For all the highly deserved criticism of Woodward, the problem wasn't just confined to his 'glamour' signings like Pogba, Di Maria but the numerous other, badly-chosen not-so-glamorous signings, whether Darmian or Schneidelin, or Bailly [ Mourinho era obv] etc (alongside the godawful coaching). Those weren't t-shirt or social media purchases or favours to Mendes, they were failures in manager and lead scouting capacity - there were lots of hungry, quick, potentially physically-capable and technically good moneyball talents floating around French, German, Dutch leagues who, added to a clutch signing or two (the 'right' kind of big-name, respect generating player, again partly down to the manager) could have seen us match Liverpool at the least.
So, even Bielsa's Leeds and Potter's Brighton (notwithstanding the clusterfeck of Chelsea Potter era) played more fluent and intelligent football later on than Van Gaal or most of the Mourinho era. That kind of game plan with the right young players, plus a suitable guaranteed striker using United-scale budget gets those sides into top 4, so we shouldn't have had any issues, even with playing ersatz Real Madrid 'Zidane and pavons' policy. For instance, if the club were going to splash the kind of money they did at the time, why not target it at Lewandowski' ((at Dortmund, or for the signing-fee when he was considering the move to Bayern)?