Whoever first described football as the working man’s ballet (it may have been Tony Waddington, the long-serving Stoke City manager), they were surely thinking of Denis Law, whose balance and agility inside an opposition penalty area would have brought a cheer from Nijinsky or Baryshnikov.

Even on the sort of gloomy midwinter day when an English football stadium could seem, in the pre-modern era, to be a dark and glowering place, Law shone through the murk, and not just for the bright red of his Manchester United jersey and the white of his shorts. A shock of straw-coloured hair made him stand out in every opposing team’s penalty area even when he wasn’t spontaneously arranging his limbs to execute a spectacular aerial volley.

Related: Denis Law, Manchester United and Scotland legend, dies aged 84

In the days when you could arrive at any First Division ground an hour before kick-off and queue to pay a few shillings at the turnstile, Law – just as much as Bobby Charlton and George Best, the teammates with whom he is enshrined in bronze outside the Old Trafford gates – was someone you travelled to see. He drew the attention even when apparently doing nothing more than hanging around in the opposition’s half, his jersey untucked – the sign, back then, of a rebellious spirit – and the cuffs on the long sleeves of his jersey bunched in each hand.

On another player, the effect might have been one of scruffiness. Not on Law. He was no urchin. Out there on the pitch, he was the epitome of a different and very personal kind of elegance.

As with his great contemporary and rival Jimmy Greaves, the fascination for the spectator lay at least partly in the waiting. Both players would lurk, predators patiently waiting for the chance to strike, each in his own style. Whereas Greaves’s killer blows were delivered with a cold-eyed assassin’s stiletto, Law flourished a fencing master’s foil. If the Englishman’s presence was all stealth and surprise, the Scot traded in an extrovert’s thrilling flamboyance.

Many of Law’s goals were scored from close range, as a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles. In that way, he and his fellow United forwards formed a usefully varied strike force. Charlton’s speciality was the unstoppable shot from distance, while Best turned defenders inside out before sliding the ball home. But the memories of Law’s goals are dominated by the combination of a pickpocket’s guile and a gymnast’s elasticity that could make a tap-in just as spectacular as a cannonball.

Law’s movement was not actually balletic, at least in terms of the classical discipline. It was not lyrical. But there was profound beauty in its finely tuned exploitation of his lithe physique, superb technique, perfect balance, sharp anticipation and hair-trigger opportunism.

Sometimes the killer blow would come when he was falling, or even already on the ground. Then he would rise from the mud to stand and acknowledge the acclaim with an arm raised imperiously above his head – the first footballer to create his own signature goal celebration.

He was a Scottish footballer beloved of English football fans, who recognised in him a special quality then thought to be typical of so many forwards from north of the border: a quick-witted ability to use skill and imagination to escape from confined spaces and smothering defences.

Although no stereotypical central striker, he was as dangerous with his head as with his feet, leaping to feed on crosses from Best, Charlton, Willie Morgan and John Aston. Instinct enabled him to get in front of his markers, often at the near post, to score goals of surprising power and deadly accuracy. And his slender build gave little hint of the courage and strength that enabled him to cope with brutal tackling, along with a hint of devilry that made him ready to give as good as he got.

Pat Crerand, his teammate with United and Scotland, noted his unselfishness. “If Denis Law was in front of goal with a 95% chance of scoring, and someone was standing in a better position with a 99% of scoring, he’d pass the ball. He always did the right thing.”

After four seasons as a teenager in the Second Division with Huddersfield Town, where he was given his debut by Bill Shankly, and one and a bit in the top flight with Manchester City, a move to Italy briefly lent him an exotic aura in the eyes of English spectators. His time in Serie A was short, just a single season, although not remotely ignominious. In 27 Serie A games for Torino in 1961-62 he scored 10 goals and was effective enough for Umberto Agnelli, the president of Juventus, to attempt to beat Matt Busby to his signature. After Busby had agreed a fee of £115,000 with Torino, a British record, enabling the Italian club to say they had made a profit of £5,000 on their payment to City a year earlier, Agnelli came in with an offer of £160,000.

Law was having none of it. He had not enjoyed the football or the attention in Italy, particularly when he and his pal Joe Baker, the Anglo-Scot signed from Hibernian, attracted lurid publicity after a late-night road accident in which Baker’s Alfa Romeo sports car landed on its roof. Returning to his native Aberdeen, Law refused to answer Torino’s calls, keeping his head down for a month until the United boss managed to convince the Italians that only by letting him return to England would they get their money back.

Four years after the Munich disaster, Law became one of the key components of Busby’s rebuilt side. Although they finished 19th in the 22-team First Division in his first season, he had 23 league goals to his name and scored the first of the three with which United beat Leicester City in the FA Cup final, giving him his first trophy as a professional footballer. The following year he won the Ballon d’Or and then, after Best had been introduced to the lineup, United were champions of the league and he was one of its great stars.

Charlton saw Law as the most fiercely patriotic of Scots. For him, England’s World Cup victory – “the blackest day of my life” – was the prelude to a decade of negative football inspired by Alf Ramsey’s successful tactics. He took his gleeful revenge by opening the scoring when Scotland beat Ramsey’s world champions 3-2 at Wembley the following April.

On his return to City in 1973, for his 18th and last season as a professional footballer, he finally scored a goal that he refused to celebrate. Through its sheer poignancy, the late backheel at Old Trafford that countersigned United’s relegation was immediately elevated to a prominence out of all proportion to its significance in his career.

His sharp, sardonic humour disguised a more private side. Charlton remembered Law’s keenness to get back to his home and family after a training session or a match – even, once substitutes had been introduced, during a match in which he had been replaced. There was, too, a keen sense of personal pride. After he was told that he would be leaving Old Trafford on a free transfer, he never forgave Tommy Docherty, then United’s manager, for the disruptive and dismaying effect of what he saw as a broken promise on his wife and children.

He was inimitable, although many tried. One grey afternoon in 1970 in Amsterdam, with a few hundred spectators rattling around the old Olympic stadium to watch DWS, the local team, play MVV Maastricht, the visiting centre-forward could have arrived from Madame Tussauds, sporting Law’s hairstyle and posture – and the shirt cuffs bunched in his fists – but nothing, alas, of the skill and panache that gave them meaning. In the same city a year earlier, an electrician and amateur footballer called Wim Bergkamp had borrowed Law’s first name for his infant son, although the registrar forced him to add an extra “n” to comply with some obscure Dutch baptismal regulation. More obviously, Rod Stewart took that rooster-cut blond hairstyle on tour around the world, in tribute to his idol. But Denis Law remained unique.