Even Sir Alex hails champs

COMPLIMENT Fergie is glad he does not face Klopp

Manchester United is always going to be the game of the season.

“Quite simply, they’re the two most successful teams in Britain when you add up all the trophies they have had together.”

Speaking alongside Klopp and Sir Kenny Dalglish to raise awareness about dementia in football, Ferguson added: “It’s obvious you have to beat Liverpool to win anything, just as when I was at Aberdeen we had to beat Rangers and Celtic to win anything.

“That was my mental attitude and it was exactly the same when I arrived at Manchester United.”

And the former United manager was the one who finally knocked England’s most successful team of the Seventies and Eighties “off their **** ing perch” as he made his team the one to beat in the Nineties and Noughties.

He added: “That ‘knock them off their perch’, I don’t know where that came from, I’m not sure I actually said that. It has gathered a lot of mileage over the years.

“Liverpool’s success over the 1970s and 1980s was phenomenal and to get to them I had to take a road that was going to be difficult.

“It meant having to wait in terms of building the club up instead of building a team and eventually it turned out fantastically.”

The man charged with knocking Klopp’s Liverpool off their perch now is Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, who Ferguson knew was destined for management, given his interest in studying every training session he took part in and every game United played.

Sir Alex added: “Ole used to take down all the training sessions, and as a sub – and he was sub many times, as you know – he would watch the game all the time.

“Sometimes subs will sit and look round the stadium and chat to each other.

“Not him. Solskjaer was always on the game.”