I think first a philosophy for a club has to be set off the pitch, and not on the pitch. It goes beyond quality of player, or technical ability, to more along the lines of character and mentality of player. That's what made SAF so successful, the character of players that he bought. You can't play high risk football unless you have a mentally strong squad capable of dealing with the pressure of high risk football.
What I always loved about the SAF era was that it was always about the sum of the whole, building a squad in which every player complemented each other, hard workers such as Park and Rooney willing to sacrifice themselves in order to allow Ronaldo to shine, much like Fletcher doing the hard graft so that Scholes could focus on what he excelled at.
I think the most worrying thing in the last 5 years has been the lack of coherent thought process as to how to build a squad capable of competing, hence the general outcry for a DoF. This idea that Woodward would have paid 100m for Varane, this obsession with building a squad of the best available 11 players in the world is naive, it simply doesn't work like that. Were Evra, Vidic, Park, Carrick and plenty others that contributed heavily to the success of United the greatest players in their position at the time the were bought?
In my mind, the greatest trait of United during SAF was the never say die attitude, players willing to give everything to the cause, fight until the very last minute, self belief in what they were doing. That goes beyond posession football, quick passing, wing play or whatever footballing style that was implemented, it was down to sheer desire and mental fortitude. That never say die attitude filtered right down from the top, from management, to our recruitment policy, everything that was done on the pitch was a culmunation of what was ingrained into every single player behind the scenes. To me, that's what we are missing the most. Its possible we are in a different era of football to ever see that again. Football has changed so much in the past 5 years alone its possible that looking back means nothing any more. Do players of the likes that SAF had at his disposal even exist any more?