs expected to contend for major honours. In the interviews coming out of United’s touring party in South Africa there was the familiar use of a personal code that is about as difficult to decipher as the neon signs on the Las Vegas Strip. Thus when he suggested an age problem at Stamford Bridge could prevent progress under Scolari (a conclusion scarcely supported by reference to all, rather than a convenient few, of the birth certificates involved), the natural reaction was to assume he regards Chelsea as the biggest threat to the defence of the championship. On the same principle that Ferguson’s disparaging words are usually reserved for the dangerous, Arsène Wenger would cast a cold eye on his willingness to wax compassionate about how drastically Arsenal were undermined by injuries last spring. As Wenger reflects on three seasons without a trophy, faces up to the loss of valued personnel and worries over the possibility that additional weakening departures will be caused by Arsenal’s rigid wage structure, sympathetic noises in a Govan accent cannot be high on the Frenchman’s wish-list.

Behind the early blitz of propaganda, Ferguson has a right to be sanguine about the campaign ahead. He has built yet another formidable team and, whether Cristiano Ronaldo stays or goes, further development should be assured by a unique manager’s talent and miraculous stamina of spirit. His prospects of more triumphs will undoubtedly be improved if the mammoth sum expended on securing Carlos Tevez as a fully signed-up United player does not encourage Tottenham to become intransigent in negotiations for the transfer of Dimitar Berbatov. With Berbatov playing centre-forward, Ferguson’s men would seem attractively priced at a best-available 6-4 to complete a hat-trick of titles (more appealing, certainly, than Chelsea at 15-8 to be champions, Arsenal at 5-1 or Liverpool at 15-2).

In the matter of who will inspire most headlines, there’s no betting.

Cash still king for Calzaghe

If Joe Calzaghe’s light-heavyweight fight with Roy Jones is postponed until next year - and many insiders regard such a delay as not only possible but probable - the obvious likelihood is that it will happen after Jones’s 40th birthday, which falls on January 16. Given that the most recent of the 45 victories constituting Calzaghe’s unblemished professional record was at the expense of Bernard Hopkins, who was 43 when they met in Las Vegas in April, the Welshman is certainly showing no aversion to the company of the elderly. Nobody would suggest that any time soon either Hopkins or Jones will need a Stannah stairlift to reach the ring but the prime years of both (and marvellously impressive years they were) are some way in the past. So much so that there has been something gratingly offensive about attempts to portray the two men as opponents capable of providing Calzaghe with a defining climax to a wonderful career as a long-reigning world champion, the kind to enable him, as the current jargon has it, to “seal his legacy”.

The conviction that such talk is ridiculously fanciful isn’t called into question by memories of how much trouble Hopkins created in Vegas. Calzaghe’s performance was fraught with shortcomings on the night and Hopkins was allowed to draw maximum benefit from what remained of once considerable assets, above all his mastery of spoiling tactics. Jones was an indisputably great fighter at his best, holder of world championships at four different weights, but irreversible diminishment was imposed on him by three bad defeats (two by Antonio Tarver and one by Glen Johnson) within 18 months of 2004 and 2005. Calling his meeting with Calzaghe a “superfight” is preposterous. Money will be the occasion’s validating element. If Joe Calzaghe sees it as having relevance to his legacy, he must be thinking of the cash he may be able to leave his children in his will.

Olympic sideshow

It requires an imagination more romantic than mine to embrace the claims that the involvement of a Great Britain football team in the 2012 Olympic Games would electrify the nation. My scepticism has nothing to do with the resistance of the Celtic minorities of the UK to a concept that might imperil their independent status within Fifa. I simply believe that Olympic events are never truly great, truly enthralling, unless they represent the absolute pinnacle of competition in a sport. Disciplines such as athletics and swimming meet that criterion but football must always be a sideshow at the games.