Alex Ferguson is busy right now conquering America. But at some point he will get round to appointing a new number two.

Mike Phelan has been filling in as the United manager's assistant since Carlos Quieroz quit Old Trafford to join Real Madrid. But Ferguson will eventually appoint someone from outside the club.

"We will bring somebody in," Ferguson said. "I don't know how long it will take, but we are not in a hurry. Taking time has always worked in the past."

Ferguson will discuss the issue with United's chief executive, Peter Kenyon, in the United States over the next few days. In the meantime, he will continue to take a prominent role in training.

United play Celtic in Seattle tomorrow (4am kick-off, GMT), Club America of Mexico in Los Angeles on Sunday, Juventus in New York on Thursday week and Barcelona in Philadelphia three days later.

Only LA is not sold out and tickets have generally gone quicker than for Bruce Springsteen's latest US tour, something United happily attribute to "the club's global appeal".

But it is an appeal that passes most Americans by. Losing David Beckham just as his face was beginning to appear on US magazine covers has left United rather worse off than the Beatles would have been arriving at Shea Stadium without John Lennon.

Without their Hollywood-handsome attraction, United are quickly discovering that the attitude of the US media is a case of "so what".

Any chance of United getting decent news coverage has been extinguished by the uproar surrounding Kobe Bryant, the LA Lakers superstar. At the weekend he held a televised news conference, with his wife by his side, in which he admitted adultery but denied a police charge of sexual assault. In newspaper terms, little else matters for the back pages right now, particularly a bunch of largely anonymous footballers from England.

In the absence of much native interest, crowds at United's matches will largely consist of Hispanics and expatriates. "I'm led to believe two thirds of the crowd will be Celtic fans," Ferguson said yesterday.

It would have been different had United held on to Beckham, who enjoys a higher US media profile partly because of the success of the film Bend It Like Beckham. When the Washington Post devoted an entire page to United, acknowledging the club as the world's most valuable sports franchise, it was the departed England captain who earned the tribute of being likened to Joe Namath, the most charismatic quarterback in the history of what Americans will always know as football.

Then came a cover story in USA Today bearing the headline "The Most Famous Athlete in the World (except in the USA)". And, finally, the New York Times ran an editorial about the Beckham mediathon.

"It's just a shame Beckham won't be playing," says Grant Wahl, soccer columnist for Sports Illustrated. "Suddenly the tour has a lot less buzz."