Looking back at the summer of 09. Did it signal the end of us being a top club?

Not just for us, after what was 5 years of premier league teams reaching the champions league final, all the top sides in the prem would decline over next few years. One of the reasons that we were able to remain the no. 1 team in the country for another 4 years.

I think the one signing we really missed out on that year was Benzema. He obviously had Madrid as his ultimate destination but we were negotiating and there was a deal to be done there. Madrid were trying for Villa at the time and they would have agreed to stay away from Benzema if we’d asked as part of Ronaldo deal. Still bewildered to this day how we just let that deal drift away.

We bought some good players over the next few years but they felt more to compliment the existing spine of the team as opposed to improve it. Maybe De Gea was the one player we did sign that was exciting. By 2013, a few players would have a bit of a swan song and the re build job would be massive.
 
In retrospect it looks like the beginning of the end, especially when the following summer's transfer window was little better.

It's true that in the short/medium term we continued being successful, winning two more titles in following seasons. But even at the time there was a strong feeling that those league winning sides were a clear step down on the side that had won three-in-a-row a few years previously. And by the time SAF left the squad was in obvious need of a big refresh, which could have been ameliorated by better long term recruitment in the three or so years prior.
 
philippexyz said:
Moment our future was doomed(as a top club) is Glazer takeover in 2005. Ronaldo and Fergie leaving in 2009 and 2013 respectively were just important steps on that path of gradual decline.
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This. 100% this.

Everything else was inertia and details.

A greedy motherfecker, who knew nothing about football, couldnt care less about it, took over United in a "leveraged buyout" and loaded it with mind-blowing amount of debt, overnight. THAT was the beginning of an end, nothing else
 
Yes, this was absolutely the beginning of the end. Other clubs were spending up large and we just refused to. We didn't spend because of our horrible owners and also thought that we could get away with it due to the Fergie factor. It was true to a degree as he did keep us competitive for a few more years, but my God how quickly did it go to shite once he left.
 
The glazer debt prevented us from having the most dominant run in PL history, likely winning every title from 2007 to 2013. If we were in a position to reinvest the Ronaldo funds, it would’ve been two-fold: reinvest in attack and midfield while also potentially slowing the rise of city. I’m pretty certain we could’ve hijacked their moves for Yaya, Silva or Aguero, we were still the more attractive destination. Instead we became complacent and the slow rot began.
 
I still maintain it was the Summers of 2009, 2013 and 2014 that did the most damage to the club's long-term standing.

We could have still rebounded in 2013 if we had secured a capable manager and a CEO who knew the business.

Realistically, we could easily have signed Ozil, Herrera and Thiago in 2013. Instead, we fatally unbalanced our squad with the wrong profile of player in Fellaini and Mata. 2014 we could have gone out and signed Shaw and Di Maria, giving us a squad of:

De Gea
Rafael - Smalling - Evans - Shaw
(Fabio, Jones, Vidic, Evra)
Thiago - Herrera - Di Maria
(Carrick, Cleverley)
Nani - Ozil
(Kagawa, Januzaj, Zaha, Valencia)
Van Persie
(Rooney, Welbeck, Hernandez)

Even accounting for loss of form, development etc, the squad above would have had a fighting chance of maintaining our level Post Fergie.
 
MiceOnMeth said:
We sold Ronaldo for €94 million and replaced him with Antonio Valencia for €18 million. Our other reinforcements included a finished Michael Owen on a free transfer and Gabriel Obertan for €4million and Mame Diouf for €5 million meaning none of the Ronaldo money was invested back into a squad that badly needed refreshing to compete with the likes of Peps Barcelona.

Meanwhile Madrid not only took our balon dor winner they also brought in Brazilian superstar Kaka for €67million, hot prospect Benzema for €35million and one of the Premier leagues elite midfielders Xabi Alonso taking their total spend to over €200 million.

Feels quite insane looking back that Fergie was ok with this. He watched us go from breaking records for the likes of Rio and Rooney to penny pinching and signing players from Wigan (no offense to Valencia) while the European giants closed this gap significantly on us and we no longer had one of the strongest teams in Europe.

