Sir Alex Ferguson took only two days to pick his first fight as Manchester United manager – with their over-familiar, City-supporting bus driver.

Ferguson was appointed 40 years ago when he moved to Old Trafford from Aberdeen to take over from the sacked Ron Atkinson and join “the biggest club in football”.

When he moved south on November 6, 1986, the Scot encountered a sleeping giant, positioned then in 20th place in Division One, and immediately identified a culture that needed to change if United were ever to reach the top again.

“Look, I’ll tell you right now, I won’t change,” Ferguson told the squad upon gathering them in the gymnasium at The Cliff training ground on his first day.

“I won’t change my beliefs in what a football club should be about… I’m not going to change. You’ll have to change.”

Ferguson’s first target was unexpectedly identified during his first match on his third of 9,631 days in charge at Old Trafford.

Derek Sutton had driven Ferguson and the United squad to Oxford United for the new manager’s first game on Saturday November 8.

Fergie was first off the Finglands coach and swallowed up by a media scrum on his way into the Manor Ground.

With his cargo unloaded, Sutton then did what he always did: parked his bus, then parked his butt on the United bench.

Having the bus driver in the dug-out was as standard as a Sunday piss-up for United then. Even if Sutton was a Manchester City fan.

Just a fortnight earlier, in Atkinson’s penultimate match as United boss, Sutton was in the City dug-out at Maine Road after driving United to the derby.

“The thing that always makes me laugh when I remember these games is that our coach driver Derek – or Del Boy as we used to call him – would drive us to Maine Road and then go and sit on the City bench,” Atkinson recalled for the BBC.

“He was a funny man and a great laugh. He normally sat in the dug-out with me and he used to make the teas for us at half-time but he was a City fan, and was their driver too.”

Ferguson did not know that ‘Del Boy’ was a City fan. He barely knew him at all. But Ferguson quickly decided his bus driver was overstepping when the new manager left his seat in the main stand with United 1-0 down towards the end of his first half in charge.

“I went down just before half time and in the dug-out, the bus driver was sitting there,” Ferguson later recalled to ITV.

“I didn’t say anything, I just thought ‘this is interesting’.

“So we went in at half-time and the bus driver is in the dressing room pouring the tea for the players.

“I said ‘excuse me, Derek. I don’t need you. Don’t come in the dressing room, don’t come in the dug-out again’.”

United physio Jim McGregor – far left on the bench in the photo above, with substitute Jesper Olsen, reserve-team manager Brian Whitehouse and kit-man Norman Davies between him and Ferguson, while Sutton sits next to the manager for the first and last time – and goalkeeper Chris Turner have backed up Fergie’s version of events.

But Sutton later disputed it. And, like most time-served City fans, he holds a sizeable grudge towards the United legend.

“Ferguson never told me to my face that he didn’t want me in the dressing room, he did that behind my back to my bosses at the coach firm,” Sutton said in 2004.

“I hate the man – he is a very hateful person.

“I was always in the dug-out until Ferguson came along. I always served the tea at half-time.

“Atkinson brought me in and he was always sound with me. I’d have passes to walk anywhere around Old Trafford and sat on the bench for the 1985 FA Cup final at Wembley when United beat Everton.

“When Ferguson came in, he wanted to stamp out all the old regime.”