When exactly did our decline begin?

[redmanx]

Well Smalling, Jones, Evans, Welbeck, Rafael were the players that were meant to be the future and not just squad players and I think we can all agree that virtually all of them weren't of the right quality; again look where most of them went and where they are now.

It does sound bad considering all that Sir Alex did but that really wasn't a classic United side he left behind. I agree with people that say the decline started in 2009. We just had some fantastic veterans and a god-like manager to paper over the cracks.

We won the Prem in SAFs last season, 2012/13 by 11 points, and would have won by 14 but for the freak 5-5 result against West Brom on the last day, so the team couldnt have been that bad; I think the trouble was that Moyes wanted his own coaching staff and got rid of those who had worked with SAF for so long, and with them went the winning attitudes and philosophies which had been embedded into United psyche; the squad needing an upgrade but Moyes had no idea how to do that, and losing David Gills experience and knowledge at the same time was a massive blow.

 

[Beans]

I dont blame moyes, I dont blame his appointment. I blame the poor, POOR transfer window. We won the league which meant we thought we had a squad to still compete, but it was very clear we didn’t, we were too reliant on rvp, had a back four with an average age over 30.
And they thought getting fellaini in would be enough..

It's fair to say the decline began under SAF, no one was ready to come into the team for Scholes, we ended up with Gibson for years, Welbeck on the wing, Smalling and Evans. The league is much better now, more internationals on every team, so it looked like we were okay.

 

[FrankDrebin]

When Moyes took away Rio's chips.

 

[lex talionis]

The decline of Manchester United began the day Ferguson appointed Moyes to be he successor.

 

[Chicharo]

It's fair to say the decline began under SAF, no one was ready to come into the team for Scholes, we ended up with Gibson for years, Welbeck on the wing, Smalling and Evans. The league is much better now, more internationals on every team, so it looked like we were okay.

Agree. We didn't buy/promoted proper successors to some of our most important players.
Remember y'all when we beat City in the Community Shield match after trailing 0-2 (of course you do)? SAF replaced Carrick with Cleverley (his first game for the first team) so we played with him and Anderson in the midfield in the second half. They played great and that was one of our finest performances in the last decade. If I remember well they continued playing on regular basis (I distinctly remember that they started against Arsenal when we thrashed them). At that time I actually thought we had gotten a new midfield partnership that would work for years, that's how good we looked. Then Anderson got injured, then Cleverley (so Scholes came out of retirement), we didn't see them playing together until the following spring. And that was it.
11 years later we still haven't solved the midfield issue, never mind the formation.

 

[tenpoless]

It started when RedCafe upgraded to XenForo theme. It was not a coincidence.

 

[Frank Grimes]

What decline? Some spoiled brats in here.

 

[Bebestation]

Selling Ronaldo and buying Valencia.

We became less of a CL team straight away.

Then we started to struggle with the PL aswell, which we went and bought RVP to get us over the line.

The whole team was left sh*t and overrated.

Literally we had Scholes, Carrick, Giggs, Rooney, RVP, RIO, Evra, Vidic and so many more that were either past their prime or even retiring the same year SAF left or after the following year.

 

[wise_old_man]

When we hired Mourinho is when we killed our resurgence. Everything was flowing well till that terrible man came in.

Was this a WUM post? You do realize our last trophy was won by him, with a squad devastated by injuries right?

 

[kthanksbye]

Not having a plan of action after SAF, not recognising that the entire club was effectively run by one man, not changing our power/responsibility structure after SAF retired.

 

[Neil_Buchanan]

Rooney had it figured out, not long after this he was complaining about our ambitions, questioning why we didn’t bid for Ozil. He got a lot of stick for this and the related contract dispute but with hindsight it seems he was correct.

 

[Neil_Buchanan]

The decline started when the Glazers bought the club, but they are not the sole reason we are in this mess.

I'm unsure if many football fans, or even all United fans, fully grasp the financial impact of the Glazer takeover.

United had zero debts and were a very profitable club with immense power in the transfer market by 2005. The Glazer takeover plunged the club into so much debt that between 2005 and 2010 we paid £75m every year in interest payments. I think again, sometimes it's difficult to grasp how much money that was then. This was 2005, Wayne Rooney, potentially the most exciting talent in World football, had just sold for £20m + £5m add-ons. Cristiano Ronaldo had just cost us £11m. Vidic and Evra cost us a combined £11m and Michael Carrick cost us £18m, all around this time. Just imagine what an extra £75m every year could have done for our squad.

Now, because we did have a fantastic squad full of proven winners and young talents like Wayne Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo, we actually embarked on a very successful period on the pitch between 2005 and 2010, but we squeezed every last drop we could out of the team and squandered any advantage we had.

