Sir Alex Ferguson may be lording it over the rest in the Barclays Premier League but he isn’t having it all his own way in a competition devised to allow managers from all four divisions to measure their achievements against each other.

    The Manchester United boss is sitting on a nine-point gap at the top of the Premier League, but he can’t hold a candle to Leicester’s Nigel Pearson in the Castrol LMA Managers’ Performance Table.

    Best in the business: Sir Alex Ferguson (left) may have guided Manchester United to a nine-point lead in the Barclays Premier League, but Leicester's Nigel Pearson (right) trumps him in the LMA chart (below)

     

    Pearson leads the way, in the latest quarterly table, with Ferguson trailing in fourth behind third-placed Paolo Di Canio, of Swindon, and, gallingly for the man who christened the Etihad Stadium’s inhabitants his ‘noisy neighbours’, Manchester City’s Roberto Mancini in second.

    Points are awarded for every competitive game played by all 92 Football League and Premier League clubs. There is a sliding scale for wins, draws, clean sheets, goals scored, winning margins and knock-out matches, with the total number of points gained divided by games played and, finally, multiplied by 10, to do away with decimals, to arrive at the Top Twenty score.

    Though consistently in the top five or six, the three quarterly tables so far do not make pleasant reading for the fiery United manager.

    In the first one he was fifth, behind Roberto Di Matteo, Ronnie Moore, Arsene Wenger and Port Vale’s Micky Adams and in the second he suffered an even greater indignity by finishing lower than his arch-rival Rafa Benitez.

    Despite Benitez’s woes as interim Chelsea boss, he was second to Bournemouth’s Eddie Howe, with Paul Sturrock, Kenny Jackett and Gianfranco Zola also ahead of sixth-placed Fergie.

    Daily Mail