You're mixing up bad decisions with owners intentions.
For example:
You sacked Ranieri shortly after winning the league. Which apparently means your owners are football people and really care.
We sacked LvG right after we won the FA cup. But our owners are just happy to bumble along?
We made bad managerial appointments which again means we're happy with mediocrity apparently.
Your guys appointed Claude Puyel. Doesn't exactly scream ambition does it?
Your club finances are a mess. Ours are pretty good. Does that mean your owners don't care and ours do?
There's just too many contradictions in your post because you've gone all tribal defending your own.
If our owners won't change anything as long as the manager is ameniable then they'll stick with Ole right? That's where your logic takes you.
If Ole gets sacked soon lets pick this up again and see if you still believe our owners are happy with the current level of achievement.
I'm not mixing anything nor went tribal, just under the impression that your owners don't give much of a shit about MU from a
football point of view and it shows. Not rubbing it in your face, just how it feels from an outsider point of view.
Even if they're not football experts, just as our owners are or many others in the league, it doesn't mean that they can let the
footballing standards drop. At least not for a long time. To keep it simple, MU as a club are a cornerstone, an institution in the english top league, they have enough history and trophies for anyone who's remotely interested in investing in it to
know what the
football expectations of the club are. Say what you want about the Qataris, Abramovich and the like, but the thing is that they understood what their club and fans
football expectations are. Of course they make a shitload of money out of it, that's their goal at the end of day, but they're killing two birds with one stone. Generate money and put the club in the spotlight while keeping the fans happy. They are in their own way committed, not selling them pipe dreams based on buzzwords like "DNA".
The point I'm trying to make is that the common point they all have is a
footballing vision, they plan for the long term. No matter what the underlying motives or the means to the end are, they want their club at the very top of the food chain, and will spare no effort (nor the money at disposal) to achieve that. They also appoint competent people at the footballing helm since they're not experts in the matter, and
hold them accountable for the footballing results. They try to make the results sustainable by establishing a competent scouting system in accordance to the club's
footballing vision. They're not caught in any kind of romanticism or nostalgia because it's a football club not Disneyland, and bring out the axe whenever they feel that the club isn't going in the desired direction. All of the well run clubs have a plan, a clear upward trajectory. None of them keep a manager around when he's not up to it because muh, player legend. See Frank Lampard as the most recent example. They take their respective club's
footballing ambitions seriously.
We appointed Claude Puel because he was a
builder. He's a much maligned manager in England because of his stint at Soton, but imo he actually did well despite the shite hand he was dealt with. Just like you, after Ranieri's sacking in February 2017, we gave into sentimentality by giving a permanent job to the caretaker Craig Shakespeare. He was the training coach under Ranieri and before him, Nigel Pearson, who actually built the team that would go winning the 2015/16 title. He was a very competent coach and well liked among the players, and when he took over after Ranieri's sacking, he lead us to the CL quarter-finals while achieving a respectable 12th place (for us then) in the league. He was then appointed as permanent manager in June 2017. Now caretaker and manager are two very different things, as Shakespeare would experience it the hard way. After a disastrous league start and unconvincing summer signings, it was clear for us and the owners that it was a bridge too far. Going back to the 2015/16 glorious way of playing wouldn't cut it anymore as teams now have adapted, and he was sacked in mid October 2017.
Enter Claude Puel. For most of the english fans, he was the guy who stank up the place at Southampton, playing dour, defensive football. These fans conveniently forget that Southampton lost most of their major assets at that time and Puel had to put out fires during the whole season he was there. He still took them to the FA Cup final, against you, where they honestly should've won the game, and finishing 8th in the league, 2 places below Koeman's last season but still respectable considering how many of the star players they lost. Now for people who actually followed football and not only the PL, Puel was a (french) league winner and had the reputation of breeding in young players as well as getting the most of his flair players. To the contrary to what he had to do with Soton given the circumstances, he actually advocated attacking football - whenever possible. The season before he was appointed, he did wonders at Nice, playing attractive, attacking football and reviving Ben Arfa's dead career in the process.
For us it was crucial, as we had Mahrez who was adrift and underperforming, no playing system, and a bloated, dysfunctional, ageing squad that needed to be trimmed down. It was an ungrateful, shit job for anyone who'd be brave enough to take, and add to that a very strong resistance amongst the fans from the moment he was appointed. Yet he did it, with more or less success. Mahrez was flying again under him, until Man City messed with his head and Puel blocked his transfer in January 2018. He stopped the slump, cleared the deadwood. We stopped leaking goals like there was no tomorrow, finally had a style of play even if it was hard to watch at times, and finished 9th that season. The young'uns were given a chance. Maddison, Tielemans, Söyüncü, R. Pereira were all his signings. All young, full of potential but still unproven in the top flight. Fofana is our current most promising CB and is hugely missed due to his terrible pre-season injury. Guess who gave him a chance and bred him in at St-Etienne before we bought him last season? Yeh, that Claude Puel. You can also add Jonny Evans, in another register though.
However he fell out with senior players, particularly with Vardy. We lost Mahrez to City at the end of the season, the fans hated his dull press conferences and weren't pleased with the football produced even if just like Southampton, we had more pressing issues than playing attractive football. Still, there was
a tangible, visible progress, transitioning from a predominant, but sussed out counter-attacking football to a more contemporary, possession based one. So the club stuck with him for the moment. In the 2018-19 season however, things went to shit, we weren't doing great in the league, lost to Newport in the 3rd round of the FA Cup and after a dreadful run (5-6 games without a win in the PL, I think) the owners decided they've seen enough and pulled the trigger in February 2019. Rodgers was then appointed a couple of days after that, which obviously means that he's been approached way before Puel's sack. But he was as much an upgrade on Puel as a continuity in the way we wanted to play the game. Possession based without renouncing to our trademark counterattack, free flowing attacking football with emphasis on young/promising players in line with what we would and could sign. The rest is what you and I know.
So from the moment they took over in 2008, we went from being a poorly run, yo-yo club, even being relegated to League One, to genuine top 4-6 PL contenders, despite the implosions at the end of the last two seasons. We went from Peter fecking Taylor, Ian Holloway to Brendan Rodgers. From fighting relegation each season to contending for a european place. How long will it last? God only knows, but the will of the owners and their vision about the club was imprinted from day one. Not that we're the only ones in this case, mind. What I'm trying to say is that "pashun", commitment have to come from the top to be effectively translated on the pitch. It starts with the higher-ups and what they want from the club they bought. And yes, if Ole by some kind of miracle, pulls it out and manages to keep you in the top 4 and comes out of his group stage in the UCL, they'd have no reason to sack him. You still generate an insane amount of money and attract fans from all over the world, based on your not so far away achievements. The other "historic" clubs (Juve, Barca, Real, etc.) aren't doing that well, especially since the pandemic, so there's still lots of money to be made out of it.
Yeh, we had financial issues since we were trying to keep up the pace with the best english teams while building one of the most modern training grounds in England and a stadium expansion, and nobody could have predicted a fecking pandemic that would last almost two years. While you might have not felt it, it affected a lot of clubs who are less blessed in income matters. I don't know what you're getting at, and it seems to me that you're using that strawman while eluding the points I've made about a club's management.