Alex Livesey/Getty Images Alex Ferguson, manager of Manchester United, celebrates winning the Premier League title with team members in April. LONDON - Manchester United confirmed Wednesday that Alex Ferguson would retire later this month after 27 years as manager of the world's most iconic soccer club. He will stay at United as a director - a presence that will be a daily reminder to his successor of a legacy that will be impossible to match in its longevity, its style and the number of titles won. Ferguson has managed and coached Manchester United since 1986. He gives up those roles with his team back on top of the English Premier League after its neighbor, Manchester City, won the title a year ago on the final day of the season. "'It is the right time,'" Ferguson said in a short statement on United's Web site. It is unlikely anyone will ever surpass the length of time Ferguson has managed at one club. Ferguson has seldom missed a day on the training field, much less a night in the competitive arena, where as a coach his teams accumulated 49 trophies - including 13 seasons as England's champion but only two, in 1999 and 2008, as the Champions League winner. Ferguson's reign makes him the most successful manager and coach - rolled into one - that the sport has ever seen. It is difficult to think of any comparable tenure in sports, politics or business during his time at United. "'The biggest challenge?'" he once said. 'Managing change.' A man of volatile temperament - sometimes a bully, often a father figure - he built and ruthlessly rebuilt five squads of players over more than a quarter of a century. One player, Ryan Giggs, grew up from a 14-year-old apprentice to a winger who is still running on Ferguson's first team, through all the triumphs and the rebuilding. Giggs is almost 40 now, and still under Ferguson's wing. Ferguson's style was defined by his giving youth its chance and clinging to experienced players while they still gave him value. But above all, he is a manager driven by a single goal: to win. Ferguson, knighted in the British custom for outstanding service to his "'industry,'" is now 71. He faces hip surgery when this season is done. He may not admit it, but he has just steered a team nowhere near the best squads in his reign to the title he vowed to regain the moment the neighbor, City, took it from him on goal difference a year ago. His desire to go out on top was insatiable, but the reality this year is that no English team was good enough to even make it to the quarterfinals of the Champions League. And Ferguson knows that Champions League success is the measuring stick in modern soccer. Whoever replaces him will have to take that challenge on, because United, owned by an American family, the Glazers, is a multibillion-dollar franchise that markets itself around the globe as being among the biggest and the best. United was recently ranked by Forbes Magazine as the second-most-valuable sports franchise on earth at $3.2 billion, just behind Real Madrid. One man touted to be the next United manager has been José Mourinho, the simmering Portuguese coach who is expected to leave Madrid soon. Coincidentally, Madrid knocked United out of the Champions League this season. Mourinho has been viewed as negotiating his way back to Chelsea, his former club. But he made what was widely viewed as an audition to be Ferguson's successor when they met in the Champions League, though questions about Mourinho's behavior might prevent him from getting the United job. Bobby Charlton, the former great player of United who remains a director, questioned whether a man who once stuck his finger in the eye of a fellow coach in a sideline argument at Barcelona has the dignity required to be the figurehead of a Manchester United. If not Mourinho, the speculation points toward David Moyes as another possible successor. He is a fellow Scot, drawn from the same city, Glasgow, where Ferguson learned his values and his work ethic as the son of a trade union official in the Govan shipyard six decades ago. Moyes shares that tough upbringing, and has shown his ability to manage players in a 10-year tenure at Everton. What Moyes lacks, however, is European experience; he has built a competitive team on a strained budget, but it is a trophyless team during his reign.