Dickinson: United aspire to greatness | Managers given leading roles | Ferguson eyes exclusive club | Berbatov has a point to prove | Park, the king of Korea | Camp fire that will never go out | Busby: man who found the Holy Grail | Leaders shaped by adversity | Xavi: Messi has no equals Novice Guardiola is a class act | Busacca on the spot again Police plan Rome crackdown | Half of Spain will be supporting Man United | Graphic: Champions League final

Which Manchester United footballer leads the most extraordinary life? Cristiano Ronaldo? Wayne Rooney? Rio Ferdinand? Wrong on all counts. Try Park Ji Sung.

Park’s is a parallel life, the kind of which is usually to be found only in fiction, and researching an article on him merely confirms this.

While his every move is pored over in his native South Korea — think David Beckham or the Queen — barely a word outside of the obligatory mentions in match reports has been written about the energetic midfield player in this country.

Even his team-mates, save for his closest friends, Carlos Tévez and Patrice Evra, from whom he bought his house in Wilmslow, Cheshire, might profess to know little about Park’s life outside of his love for football. A king in South Korea, then, but a relative mystery in Manchester.

Indeed, it must be strange for someone who is mobbed on the streets of Seoul to be able to walk through Salford without people offering more than a passing glance, but given his almost excruciating shyness — a trait that his parents and early coaches feared would severely impede his development — it is not hard to understand why Manchester is manna from heaven for the poster boy of South Korean football.

In October last year the Korean edition of FourFourTwo magazine dedicated 40 of its 178 pages to him, the front cover adorned with his picture and bearing the words “Legend of JS Park”.

It was, in effect, a condensed version of his 2006 autobiography, Infinite Challenge, which topped Asia’s bestsellers’ list, a comprehensive account of his life “From The Cradle To The Pitch” as one heading read.

There were even three pages dedicated to discussing the minutiae of the Nike boots he wears. No detail is considered too minor where Park’s followers — more than 87,000 of whom are members of his official fan club — are concerned.

The same magazine rated him this month as the second most powerful person in Korean football, after Chung Mong Joon, a Fifa vice-president, although Park will probably occupy top spot next year if he becomes the first Asian to play in a Champions League final tomorrow when United take on Barcelona in Rome.

It will be just reward for a player who was left out of United’s squad for last season’s Champions League final victory against Chelsea, despite the influential role that he had played in helping to get his team to Moscow, but then Park’s story is, in itself, a triumph against adversity.

He was born in Seoul in February 1981 and brought up in nearby Suwon, where he now has a street named after him. His mother, Myung Ja, was convinced that her son would grow up to be as strong as the mythological Korean dragons she had dreamt about during pregnancy, but initially the opposite — at least in body — was true. Imagine his parents’ surprise then when Park, while still in third grade at elementary school, professed a wish to become a professional footballer.