You're clutching at straws, imo. In terms of full autonomy, Mourinho had it, just like Moyes and Van Gaal, up until the point where they didn't and got sacked. Full autonomy is one of several reasons we've managed to spend £850mill since Fergie retired on transfer fees, and we still have a squad with more holes than swiss cheese. He was allowed to get rid of the players he didn't want and we spent the odd £370mill in transfer fees + the two free transfers of Sanchez and Zlatan in an attempt to allow him to build the squad he wanted. In the same period, Tottenham spent less than half of that bringing players in, while selling players for close to £130mill (we sold for £77mill). Liverpool actually spent around £10mill more than us during the same period, but they sold players for a lot more (£291mill, just one of them being a key player, Coutinho)
I agree that the board shouldn't have handed him a contract extension (with increased wages) that early, but it's hardly that black and white either. Mourinho and his agent were making noises about other potential "projects" while we were doing fairly well, what would the reactions have been if Woodward went head to head not wanting to extend at the time, damned if you do and damned if you don't. Things turned sour quickly, unfortunately.
Peoples interpretation of not being backed is surprisingly strict. When it comes to transfers, we did our best to sign the players he wanted and got the majority of them. Unfortunately, most of the focus was on the players we didn't sign. Again, we spent £370mill + two extremely expensive free transfers (sign on fee + wages) over the course of 3 summers. None of the other managers got all the players they wanted and, perhaps more importantly, 12 months later they weren't still complaining about it. Mourinho slowly started losing the support of the higher ups towards the end of his second season at the club. Martial and Rashford had a great start to the season, then Mourinho got his will and we shipped out Mkhi in return for Sanchez, who we then proceeded to stick out left where we already were alternating between Rashford and Martial. We had essentially gone from two young players doing well, having a functional left side, to an extremely expensive Sanchez not playing well at all and for some reason constantly playing, his comments surrounding the Sevilla match and our exit from the Champions League, rewind back to his first season and his comments about the failures of Klopp, Poch, how finishing top 4 without winning anything is meaningless, fast forward to "one of his biggest achievements in his career", finishing 2nd in the league without actually competing for the title. His stint as a pundit during the world cup with the focus on the clubs failure to sign Perisic, Mourinho's utter absurd decision to have a go at Pogba instead of simply praising him for an outstanding world cup and looking forward to the next season. His complaints about not being backed that summer carries more weight but it's not that simple either:
- Bailly and Lindelof were hardly cheap signings at the time, suddenly he didn't fancy either of them and the solution was to go after Maguire, who had a good world cup for England, for a world record fee, take into account that we'd tracked Maguire years back and he was available for half of what we forked out for Lindelof during the same transfer window, it's hardly a surprise that people weren't too impressed. Not to mention that his solution to our right wing was that we should get rid of Martial, preferably to Chelsea in order to get Willian (who was only interested in a transfer if Conte continued as Chelsea manager). Factor in Matic's performances, how Willian was generally playing, the importancy of bringing in Sanchez, the decision to sell Depay (Club originally wanted a loan deal, as they had hopes he'd improve) who was now playing well in France, Blind doing very well for Ajax. Mourinho's decisions were looking dodgy as feck, at the same time as he was picking fights with the dressing room and generally giving his full backing to players that weren't performing whatsoever. Mourinho undermined himself.