I think the answer is that we have simply never valued it enough, as a club. Football teams, and then entire football clubs, are often built upon certain principles - and the top passing teams are never coincidental. It’s always obvious that they have made a clear decision on building a team on the principle that it MUST keep the ball, and have clearly spent hours and hours training and drilling that. It’s often the same journey too, never quite right at first, sometimes backfires in some high profile moments but the coach swears by it - and so long as he is there, that’s the way his team should play. Players are signed in keeping with these requirements and an identity is soon established.
With us, this has never been the case. Van Gaal tried to teach us how to keep the ball and we complained that we were bored. Our transfer strategy has always been with a view to players providing ‘impact’, i.e - a successful signing is one who will ‘win us the league’ more than one who compliments a clear wider vision. But primarily, our managers have not been committed to it, our own manager seems to have suddenly decided he can’t be bothered with it and now wants us to be a ‘transition team’, so clearly, it’s not a non-negotiable philosophy of his.
We can’t just become a top passing team by chance. It’s a decision, one that takes time and deliberate recruitment. If we are a ‘passing team’, a lot of players simply would not be here. They are here because we have placed other qualities they have above the importance of passing the ball well, and this is what it looks like.