What was the mood like on here at the time? We were still the best team in England and CL finalists but did you all see the writing on the wall for our demise during this time?
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Fergie convinced Ronaldo to stick around for a final year after the Moscow final, so him leaving in 09 was inevitable.

Valencia was obviously never going to replace him, but he did contribute a decade of service to the club, often at a very high level. There was a point at which (still at Barca at the time) said Valencia was the best winger in the world.
 
Gazza said:
I still maintain it was the Summers of 2009, 2013 and 2014 that did the most damage to the club's long-term standing.

We could have still rebounded in 2013 if we had secured a capable manager and a CEO who knew the business.

Realistically, we could easily have signed Ozil, Herrera and Thiago in 2013. Instead, we fatally unbalanced our squad with the wrong profile of player in Fellaini and Mata. 2014 we could have gone out and signed Shaw and Di Maria, giving us a squad of:

De Gea
Rafael - Smalling - Evans - Shaw
(Fabio, Jones, Vidic, Evra)
Thiago - Herrera - Di Maria
(Carrick, Cleverley)
Nani - Ozil
(Kagawa, Januzaj, Zaha, Valencia)
Van Persie
(Rooney, Welbeck, Hernandez)

Even accounting for loss of form, development etc, the squad above would have had a fighting chance of maintaining our level Post Fergie.
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I doubt David Moyes or United wanted Maroune Fellaini though. He was available for £23m because of a clause which was expiring after July 31st, if we really wanted him we could've had him instead of paying for 28m around the end of the transfer market.
None of our main targets(Thiago Alcantara) wanted to come I guess and was forced to buy Fellaini. Shows how badly we was run. How could you go from Thiago to Fellaini? And that leaving it to the end of the market. Just madness.

Also Mesut Ozil, how did we let Arsenal sign him?
 
Yup it was the first shift. We felt the effects of it from then until SAF retired but he was such a good manager that he mitigated a lot of the damage.

08/09 was the best squad we ever had and Barcelona just beat us in the battle of the two best teams. Fergie always loved a challenge and there was never a time a team was better than us that we didn’t rise to the challenge and dethrone them. Barcelona was the exception because we kept getting worse while they got better and gave us an embarrassing defeat at Wembley.

The summer of 09 in any other period, SAF would go for the biggest stars or the best young players in the world. Valencia was a great servant and Owen served his purpose but that was the moment we could no longer compete at the highest level. Benzema, Tevez, Robben, Sneijder, Eto’o, Ibrahimovic, Diego Milito all moved clubs that summer and we didn’t get any. It was ridiculous looking back at it considering we were the second best side in the world and 1 game from being the first team to win b2b CLs as well as only the second team to win 3 PL titles in a row at the time.
 
As someone else has said, the Glazer takeover was the first and most important step.

Replacing the greatest manager of all time with David Moyes is what killed us.
 
TheRedDevil'sAdvocate said:
It was a disappointment for two major reasons. For starters, it was a missed opportunity to incorporate the new football trends of the time into a well-oiled machine led by a GOAT manager and several top-class players. Instead, we sleepwalked for the next few seasons, resting on our laurels and capitalizing on the league's "ebb moment" to knock Liverpool off their perch. It became worse later on because, at the time and in terms of decision-making, Ferguson was to United what Louis XIV was to France. When he retired, we had to replace not only a manager, but a whole modus operandi.

The other thing was watching our noisy neighbours with their fast-track spending catching up from 2009 to 2014. It was alright to laugh at them at the start, but it became clear as daylight that after the initial nonsense spending, they were getting more things right than wrong.

By 2012, our fear factor was Ferguson in the dugout chewing his gum. I still remember before the 1-6 game (which was a turning point moment for both clubs) a friend of mine (not a big PL fan) turning to me, after he saw Fletcher/Anderson in the midfield (against the likes of Yaya Toure, David Silva and young Barry and Milner), and asking me: "With this shower of shite, you're going to win the title?". That is where we were at the time in the eyes of the neutrals.
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Shower of shite haha, not heard that term in a while.

