Wayne Rooney takes centre stage

Ferguson, who will be given all of the Ronaldo money to spend plus the £6m raised by selling Fraizer Campbell to Hull, on top of his annual transfer budget of around £20m, now has more than £100m to invest in restructuring his team. As he considers his targets, with Luis Antonio Valencia, Karim Benzema and Franck Ribery the foremost among them, his question should be which new players would fit best around Rooney. Ronaldo is irreplaceable but then so was Roy Keane. No single signing can be slotted in to a function once performed by an icon, but team shape can be altered and a new, equally potent, way of playing found.

Rooney must become central and not just in the tactical but also in the positional sense. He was bred and honed to play the second striker role and Ferguson, with his socialist views on improving workers through learning, would agree that it is a shame to let a good education go to waste.

Rooney spent much of last season, and portions of the two which preceded it, stuck on the flank where Ferguson knew, through his energy and natural selflessness, he would perform that all-important task of the modern game - stopping the opposing full-back attacking. He needed him there because of Ronaldo. If Ronaldo was on the other wing he would not be tracking back. If Ferguson wanted Ronaldo in the middle, as he often did in major European games, he liked the ball going to him directly and not via a second striker, so as to exploit the pace of the Portuguese on the counter-attack.

Rooney has enough ability to make a fist of most positions and had some very good games on the left but in the biggest ones - such as the Champions League final, and last season's clashes with Liverpool - his limitations as an ersatz winger were uncovered. He is not super-quick and nor, to use professional parlance, does he "have a trick". He could not run beyond or beat his man, forcing him to offload the ball inside. From the angled and often deep positions that his job forced him into adopting, there were limited chances to use his greatest talents, shooting and penetrative passing.

Even United's rivals know the answer for Ferguson. "If you say who would I want more, Rooney or Ronaldo, as an ex-footballer I would say Rooney, because he's a team player. Rooney's a wonderful footballer," said Ray Wilkins, Chelsea's assistant manager.

Even before Ronaldo's departure became likely, Rooney himself was pleading for central attacking duties. "The position I play for England is the one I like the most. I haven't played there for a while for United," he said before the international in Kazakhstan. "It is the manager's choice, although my best position in any team is up front."

Rooney may never exceed Ronaldo's 2007-8 total of 42 goals in a season, but Ronaldo might not have done either and over the course of their United careers it is Rooney's goals-per-game ratio which is, by the smallest margin, better. Take away four penalties Ronaldo scored and the players' records in 2008-09 were similar: Ronaldo had 22 goals in 53 appearances, Rooney 20 in 49, while operating mostly on the wing. Can Rooney carry an entire attack, as Ronaldo often did? Yes. He is doing it for Fabio Capello and he also did it for England at Euro 2004. He has done it for United, most memorably on his debut when he scored a hat-trick versus Fenerbahce in the Champions League. All these examples involved him playing a central role.

He once described setting up a goal Ronaldo scored in 2005. "I get the ball 30 yards out, and I look round to see Ronaldo's on that side, Ruud (Van Nistelrooy) is inside me there, and I'll always have that picture in my head. Then when I went through I knew from five seconds earlier where Ronaldo was so if I'm running through the defenders are going to be coming towards me, which means he might be free. So I've hit the ball and luckily he was. At Everton the coaches always used to go on about having a picture. 'See the game,' they'd say. Before I get the ball I always look to see where people are, and know my options."

These are the mental processes of a playmaker-attacker, a number 10, but Rooney has the scoring imperative too. He also told me about kicking the ball around on a concrete pitch behind his street in Croxteth as a kid: "I'd be there for two hours on me own. There was nobody in goals or nuttin' but I'd just shoot. And then go and get the ball and shoot in the other goal. I'd be there for a couple of hours until I felt sick and needed to eat something and I'd go home."

It all adds up to a natural-born second striker. For England, Rooney enjoys life best when a big, back-to-goal striker such as Emile Heskey or Peter Crouch is his foil. He wants an accomplice who can occupy both centre-backs, hold possession and feed it to him. Dimitar Berbatov has perfect tools for the job but, so far in his United career, has not been inclined often enough to use them. Benzema has the size and skill - and the added virtue of pace. He is raw but no manager knows better than Ferguson how to let a player mature. Imagine Rooney with the ball at his feet and Valencia, Benzema and Ribery in front of him. None of these players are Ronaldos but as an overall attacking quartet it seems superior to the one of Ronaldo, Giggs, Ji-Sung Park and Rooney-the-winger, which faced Barcelona in Rome. Conjuring new frontlines using players from different teams is the stuff of fantasy football. But with the money he has available, Ferguson can afford to play it.