The truth of the whole thing is the club as we all knew it died in 2005 when they took over and it’s taken this long to realise it. For 8yrs we had the will of the greatest living manager keeping the club alive and fortunately a lot of the core that made the 2007-2010 team was already present.
Prior to this, contrary to the revisionist narrative, we had no issue at all buying superstars or going all out for young talent. It was always a core of local/academy talent enhance by some of the best in the world. Yorker and Cole, Rudd, Stam, Ferdinand (30m in 2001!!!), 12.8m for an unproven 18yr Old Portuguese kid (remember the outrage?) and 24m for Rooney at 18yrs old. Not just fees but wages too as I’m sure we remember the outrage when we gave Keane £75k a week.
The club was hitting life support after Ronaldo left and we spent 1/6 of his money on a replacement, quickly followed by the unwillingness to pay the requirement for Tevez and Fergie's, ‘no value in the market’ period. They stuck their necks out one time to get Fergie RvP but for that post-Ronaldo period our spending was a joke. We had, barring arguably the greatest Barcelona side there’s ever been, the best squad in Europe. It was us and Barca at the top table with a long gap to the next tier of teams but we got shoehorned in to second rate deals for the likes of Buttner, Nick Powell and others that did nothing but veer the squad off-course in to mediocrity. The only thing that got us that last title for Fergie was that combination of his mentality and that of the core number of players within that squad who would simply refuse to be beaten. We played some SHIT that season but would always find a way to get the points.
As soon as the great man left (and I’m genuinely pissed at his role in their takeover with that shit with JP McManus) the inmates started running the asylum. Gill left (I would argue the bigger loss for the club) and the Glazers’s little pet came in and suddenly became a football CEO instead of an accountant and a Commercial Director.
The fact is that the club, to continue the analogy is no longer on life support, it’s dead, stuffed on the Glazers mantle-piece like a trophy and our only apparent saviours are the fecking Saudi royal family, a group happy to murder journalists and allegedly hack multinational conglomerate CEO’s phones.
When it was Moyes he was too inexperienced, with LvG he was over the hill, with Jose it was that he was too acerbic, with Ole it’s that he’s too friendly. It does not matter who our manager is whilst these leaches are in charge as, no matter how nice a vision the manager wants to present, they simply won’t have the resources released to let them realise it. I’m not even blaming Woodward anymore at this point because he’s not at the top, and he has a boss who tells him exactly how high he can jump.
In 2005 we were one of the biggest footballing brands in the world, had zero debt and would throw our financial muscle and take the best from the others to make us better. Now we are in the top 5 sporting brands in the world, a financial juggernaut, with less resources to the core stock of our value, the team.
It’s a fecking disgrace.