However, yes, many teams were beaten before we started with SAF in charge, however, many years of very poor recruitement, even back then, is what we're still paying for now. People can say we need x amount of transfer windows to sort this mess out, but with a revolving door on managers at the moment, that isn't going to happen either. The only way we're going to get this fixed for the long term is by having a stable manager through ups and downs, whilst the overall squad gets sorted, sadly I don't see a period of time where this will happen at the moment as if it isn't the management team getting what they want, it's the fans that are starting.

You are spot on with the noisy neighbours. Spent massively for a while to get the overall squad quality up, then fine tuned it, and nobody else really followed suit until Klopp came to Liverpool, and now it's Arteta at Arsenal.
 
Bwuk said:
We got to the CL final 2 years later…

Valencia was excellent.
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After the easiest run to the final possibly ever and then got utterly decimated in the final by the new standard bearers.

Valencia was a fantastic servant to us but he wasn’t world class which is where we were in 2008/09
 
Manchester United have advantages that other English teams (financial, global appeal, etc) don't have. It was Tommy Docherty, I think, who said the club was a license to print money.

So for me the 2005 Glazer answer is the correct one. I think you've won 5 PL titles in 21 years since the takeover, but without that buyout it could have been so much more. Moyes, though not up to standard, was taking over a base that was much weaker than it would have been had the Glazers never intervened.
 
Bwuk said:
We got to the CL final 2 years later…

Valencia was excellent.
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Yes, people seem to forget Valencia was absolutely superb that season. Seemed to be the absolute anti-Nani, in that he made the correct decision almost everytime.
It was years before he developed the habit of racing to the opposition 18 yard box, stopping dead like he was playing musical statues, and either going for a safe pass, or thrashing it into the shins of a full back.

Owen more than pulled his weight for the size of the deal too. City late winner, league cup final goal, away hatrick in the champions league and plenty of other helpful goals over the season.

It helped us that Rooney stepped up to the plate as key man.

What is a sickener though, is how much we've wasted in the last 14 years and imagining what Fergie could have done with those funds from a position of strength.
 
matherto said:
After the easiest run to the final possibly ever and then got utterly decimated in the final by the new standard bearers.

Valencia was a fantastic servant to us but he wasn’t world class which is where we were in 2008/09
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It was an easy run because we were still one of the best in Europe even without Ronaldo.
 
Sandikan said:
It was an easy run because we were still one of the best in Europe even without Ronaldo.
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We were better than mid tier European teams like Marseille and Schalke but the difference between us and them was the same between us and Real/Barca at the top.

Considering we were the best team in the world in 2008 we were nowhere near in 2010/11.
 
matherto said:
We were better than mid tier European teams like Marseille and Schalke but the difference between us and them was the same between us and Real/Barca at the top.

Considering we were the best team in the world in 2008 we were nowhere near in 2010/11.
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That Barca team from 2011 is one of the best club sides of all time.
 
I mean, of course we were worse for signing Valencia, Owen and Obertan while Ronaldo and Tevez left. To compound it, Hargreaves never played for us after 2008 really and Anderson didn't push on. We basically lost a hell of a lot in attack and midfield, and started to rely more on our overall solidity to grind out results.
 
It was 3 fairly questionable transfer windows in a row from losing Ronaldo and Tevez.

2009 - Valencia, Diouff, Obertan, Owen
2010 - Bebe, Lindegaard, Smalling, Chicharito
2011 - Young, De Gea, Jones

Arguably the main issue was how outmatched we felt in midfield in 2009 against Barca and they did nothing to address it. SAF seemed to be way too patient with Anderson, too patient with Hargreaves thinking he'd come back from his injuries, sentimental with Fletcher after his illness and subsequent drop in playing level, overly sentimental to Giggs/Scholes in wanting to make sure they still had plenty of game time despite being nearly 40 years old.

2012 was a little different with RVP and Kagawa it at least felt like we were targeting elite players again. But again no real central midfield rebuild.


The signing of Berbatov going back to 2008 was never the right one for the balance of the team either really, I remember a Rio interview where he suggested it would drive him mad how Berbatov didn't want to play with any urgency and wanted to do things at his own slower pace compared to the rest of the team.
 