By the time SAF retired, the loans had been restructured but the squad was in urgent need of major surgery. In the 12-months between SAF retiring and LvG taking over, we lost Evra, Vidic, Ferdinand, Giggs and Scholes. Rooney was already regressing, RvP was in his 30s, Carrick and Fletcher both struggled on for another year but had their best years behind them. Park and Nani had also gone, and all of a sudden the squad began to look very short.

What compounded these problems was that because of our success we hadn't evolved as a football club. We had been so reliant on one man that there was no structure in-place to ensure continuity between managers. The scouting department was so bad Moyes was in shock at what he found. An accountant with no experience of being involved in football at any level was put in charge of overseeing the football side of the business. It was a recipe for disaster. We finally had some money to spend again but no idea how or where to spend it.

On top of all that, and a huge factor often missed by your average football fan, was the new multi-billion pound TV deal signed in 2013/14. Sure, this meant United had more cash, but it also meant our PL rivals were now richer and more financially stable than they had ever been. This made it all but impossible to sign players at a decent price from other English clubs. Times gone by, the majority of our big signings had come from English teams. Cole, Yorke, Sheringham, Carrick, Berbatov, Ferdinand, Keane, Pallister, Bruce, Irwin, Ince etc...

It was lazy but effective method of signing players. You knew roughly were you stood with these players as they were unlikely to have too many problems adapting. We also had the safety net, for a long time, of knowing we could afford to let the likes of Rio Ferdinand and Michael Carrick test their mettle at Leeds and Tottenham before signing them. It just isn't viable now. We should almost forget about signing players from the PL UNLESS there is some kind of contractual situation we can exploit. To quote SAF, there genuinely is "no value in the market" when it comes to English players, because our rivals have no motivation to sell.

So, plenty of issues, mainly stemming from Glazer debts/Glazernomics, poor continuity planning, failure to adapt to the changing landscape and having non-footballing people making decisions.

One of the reasons we never get anywhere is because we as a fanbase are still obsessed with managers, because we had one of the best of all time. We seem to fail to understand that the success of a Pep or a Klopp is only possible because of the world-class support they get from Begiristain or Edwards. We think that every new bloke who steps foot in the dugout will be the saviour, when in reality the ships captains are still headed directly at the iceberg and all our managers are really doing is rearranging the (vry overpriced) deckchairs.

Cracking post, well articulated.

 

[jeepers]

Glazers. Zero succession planning before SAF’s departure. Moyes as SAF’s successor. Scattergun approach ever since.

It’s the opposite of City, they started with shit managers, throwing money at whomever and seemed to have no plan whatsoever until they started putting things in place for Guardiola.

 

[The Mighty Gatekeeper]

When the class of 92 got old and Fergie was still unable to buy a class central midfielder. It's genuinely unbelievable that he was as successful as he was when he bought two effective CM in 27 years. Keane. Carrick. That's it.

 

[KennyBurner]

Was this a WUM post? You do realize our last trophy was won by him, with a squad devastated by injuries right?

Posts like this are so nonsensical. Who the hell cares about the odd trophy when you cant replicate it over a period of time? Shortsighted fan base.

 

[Stobzilla]

Summer 2009.

 

[2cents]

When the class of 92 got old and Fergie was still unable to buy a class central midfielder. It's genuinely unbelievable that he was as successful as he was when he bought two effective CM in 27 years. Keane. Carrick. That's it.

Ince?

 

[red4ever 79]

It started when RedCafe upgraded to XenForo theme. It was not a coincidence.

I miss the old sites. There used to be a nostalgia thread around here where you could dip in and remember

 

[Hansi Fick]

When the class of 92 got old and Fergie was still unable to buy a class central midfielder. It's genuinely unbelievable that he was as successful as he was when he bought two effective CM in 27 years. Keane. Carrick. That's it.

What do you mean "two effective CMs" in 27 years? Two that ended up being effective at DM for Man United? Because I'm pretty sure Fergsuon bought a few more players that would count as CMs, some of them for considerable money.

 

[IWat]

Summer 2009.

Agree. Ronnie not being replacable and the swansong of Scholes, Giggs etc continuing without adequate replacement/successful understudy and then Rooney's decline began a couple of years later.

 

[Denis79]

2005.

The way the Glazers took over the club made it impossible for us to invest in the squad proactively for almost 8 years, the loans taken to buy the club had insanely high interest and those took priority. From 2005 to 2013 we were outspent by every rival we had back then, City, Liverpool, Real Madrid, Barca etc.

