The idea that Sir Alex Ferguson's investment in Michael Owen is the desperate throw of a football man looking into the skull's head of a bleak and hopeless future is absurd.

Owen was available at a knock-down price. No doubt he is not what he was, which is to say the most electrifying scoring talent in the world, but he still knows where the goal is far more acutely than many of his rivals in a grossly inflated market.

No, it was Newcastle, poor dysfunctional, madcap Newcastle, who made the gamble, the cost of which, when it was finally totted up this week, came out at a mind-numbing £41m.

Newcastle's calculation was that even while they were breaking every basic rule of football success, they might scuffle to some kind of benefit from the aura of the striker who at one point threatened to smash every scoring record in English football, including Sir Bobby Charlton's 49 goals for the national team. Such milestones may look unobtainable now, but Ferguson isn't a philanthropist. His mission isn't to resurrect fallen superstars.

When he signed Eric Cantona — maybe the most significant deal of his career — it wasn't the result of some agonised selection process. The overture came at the end of a conversation with Leeds United manager Howard Wilkinson. It was an aside, an afterthought, a foray, and it just happened to produce the catalyst of his great piece of team building.

Wilkinson, the ultra disciplinarian, sold him cheaply because he had quickly formed an opinion long established in the player's native France. Talented the big man certainly was, but then he also marched to his own drummer, one who played music that sometimes made Looney Tunes sound like Beethoven's Fifth.

Ferguson doesn't see the Owen deal as some career-changing initiative, either for himself or the player — no more than he did the cut-price purchase of Cantona. He sees it as something with possibilities for both parties.

United, who were not awash with goals at vital points of last season, get one of the most practiced hands in that vital department. Owen gets to go about his business in a team which apart from winning the game's most serious silverware doesn't, if we forget for a moment the Champions League final against Barcelona, frequently suggest that their idea of teamwork is a collective failure of nerve — a bonus he did not enjoy in his four years in Newcastle.

While raddled by injury, and increasing evidence that Newcastle were hopeless, Owen did manage to score 30 goals in 65 games. It wasn't nearly enough to impress England manager Fabio Capello — but nor did it rule out the possibility that in the right set-up, and with a minimum of encouragement, he might still be able to make a significant impact.

More than anything, Ferguson's move seems to be a gesture in support of the meaning of certain careers.

If he had had the choice between signing at his price the big and sometimes brilliant Frenchman Karim Benzema and a possible reclamation of Michael Owen there's no doubt about what his priority would have been.

However, the big bird at Lyons had flown, and as available sparrows go, Owen — on a modest wage and possibly inspiring incentive clauses — can certainly make a case for himself.

Ferguson has done this kind of thing before. A massive admirer of the great French central defender Laurent Blanc, Fergie persuaded himself that he could coax a few more years out of one of the foundation stones of France's winning World Cup campaign in 1998. Blanc arrived at Old Trafford and for a little while was glorious.

Then it became apparent that he had lost much of his ability to run. So you cut your losses and move on.

Ferguson decided that he would have some of the last of Larsson, too, and for a few months the effect, not least on Wayne Rooney, was at times magical.

So of course Owen has come running to Old Trafford. It is not so much that he is pursuing some late and undreamed last hurrah, although no doubt that will have crossed his thoughts.

More than anything, you have to suspect, he is reaching out for something that was taken away from him some time ago, along with that first searing edge of speed. It is respect, the kind which comes naturally when you have done a few things and you operate in a proper football club.

Ferguson, simply, has been happy to oblige at the right time — and at the right price.