“Sir Alex Ferguson retires #thankyousiralex.” With that tweet at 9.17am on Wednesday May 8 last year, Manchester United confirmed the news many of us had already guessed — Twitter is the dominant media for discussing football.

We may watch it on TV and read about it in newspapers, books and magazines — or watch and read about it on our tablets or smartphones — but when it comes to actually talking about the beautiful game, Twitter’s where it’s at.

The 2012-13 season saw Chelsea use Twitter to announce Roberto Di Matteo’s sacking and the appointment of first Rafael Benitez and then Jose Mourinho. QPR tweeted the firing of Mark Hughes and the hiring of Harry Redknapp and Everton broke the news of Roberto Martinez’s appointment via Twitter.

The fact the Old Trafford media team decided to eschew the tried and tested methods of the press conference or press release and instead used Twitter to confirm that Sir Alex was stepping down speaks volumes.

Within eight minutes the club’s self-styled hashtag #ThankYouSirAlex was the top trend worldwide. Within an hour there had been 1.4 million mentions of the story on Twitter, 400,000 more than in the same period following the announcement of Margaret Thatcher’s death a month earlier.

If you still doubt the importance of Twitter as an arena for discussing football here are some more numbers for you. Of the list of the top 10 most talked-about events of 2012 on Twitter — measured by the number of tweets sent per second — seven were about sport, of which four were about football.

On the day Twitter nearly melted over the news that Sir Alex had decided to retire, United’s cross-city rivals Manchester City released their own news which, although it passed most people by, will likely have a far greater impact on the game in the long-term.

They revealed they were going to install high-density wifi at the Etihad Stadium, creating one of the most “immersive, video-rich experiences in sports.”

What does that actually mean? Well, apart from the fact everyone in the stadium will be able to text, tweet or access the web at the same time without any problems, it will effectively turn every smartphone in the ground into a live video scoreboard.

Just by opening up the relevant app, fans will be able to receive live commentary, view live video from a variety of camera angles, rewind the footage, access real-time statistical information and even order food.

The upshot of all this is that the second screen experience is moving out of your living room and into the football stadium. In short, even watching a game live will become a mediated experience.

But if fans can get all this straight to their smartphones while they’re at the ground watching a match, where does this leave older forms of media? Cheaper hardware and quicker, easier ways to disseminate content hasn’t just democratised the means of production, it has also changed the nature of consumption.

Previously primary consumption was buying the newspaper and secondary consumption was borrowing a copy from a friend, picking up a discarded copy on the train or in a pub or maybe looking at a back issue in a library archive.

But this rudimentary social network was limited by the number of people you knew or the distance you were able to travel. New and social media have made it much easier to cross the boundaries of time and space, meaning your social network is much larger. A blog post, video or a tweet can be liked or re-tweeted by just one reader and it’s instantly in the possession of all their followers.

There is no escaping the fact that fans are no longer just consumers, they’re producers too and so are the players. Now there are loads of them tweeting all sorts of stuff with no browbeaten PR on hand to say: “Joey, I don’t think that’s such a good idea.” Social media is allowing footballers to break news about themselves or give an opinion which is only subsequently reported by the mainstream media.

Of course, it works the other way too. Ryan Giggs successfully got an order stopping the press and television news from telling us that his carefully crafted family-man image hid another side of his personality, but that didn’t stop the news trending on Twitter.

And although the match in which John Terry was alleged to have racially abused Anton Ferdinand was broadcast on Sky, it was only once the footage was posted on YouTube and shared via Twitter that it became a news story.

Some media are better equipped to deal with this than others. TV and radio are immediate and intimate and are less restricted by time and space. Just as TV has already gone digital, so radio will have made the switch by 2019. It’s significant that the BBC and Sky are just as strong now as they were before the dotcom bubble burst in other people’s faces but what about the “Grand Old Man” of the media? What about newspapers?

In 2011 the Daily Mirror’s chief football writer Oliver Holt told an interesting anecdote about the incident in which Manchester City substitute Carlos Tevez refused to come on during the club’s Champions League match with Bayern Munich.

Holt had been covering the game but said that because of the position of the press box at the Allianz arena he didn’t see Tevez’s confrontation with manager Roberto Mancini. The first he knew about it was when he started receiving texts and tweets from people watching the game on TV.

OK, the stadium’s layout played a part but the fundamental point remains — here was a journalist who was writing a report for a newspaper which wouldn’t hit the shops until the following morning, finding out about the game’s top line via a social networking site accessible to all from people watching the match live on TV.

Football journalism is thriving. We’re probably reading more about football than ever before but newspapers as a delivery mechanism for that journalism? Well, that’s a different issue altogether.

Really their days have been numbered since 1936 when BBC radio’s Richard Dimbleby scooped them all from a phone box with his live report on the Crystal Palace fire. Newspapers as we know them were born in the age of railway time. They might have been at the cutting edge of media technology when the Sheffield Evening Telegraph took less than 10 minutes to get the result of a match nearly 80 miles away into the paper and onto the streets, but that was in 1889.

The fact is that in the age of the multiscreen “transmedia sport experience,” of smart stadia and of internet time, newspapers just can’t keep pace. To stave off the inevitability of death, newspaper companies have been forced to evolve. The internet is increasingly central to their plans and many have made great strides to adopt other new and social media techniques to drive traffic to their websites.

Also central to their plans is football, the most popular sport on the planet. Which just goes to show, the more things change the more they stay the same.

From The Back Page to the Front Room: Football’s Journey Through the English Media by Roger Domeneghetti is available on all formats via www.ockleybooks.co.uk, with the paperback priced at £9.99.