Yes. I only became a United fan in 2010, a year after this. The fecking Glazer cockroaches should be in prison for what they did to this beautiful club. We managed to maintain our dominance for four years after due to Sir Alex Ferguson, the greatest football manager of all time, but it all fell apart like a house of cards after he left, and we’re still yet to recover. It looks less and less likely that we will. Had we had owners who actually cared about football, we would have continued our dominance. The damage that the Glazers have inflicted upon us cannot be understated. And what’s even worse is that some Tampa Bay Buccaneers fans don’t want to listen to criticism of the Glazers because the Glazers actually seem to care (at least a bit) about the Bucs.
 
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thisisnottaken1 said:
The damage that the Glazers have inflicted upon us cannot be understated. And what’s even worse is that some Tampa Bay Buccaneers fans don’t want to listen to criticism of the Glazers because the Glazers actually seem to care (at least a bit) about the Bucs.
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I started following NFL relatively recently(2021), so I'm not an expert on the sport, but Tampa Bay Buccaneers used to be called "Succaneers" for a long time until Tom Brady came in 2020 and won them a Superbowl(they had a talented roster but with a bad QB, the most important position by far). Tom arrived, recruited some additional players and they won it.

Glazers are not competent even in the NFL, they just had a lot of luck to achieve something. Salary cap, draft and "closed shop" system(no relegation) help them but they still don't care(that's not unusual for American sports owners, everything is just a business there).

Manchester United has suffered 2 great tragedies in it's history. Munich Air Disaster that decimated the team and Glazer ownership(as I like to call it "Glazer Apocalypse"). We managed to recover somehow from Munich and become a top team, I'm not sure we're ever going to recover from the Glazer Apocalypse. By the time Grotesque Goblins finally decide to release the club from their shackles, it might be too late(damage too significant and irreparable)...
 
Bwuk said:
That Barca team from 2011 is one of the best club sides of all time.
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Indeed they are.

That has no bearing on our quality in 2011 which was severely diminished from 2008/9.
 
philippexyz said:
I started following NFL relatively recently(2021), so I'm not an expert on the sport, but Tampa Bay Buccaneers used to be called "Succaneers" for a long time until Tom Brady came in 2020 and won them a Superbowl(they had a talented roster but with a bad QB, the most important position by far). Tom arrived, recruited some additional players and they won it.

Glazers are not competent even in the NFL, they just had a lot of luck to achieve something. Salary cap, draft and "closed shop" system(no relegation) help them but they still don't care(that's not unusual for American sports owners, everything is just a business there).

Manchester United has suffered 2 great tragedies in it's history. Munich Air Disaster that decimated the team and Glazer ownership(as I like to call it "Glazer Apocalypse"). We managed to recover somehow from Munich and become a top team, I'm not sure we're ever going to recover from the Glazer Apocalypse. By the time Grotesque Goblins finally decide to release the club from their shackles, it might be too late(damage too significant and irreparable)...
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Well said. The Glazers have ruined our club beyond all repair. It makes me so sad and angry at what they’ve done.
 
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No. United will always be a 'top club', we still won PL and reached CL finals without Ronaldo.
 
It’s telling that while City were building we were consolidating and suddenly moaning about value in the transfer market.

The only real signing that you could call top tier from the end of the 08-09 season under Fergie was RVP.

We were linked with Benzema, Sneijder and Ribery that summer of 09 and signed Valencia, Owen and Obertan. Signings that you wouldn’t associate with a club of United’s magnitude.
 
Reds Under The Bed said:
It’s telling that while City were building we were consolidating and suddenly moaning about value in the transfer market.

The only real signing that you could call top tier from the end of the 08-09 season under Fergie was RVP.

We were linked with Benzema, Sneijder and Ribery that summer of 09 and signed Valencia, Owen and Obertan. Signings that you wouldn’t associate with a club of United’s magnitude.
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Fergie wanted Benzema but he was Real bound and I am pretty sure we were never in for Sneijder.
 
Bondi77 said:
Fergie wanted Benzema but he was Real bound and I am pretty sure we were never in for Sneijder.
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By never do you mean in 2009? Because we definitely were afterwards. The player even said so.
 
Aside from the obvious argument that the real damage was done in 2005, you could equally argue the problems started in 2008.

Berbatov, as world class as he was at times, probably wasn't suited to us at that time and maybe we should have strengthened differently.

