2009 – United win the league championship for the 3rd season in a row. They reach back to back Champions League finals. They are the World Champions and have the current Ballon D’or winner and the PFA POTY in their side.
It’s from this point the decline starts.
Signings in the years previous to that Summer is similar to what Liverpool have been doing recently but on an even bigger scale. It’s one hit after hit. This is how such a great team was built:
Berbatov
Anderson
Nani
Hargreaves
Tevez
Carrick
Vidic
Evra
Park
Van Der Sar
Rooney
Smith
C.Ronaldo
Saha
Following on from that Summer, the signings become more hit and miss:
Owen
Valencia
Obertan
Smalling
Chicharito
Bebe
Young
Jones
De Gea
Kagawa
Van Persie
We then find ourselves in 2013 winning the league once more. However, we had lost quality in those 4 years since 2009 and as you can see from the list above, it was not adequately replaced. RVP was the main reason we won the league that year. The squad is fairly aged. We have failed to reach the ¼ finals of the Champions League in 2 seasons and it needs refreshing.
It can therefore be said that a small amount of blame is on Fergie’s hands. The quality of the recruitment had declined between 2009 and 2013, in comparison to between 2003 and 2009.
However, the squad were still champions and needed some refreshing over the Summer. Players like Rooney probably did need moving on in all honesty, yet Moyes kept him and didn’t break up the squad at all probably because he didn’t have the balls and thought he would do well enough with a championship winning team. Wrong. He then coaches the team poorly to a disastrous 7th place finish – he is also to blame.
Nevertheless, he still realised that we needed new players in that Summer of 2013, yet we didn’t get any as Woodward completely failed to do so. He was shambolic in that 2013 window and should have gone there and then. In the following years, a change of manager from a mug like Moyes to some of the most highly rated in history, has still not changed the awful recruitment. Van Gaal and Mouiniho were too defensive and maybe a little past their best to bring United back. They also share some of the blame. However, the recruitment from 2013 to 2020 has been beyond diabolical and there is only 1 man who has been the constant through all of it. His signings look like:
Fellaini
Mata
Di Maria
Shaw
Herrera
Rojo
Blind
Falcao
Martial
Schneiderlin
Depay
Darmian
Bastian
Romero
Pogba
Mkhitaryan
Ibra
Lukaku
Matic
Lindelof
Sanchez
Fred
Dalot
Compared to that top list it is utter dross. So whilst Fergie’s latter hit and miss recruitment meant the squad wasn’t in the best state, and then Moyes’ lack of bottle and crap management meant that squad was even more rotten a year later and we were out the top 4 for the first time, Van Gaal and Jose’s crap football meant we didn’t get anywhere - it is still Woodward who has been in charge of recruitment through all those post-Fergie managers and who is responsible for that horror list above. Yes, Van Gaal and Jose will have targeted some of crap, failed to coach them properly and share a lot of the blame, but how do you then excuse windows such as 2014 where we left it all too late, 2017 where we didn’t buy anywhere near enough, 2018 where we didn’t buy anywhere near enough and 2019 which was absolutely laughably bad? That's on Woodward.
All these managers hold a small stake in the shit-show that Ed Woodward is entirely responsible for. They are all just footnotes as far as I’m concerned. None of them were good managers but the squad Ed has assembled and the inability of him to conclude deals, to buy in the positions our managers want him to and his preference to buy players to sell shirts rather than actual footballing reasoning is 80% of the reason we are in the mess we are in today. I also believe he has brought in players that previous managers didn't even want, pretending he has a clue about football.
Finally, when you consider he is the one who brought in these shite managers, it's 100% on him and he needs to accept that. After 7 years of crap with him and the common denominator at what point does he accept that it might be on him?