IT’S always sad to leave a workplace you love and it’s understandable that the temptation will be there to turn up every Friday and ask if anybody fancies a beer like the old days and act like you’re still part of the group WhatsApp.

You can tell your replacements what you did when you worked there, how you fix the printer and the best place for coffee nearby.

But there is a natural grace period to all this; and then there is semi-stalking, weirding out the new employees and putting pressure on them to do things exactly as you had done before.

Sadly, nobody seems to have explained the etiquette to Sir Alex Ferguson who, more than a decade after leaving the job of manager of Manchester United, continues to turn up every week. Not just every now and then, but every ­– single ­­– week!

Imagine taking any job offer in the working world but being told by the interviewers that the person who did it before you did it REALLY, REALLY well and: “Just so you know, they will be coming in to watch you do it every week. Are you OK with that?”

This is the desperate fate that every United manager has faced since his “retirement” in 2013.

In fact, nobody has put more intense pressure on every one of his successors and the anaemic United team we see now than their treble hero, with the cameras flashing to the stands to see either a happy Fergie or a sad Fergie.

In comparison, Arsene Wenger clearly still loves Arsenal but has been graceful in his support from afar and hasn’t acted like a mute backseat driver – saying nothing out loud by expressing it all with a frown or an exasperated sigh.

In recent months it has been revealed among the United free meal cost-cutting that Sir Alex had been collecting £2million a year to work as an ambassador.

Nobody would know who United were if they didn’t have a set of ambassadors to represent them, you see.

Whatever you think of mean ol’ Jim Ratcliffe, stopping this payment doesn’t seem unreasonable.

The owner said this week that he had told Sir Alex: “Honestly, we can’t really afford to continue to pay you £2million a year,” adding: “I said ‘I’m going to leave it with you, let you have a think about it’.

Maybe a little bit grumpy at the beginning but Fergie got it, and he came back three days later, after talking to his son, and said “fine, I’m going to step away from it.”

It took him three days, people. And he needed to talk to his son.

Sometimes you’ve just got to let it go.