It did not follow that Sir Matt Busby would fashion another great Manchester United side from the wreckage of the tragedy at Munich. There is strength in adversity, no doubt, but not of the kind Busby and his team had suffered. Managers may pin the words of critics to the dressing-room wall, players may respond to mumblings of discontent in the crowd, but the bitter fate that Manchester United had suffered was too excruciatingly extreme for there to be a shaft of enlightenment within. The club stumbled into the wilderness and remained there for several years.

Looking back, knowing what we know now, it is possible to conceive Busby’s story as a rosily glowing Hollywood script: the inspirational tale of a man who loses everything, but battles on to even greater glory. And if ten years can be dismissed with a click of the fingers then, yes, it was like that. The reality is very different. In the years immediately after the Munich disaster, Busby was ruined by the crash – “he never talked about it, but it was there in his eyes, always,” Paddy McGrath, his close friend and proprietor of the Cromford Club, where Manchester United’s staff and players frequently went to dine and dance on Saturday nights, said – and for a time, the club disintegrated. Between 1960 and 1963, United’s league positions were 7th, 7th, 15th and 19th.

In his book about Busby, A Strange Kind Of Glory, the writer, Eamon Dunphy, who was a youth-team player and reserve at Old Trafford throughout this period, recalls a club with a venomous atmosphere. Despite battling relegation, United won the

FA Cup in 1963, yet still the anguish and resentment that had spilt out after Munich remained. Busby was a distant figure, there was an outbreak of theft in the dressing-room and high stakes gambling schools poisoned team spirit. On the first-team bus to a match away to Nottingham Forest, Dunphy recalled a folded sheet of paper falling on his lap, dropped by the senior player occupying the seat in front. It was a spiteful caricature of Busby, his nose as a penis, his cheeks as two testicles. ‘Bollock chops,’ read the caption.

From this nadir, within five years the man then built a team capable of playing the finest, most exciting, football in Europe, at a time when the trend was towards caution and conservatism. To sanitise that story, to present the light of his journey postMunich without the shade, is to underplay his achievement. It is not just that he produced another great team in the aftermath of the Busby Babes (and he hated that soubriquet because he thought it implied naivety and did not acknowledge that those players were spiritually and intellectually old beyond their years), but that he produced one in the aftermath of the aftermath: all the soul-searching and rancour that would have hollowed lesser men. He may have seemed a ghostlike presence to those that had known him before but, however fragile, Busby held it together until the time was right for Manchester United to come again. It did not have to be that way.

On May 4, 1949, an Italian Airlines Fiat G212CP aircraft carrying all bar one of Il Grande Torino, arguably the finest club team in the history of Italian football, clipped a wall surrounding the Basilica of Superga near Turin while attempting a landing in bad weather. There were no survivors. Torino lost 18 players, five members of the coaching staff and have never recovered. Between 1943 and 1949, they won five straight Serie A titles (World War II intervened), rewriting the record books. Il Grande Torino played 93 home matches unbeaten, scored more goals, won more games, suffered fewer defeats and won the league by a greater margin than any team before or since. On May 11, 1947, they provided all ten outfield players as Italy defeated Hungary 3-2. Some historians claim they were the first team to play 4-4-2, predating the Brazil World Cup winners of 1958 by more than a decade.

In real terms, Torino’s loss was greater than that of Manchester United at Munich – only one first-team player survived, having missed the trip to Portugal because of injury – but more than half a century on, the club remain in mourning. There was a lone title success in 1976 and odd flurries in cup competitions, but these days Torino slide between promotion and relegation and exist on the fringes of the Italian game. In 2005, after financial collapse, the club were reestablished with a slightly altered name. Beyond the annals, the sole legacy of Italy’s most tragic football team is Sandro Mazzola, son of Valentino Mazzola, the Torino captain, who grew to be the inspiration behind the great Internazionale side of the 1960s (La Grande Inter), wearing the same No 10 shirt as his father.

The Superga tragedy shows what might have become of Manchester United had Busby not been a man of such faith. He came into management in 1945, just as Il Grande Torino were nearing a peak and, although European football remained obscure from Britain, Busby always had a yen for the world beyond the grey English game. It was his fascination for the bigger stage that took his team into Europe against the wishes of the Football League in the 1950s – and his desire not to compromise United’s attacking style that later placed his club at the pinnacle, the first from England to be crowned champions of Europe.

Yet again, contrary to the script, Busby claimed not to be driven by a desire to lay Munich to rest by winning the European Cup. How could he ever do that anyway? Busby was a man who did not talk about the crash, so to see it invoked almost casually in newspaper articles later in his career pained him. Manchester United did not win in 1968 because they were inspired by ghosts; they won because they had the best players, and a manager who knew this, and let them play.

Busby’s triumph was to trust his instincts at a time when football was being turned into a scientific problem. England’s World Cup victory in 1966 was inspired as much by thought as deed and, throughout English football the concepts of coaching, drills and tactical organisation were on the rise. Busby was no dinosaur, but he was uncomplicated by comparison and blessed with one of football’s few geniuses in George Best, a player he had nurtured with paternal pride. As the 1968 final prepared to enter extra time, his advice to his players was reassuringly understated. “If you pass the ball to each other, you’ll beat them,” Busby said.

It seems so slight now, so lacking in moment for such a consequential occasion. One expects drama, emotion, a line that would encapsulate the voyage that Busby had taken from an oxygen tent at Rechts der Isar Hospital to the brink of sporting immortality at Wembley. Instead, he told his players a simple truth and let them win the game their way. Later that night, at the celebration party, Busby sang Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World. Within eight months, he announced he was stepping down as Manchester United manager.