We've only ever needed 1 thing. A highly skilled DOF. It may sound too obvious but its a testament to how much Glazers just don't give a "f**k" about the club.
ETH is a decent coach but not skilled at building teams. Overmars did that at Ajax. He has done well recruiting former players. But lets take a laundry list at errors recently.
1. Antony was a terrible buy. You could have gotten 2 good EPL level players for his price. ETH made a terrible biased decision.
2. Didn't force a Maguire sell. Why not, publicize he is done, put him in the reserves.
3. Paying £54M for a player Chelsea was not willing to invest in and having 1 year left on the deal. Maybe it's good long term but still a bad short term decision.
4. Paying £64M plus 8M add-ons for an unproven young striker who's hurt? Maybe long term he develops, but that's a really bad bet to pay that much when you could fork out £25M and get an elite level player. But he's forced into this with previous bad investments of Mount and Antony.
5. Not getting rid of bad salaries of Maguire, Henderson, Bailly, Martial immediately last season, taking a short term financial hit but coming out ahead long term with more money to invest in rebuilding year 3 onwards.