The club started to invest in the squad properly again 2013. But by then the squad needed a complete overhaul, we pretty much needed to change 8-9 players and that's really hard to do successfully.

 

[ManchesterManchester]

2005.

The way the Glazers took over the club made it impossible for us to invest in the squad proactively for almost 8 years, the loans taken to buy the club had insanely high interest and those took priority. From 2005 to 2013 we were outspent by every rival we had back then, City, Liverpool, Real Madrid, Barca etc.

The club started to invest in the squad properly again 2013. But by then the squad needed a complete overhaul, we pretty much needed to change 8-9 players and that's really hard to do successfully.

Yeah we have never recovered from that. When we dont consistently invest then it leaves us vunlerable to price increases and inflation. That’s exactly what’s happened, people keep saying we have spent so much but they don’t realise that 10m in 2008 is 50m in 2022 relative to the transfer market. That’s not even taking into account agent fees and wages.

We are trying to catch up now but it’s just not going to happen as we are still too handicapped by dividend and debt repayments. Plus other investments such as the stadium construction which have been completely overlooked and put on the backlog like transfers were. Again the inflation of construction costs will be causing us a gigantic increased cost to what it would of been 15 years ago.

Sadly, the Glazers are not billionaires and will not be able to get us out of the mess they have gotten us in.

 

[tenpoless]

I miss the old sites. There used to be a nostalgia thread around here where you could dip in and remember

Me too.

Sent from my iphone using Tapatalk

 

[Denis79]

Yeah we have never recovered from that. When we dont consistently invest then it leaves us vunlerable to price increases and inflation. That’s exactly what’s happened, people keep saying we have spent so much but they don’t realise that 10m in 2008 is 50m in 2022 relative to the transfer market. That’s not even taking into account agent fees and wages.

We are trying to catch up now but it’s just not going to happen as we are still too handicapped by dividend and debt repayments. Plus other investments such as the stadium construction which have been completely overlooked and put on the backlog like transfers were. Again the inflation of construction costs will be causing us a gigantic increased cost to what it would of been 15 years ago.

Sadly, the Glazers are not billionaires and will not be able to get us out of the mess they have gotten us in.

OT will be left neglected most likely. As long as we have to spend huge sums replacing player after player.

 

[Wheato]

We went from an Elite team with Ronaldo, Tevez, Rio, Vidic, Scholes, Rooney, Evra, Giggs eta and in a few short years we were fielding a very ordinary looking side with Smalling, Jones, Young, Valencia, Cleverley, Wellbeck, Chicharito,

We used to sign the best in class, now we don’t.

 

[BrilliantOrange]

I would say the first moment where United didnt finish op top of the PL and were in peace with it...

 

[UTD_Since_1978]

...

 

[BorisManUtd]

I'd say summer 2009. Replaced best player in the world with Obertan, Valencia and Owen. Managed to remain top team in Europe until 2011 and top in England until 2013 mainly because of Ferguson but it was a slow decline that was happening to us. Everything that's been going on between 2014 and now is a mixture of having past it or not good enough managers to take us back to the top, spending loads of money but without a proper plan or anything.

 

[singhters]

If you look through history every team has its day and declines and then comes back again its a cycle.

Leeds in the 70s
Liverpool in the 80s
Man Utd in the 90s and some Noughties
Then it was Arsenal for a while
Then Chelsea came along
Then Man City
Then Liverpool again for a short while
And Now its City.

 

[Woodenlung]

The Glazers takeover is the obvious and correct answer. But Ferguson also deserves some of the blame when you talk about our decline. Specifically in the area of player recruitment where he definitely took his eye off the ball and fell behind the competition. I don't just mean the quality of the players we signed, but also the process behind how we made those signings.

I've read a lot of articles in the years since his retirement and one thing that sticks out like a sore thumb is how rudimentary our scouting system was. Even back in 2013 there had already been a significant shift towards analytics and data that showed which players excelled at what roles. But United still relied almost entirely on traditional scouting and in networking with other scouts to find hidden gems. We were already 3 or 4 years behind the curve when Ferguson left and Moyes, who actually did have an analysis package at Everton, wasn't here long enough to modernise the system.

LVG was apparently another old school manager ala Ferguson and didn't really go for the stats based approach of scouting. So by the time we actually sorted ourselves out on that end we were already 6 or 7 years behind the curve. Of course, the Glazers could have at any stage decided to modernise the system themselves. But they're so clueless about the game that the never did.

 

[Green_Red]

I think Ferguson knew after the 2008 team he wasn't going to build another one. He added where necessary but I don't think he really left United with any seriously good long term signings other than De Gea. He probably thought Jones career would be somewhat different. I think that's the beginning of the decline. After he left we've never really had a clear continuity of vision to keep is moving forward. That's a result of poor leadership in the management of the club.