There had been warning signs in 08/09 that our midfield wasn't as good as we thought (I think back to two games against Liverpool and Barcelona) and we suffered badly without Hargreaves.

Our back 4 and keeper at the point were unreal and probably saved us.

Had Fergie added an additional midfielder post 08 European Cup win, the lack of Ronaldo replacement 12 months later would have almost been irrelevant given the form of Rooney in 09/10.

I'd also add that the players people wanted Fergie to sign in 2009 were the ones that Fergie very rarely signed anyway. Valencia was a great player for us but he almost ended up being marketed as a Ronaldo replacement rather than being the solid professional that Fergie signed for years, even when "Glazernomics" weren't a thing.
 
Bondi77 said:
Are you implying that Fergie was lying about the interest in Sneijder then?
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I don't see why he wouldn't. I can think of loads of things he wasn't honest about. Has he ever said we wanted a player after we couldn't get them over the line? Makes sense he'd deny it
 
Fergie gets called out on choosing Moyes a lot, but he and the club never really get called out on not refreshing the squad in his final few years. It always felt to me like the 12/13 season was his one last hurrah, where his experienced pros with the addition of van Persie just had to get one last title for him. I feel if Fergie was 10 years younger and it wasn't his last season, his squad building would have been different.

Any next manager would have stepped into 13/14 with the following player ages:

Evra (32)
Ferdinand (34)
Vidic (31)
Giggs (39)
Scholes (38)
Carrick (32)
van Persie (30)

That with the fact that additions like Jones, Smalling, Young, Cleverley while solid pros were clearly a step below where the team was 5 years previously. It's probably partly Glazernomics, but also a shift in the dynamic with Chelsea and City levelling the playing field by signing and not selling good players. Also we had no next great England hope to go out and buy - the 2010-2016 generation was pretty poor.
 
Looking back we should have got Aguero and Silva in as replacements, the Ronaldo money would have covered that

The only reason we stayed successful for a few more years was we still had a solid team but unfortunately the rot set in and the standards were gradually lowered.

The Glazers would have been smart business people to have cashed in 2009
 
Fortitude said:
No. The end was the Fergie handover into ruin.

With him at the helm, we were still competitive and players wanted to come here literally to play for him. All of that presence and aura left with him and we turned into a running joke within a few months.
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Actually after 2009 only Van Persie came to us as a world-class addition. Which other world-class players actually joined us during that period anyway?
 
Trequarista10 said:
I was most disappointed we didn't sign Benzema, or a similiar profile striker. We could never directly replace Ronaldo. I thought Valencia was a solid signing, with Nani being the more flair winger. But bringing in Benzema would have provided the power and aerial threat that we lost with Ronaldo leaving, allowing Rooney to play in his preferred second striker position.

The midfield was already a concern by that time too, as Scholes and Giggs were aging, Hargreaves had injury problems, and there were doubts about Fletcher and Anderson's long term potential.

We actually managed to do pretty well over the next few seasons. Scholes and Giggs lasted longer than anyone might have predicted, Fletcher was phenomenal for a couple years before illness screwed him over, but Anderson and Hargreaves were pretty much done after that. We improved the front line eventually with Hernandez and finally Van Persie for some much needed firepower. Young players like Welbeck and Cleverly contributed, but it was clear we were a couple of top players short of where we needed to be.

Overall it did feel like we were slow in the market. We missed out on several top players towards the end of SAF's reign and then dithering Moyes. By the time the club was then willing to splash the cash we were not the preferred destination for players, so we ended up overpaying for big names and veterans who werent wanted by other top clubs and who didn't really suit what we needed.
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Looking at it in hindsight, things worked out better than we could have expected but we were unfortunate at key juncture - the Fletcher illness and Hargreaves injury being the major losses and we had a few unfortunate reds in key European ties against Bayern and Madrid where a path to the final would have been clearer after going past them.

I think we tied ourselves in knots over the Hazard deal, was it £6m that we refused to pay? Chelsea win the CL and his options become wider. Hazard instead of Kagawa would have been a more transformational signing.

