Sir Alex Ferguson hints Manchester United are rediscovering their old identity

Sir Alex Ferguson remains the defining figure of modern Manchester United, the manager who turned the club into a dominant force while maintaining the feel of a family club.

Across 26 and a half years at Old Trafford, he delivered 13 Premier League titles, two Champions Leagues and a culture built on togetherness, standards and everyone feeling part of the same project.

However, since his retirement in 2013, Manchester United have struggled to recreate that balance of success and identity.

A series of managerial changes, shifting recruitment strategies and mixed results on the pitch have left the club searching for a clear direction, with supporters often feeling that the connection which underpinned Ferguson’s era had been eroded.

The arrival of Sir Jim Ratcliffe and INEOS as minority owners has begun to reshape the club’s structure, with a clear focus on modernising football operations and infrastructure.

That process has not been without pain, with two rounds of redundancies and a significant reduction in the overall workforce, but it has run alongside major investment in the training ground, including a £50 million redevelopment of Carrington.

Now, The Sun has reported that Ferguson has been left impressed by a simple but important feature of the new Carrington complex.

The 83-year-old is understood to be particularly taken with the open-plan design, which brings staff closer together and is aimed at creating a more harmonious day-to-day atmosphere.

Sources suggest Ferguson believes this layout can help re-establish the kind of environment where colleagues know each other’s names and feel part of the same club-wide effort.

As such, even against the backdrop of job cuts, he sees the new facility as being set up to support a return to the “family club” feeling that underpinned his most successful United sides.

For Ruben Amorim, who has been tasked with restoring Manchester United to the levels Ferguson once made routine, that sort of endorsement is significant.

A modern training base that encourages interaction between departments should make it easier to align the first team, academy and wider staff behind a single long-term project.

Already reports have suggested that the men’s squad are appearing more together, with unlikely “bromances” forming between duos such as

From June 2026, Manchester United are also set to add Carrington visits to their Old Trafford stadium tours, giving supporters the chance to see the revamped training complex up close for £100 per person.

If the atmosphere inside the new facility matches Ferguson’s optimism, and the work done there translates onto the pitch, the Red Devils may yet edge closer to rediscovering the identity that defined their greatest era.