 

[cyril C]

We won the Prem in SAFs last season, 2012/13 by 11 points, and would have won by 14 but for the freak 5-5 result against West Brom on the last day, so the team couldnt have been that bad; I think the trouble was that Moyes wanted his own coaching staff and got rid of those who had worked with SAF for so long, and with them went the winning attitudes and philosophies which had been embedded into United psyche; the squad needing an upgrade but Moyes had no idea how to do that, and losing David Gills experience and knowledge at the same time was a massive blow.

Leicester City won a EPL as well, so winning in 12/13 didn't mean much. In fact, both of Leicester's CB retired with players coming and going, and they still manage to play consistent football.

Our problem is on recruitment, who have we recruited from 13 onwards to replace the ageing / departing players? How many of them remain or last more than 5 seasons? When we recruited Darmin to replace Rafael, I can smell trouble. Someone who can't cross, can't shoot, slow pace and slow to turn, and the pain continue.

We had Jones, JOS, and I remember Hargreaves playing make-shift RB, and the result was not too damaging. Which obviously required a great deal of adjustment to compensate for this lame leg, but rest of the team still manage to function. Nowadays it appeared the entire team is lame, or may be rest of the EPL has progress

 

[Nicolarra90]

The important question is... when will our decline stop? Has it already stopped or will we reach a new low by going to the conference league next season?

 

[Kopral Jono]

The Glazers takeover is the obvious and correct answer. But Ferguson also deserves some of the blame when you talk about our decline. Specifically in the area of player recruitment where he definitely took his eye off the ball and fell behind the competition. I don't just mean the quality of the players we signed, but also the process behind how we made those signings.

I've read a lot of articles in the years since his retirement and one thing that sticks out like a sore thumb is how rudimentary our scouting system was. Even back in 2013 there had already been a significant shift towards analytics and data that showed which players excelled at what roles. But United still relied almost entirely on traditional scouting and in networking with other scouts to find hidden gems. We were already 3 or 4 years behind the curve when Ferguson left and Moyes, who actually did have an analysis package at Everton, wasn't here long enough to modernise the system.

LVG was apparently another old school manager ala Ferguson and didn't really go for the stats based approach of scouting. So by the time we actually sorted ourselves out on that end we were already 6 or 7 years behind the curve. Of course, the Glazers could have at any stage decided to modernise the system themselves. But they're so clueless about the game that the never did.

Bolded, and the fact that the Glazers/Fergie didn't see 'value in the market' around that time, were a disaster in the making. We're still seeing the effects of those missteps today.

 

[Lemon Moon]

To answer the OP, In the moments of the poor planned & thought through handover from SAF's management. The biggest issues for me were the age & condition of the squad SAF left us with & the structure of the clubs hierarchy at that moment. We were set up to fail really.

 

[UTD_Since_1978]

The important question is... when will our decline stop? Has it already stopped or will we reach a new low by going to the conference league next season?

And the GM Vauxhall Conference a few seasons later at this rate. (Going slightly "old school" there for those that know their football history)

 

[The Mighty Gatekeeper]

What do you mean "two effective CMs" in 27 years? Two that ended up being effective at DM for Man United? Because I'm pretty sure Fergsuon bought a few more players that would count as CMs, some of them for considerable money.

Like whom? Someone mentioned Ince, which is one I forgot. But who else?

 

[The Mighty Gatekeeper]

Ince?

Him too. Forgot about him.

 

[SirReginald]

To answer the OP, In the moments of the poor planned & thought through handover from SAF's management. The biggest issues for me were the age & condition of the squad SAF left us with & the structure of the clubs hierarchy at that moment. We were set up to fail really.

This would be it. Your squad was definitely on the decline even before SAF left. That’s not to say it was bad by any means but the gap between you and other teams was shrinking.

On top of that you changed CEOs to one of the worst in Europe for actual football related decisions. Pairing him with a manager who deserved a chance but didn’t have the experience of running such a large club.

City on the other hand went to continue building on their foundations and further cemented themselves at the top.

 

[oz insomniac]

We can talk around the issue saying players were not replaced etc etc

The answer is simply the Glazers and Woodward happened, no football intuition and as far as the Glazers were concerned- no care as it was simply an investment making a return that effectively cost them nothing.

Woodward‘s incompetent management in football terms , didn’t concern the hierarchy as he was simply rewarded for inventing an investment for the Glazers, no idea on football structure and the slide begins and gathers pace until 2022.

Rooney encapsulated the whole thing when stating that as soon as Ferguson understood what was really happening at the top of the club , he retired.