Fergie and Gill leaving in the same summer and going into a crucial window with Woodward and Dithering Dave killed us as a top club. What happened that summer is what broke our backs, we then became desperate and started signing mercenaries that Fergie used to sniff from a mile out.
 
RedKnight88 said:
I doubt David Moyes or United wanted Maroune Fellaini though. He was available for £23m because of a clause which was expiring after July 31st, if we really wanted him we could've had him instead of paying for 28m around the end of the transfer market.
None of our main targets(Thiago Alcantara) wanted to come I guess and was forced to buy Fellaini. Shows how badly we was run. How could you go from Thiago to Fellaini? And that leaving it to the end of the market. Just madness.

Also Mesut Ozil, how did we let Arsenal sign him?
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It always felt that after Moyes and Woodward came in we pivoted from Alcantara to Cesc and had some sort of Bale pursuit going. I think the Alcantara deal was set up by Fergie and was almost done but the hesitation in closing the deal opened the way for Bayern who had just got Pep in.

Our biggest mistake, and it happened under Fergie, was not setting up a structure to support Woodward way before Fergie left. I know he takes a lot of the blame, and deservedly so, but people just underestimated the role and put more focus on managers when the rest of the game had begun installing these DOF led structures.

It feels like Woodward stepped in, wanted to imprint his name on club and the overall game so he adapted the flawed Galactico strategy which we weren't prepared for and the players brought in didn't go halfway towards addressing our major issues, some of which we still have today.
 
What would the alternative to Ronaldo be in 2009? Schneijder? Aguero? My mind is a bit weak on who was emerging as big talents at the time.

It didn't help that we missed out on Eden Hazard in 2012. But overall we did really well with those signings in 2009.

Replacing Ronaldo directly would probably require another Ronaldo. Only Aguero was semi-capable of that (in hindsight), so it would probably be in combination with another big talent.

Agüero+Silva/Schneijder/Ribery is probably the answer, but in a market full of maybe 100 targets, getting those 2 right and making all the planets perfectly align, that seems like wishful thinking too.
 
ROFLUTION said:
What would the alternative to Ronaldo be in 2009? Schneijder? Aguero? My mind is a bit weak on who was emerging as big talents at the time.

It didn't help that we missed out on Eden Hazard in 2012. But overall we did really well with those signings in 2009.

Replacing Ronaldo directly would probably require another Ronaldo. Only Aguero was semi-capable of that (in hindsight), so it would probably be in combination with another big talent.

Agüero+Silva/Schneijder/Ribery is probably the answer, but in a market full of maybe 100 targets, getting those 2 right and making all the planets perfectly align, that seems like wishful thinking too.
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I think we definitely missed out on a few attackers that if we'd been able to secure, or if the Glazers weren't hindering us, would have meant for a smoother transition. Benzema, hazard, Ribery, Sneijder, aguero, Silva, Lewandowski, they were all on the move at this time. Instead we went into 2011/12 with Rooney, Hernandez and welbeck, before opportunistically signing a 29 year van persie the following season for one last title push.

The Fergie of old loved adding firepower from a position of strength. But now we were shunning the next generation of world class players because there was no "value" in the market. £32m for eden Hazard would've been a steal looking back. Instead we preferred to spend £18m on Ashley young, because that was better value? You can't tell me the Glazers didn't have a hand in that, despite what Fergie says.

It's not as if we even spent money elsewhere. We neglected midfield even more so, as Sir Alex got a bit too sentimental in trusting Scholes and Giggs until they were 40, when really they should've been bit part players by then. Scholes coming out of retirement rather than spend some money on a midfielder was a glaring sign. He also trusted fletcher, Hargreaves and Anderson far too much when they all had issues.

Basically, feck the Glazers for making the greatest boss of all time spend the last few years of his tenure managing us with his hands tied behind his back. If they'd never darkened our door, I've got no doubt that we'd have a couple more champions league to our name.
 
bringbackbebe said:
We didn't want to immediately spend money because SAF/Gill felt clubs would rip us off since they knew we had the Ronaldo money to spend. Kind of what happened with Liverpool a year or so later when they sold Torres to Chelsea and spunked it on Andy Carroll.
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We couldn't spend it, the Glazers had us buckled. Fergie loved a record transfer in his time
 
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