Cristiano Ronaldo’s frustrations with Manchester United began with the neglected, chipped tiles in the team’s swimming pool at their Carrington training facility. For Zlatan Ibrahimovic, the realization that the club was not as grand as he had envisioned came when he noticed a £1 deduction from his paycheck for consuming a fruit juice from a hotel minibar during a club trip.

Ibrahimovic shared in his autobiography, “Everyone thinks of United as a top club, one of the most powerful in the world. But once I was there, I found a small, closed mentality.”

For Alexis Sanchez, the disillusionment set in after just one training session. The Chilean forward, often considered one of the most disappointing and expensive signings in United’s recent history, immediately contacted his agent to explore the possibility of reversing his transfer from Arsenal after catching a glimpse of life at Old Trafford.

These revelations from two of the club’s high-profile signings in the past decade highlight the decline of the empire Sir Alex Ferguson carefully constructed before his retirement in 2013. The deteriorating standards became most evident in the playing squads that have struggled over the past ten years.

The modern narrative surrounding Manchester United often points to a singular antagonist: the Glazers. As absentee owners for much of their tenure, the American family and their representatives frequently bear the brunt of the blame for the club’s woes. It’s a sentiment that resonates with many, as leadership issues often reflect throughout an organization.

But what about everybody else? United have flatlined because of years of underperformance on the field and that is on the players – and the ‘experts’ who bought them. 

It’s also on Ed Woodward, in thrall to star names and flashy agents and far too interested in social media metrics. It’s on Richard Arnold, who followed him into the CEO’s office. And on the numerous faceless men who United have asked to do their work for them in the market all these years and have failed. Men such as John Murtough, now at Atalanta after a disastrous spell as United football director.

Squad-building is nuanced and complicated. Mistakes get made. But the truth is that United have been getting it wrong for years on a very basic level: Too much money on too many bad players.

How have so many dismal and destructive patterns been allowed to repeat? From Angel Di Maria in 2014 to Rasmus Hojlund in 2023, United’s cack-handed strategies have left a money trail so deep and unseemly, you can almost smell it.

Over the course of 12 years, United have spent close to £2billion on 75 players. And how many of those players can be considered successful acquisitions? Apart from Bruno Fernandes – signed five years ago – can you name another?

And what has been the strategy linking United’s recruitment over the past decade? Has there even been one?

While clubs such as Manchester City and Liverpool have surged forwards on heavy spending and smart work in the market, more modest outfits such as Bournemouth, Brighton and Brentford have embarrassed United by using modern data and AI models with considerable success.

United have made a profit on one first-team player – not including homegrown talent – in the past decade. Dan James was bought from Swansea for £15million in 2019 and joined Leeds for £25m two years later. 

Few people leave Old Trafford a better footballer these days. United have become a graveyard for big stars and the cream of the club’s famed youth academy. Marcus Rashford, Jesse Lingard, Alejandro Garnacho and Scott McTominay have all come through the ranks at United and moved on. The talented Kobbie Mainoo could be next.

Rashford and McTominay have thrived after moving elsewhere, another worrying sign about the debilitating, demoralising environment that has grown up around United, unable to develop and care for talented young footballers.

United had been buying poor players even before Ferguson left the club. He won his valedictory title in 2013 after picking City’s pocket to sign talismanic forward Robin van Persie. But that season disguised a malaise that had already set in.

In the summer of 2012, for example, Van Persie joined alongside Shinji Kagawa, Nick Powell, Alexander Buttner and Angelo Henriquez. A deal for Wilfried Zaha was then done in January 2013. David Moyes had to clean up the mess of that one.

Back in 2009, meanwhile, United had waved Ronaldo off to Real Madrid, watched City take Carlos Tevez from them and spent just £24m on Antonio Valencia, Gabriel Obertan and Mame Biram Diouf.

A year later City shelled out £125m on a squad that would go on to topple United from the pinnacle of English football, while their neighbours spent £39m on four players including Bebe, an unknown Portuguese player who came to prominence playing for a homeless charity.

In many ways the die was cast. The Blue Moon was rising. But the manner in which errors at the end of the Ferguson era were allowed to snowball into a decade or more of catastrophic misjudgments in the transfer market is even more astounding.

Things changed dramatically after Ferguson and United got it terribly wrong. They admit it now. Woodward – United’s all-too-visible executive vice-chair from 2012 to 2022 – has copped a lot of the blame. Some insiders believe he was starstruck, others describe him as being ‘like a kid in a candy store’.

He pushes back against some of that, but not all. ‘People say I was signing players but I wasn’t,’ he told a confidant. ‘I put people in place to do that.

‘In the first three years post-Ferguson we made poor recruitment decisions. You need seven out of 10 signings to be successful. We were three out of 10.

‘Ferguson was even more of a genius than we realised. He was the Pied Piper. We actually needed to evolve and we didn’t. Then we made multiple mistakes around recruitment. It really hurt us for a long time.’

Ferguson had preferred to work closely with his chief scout Jim Lawlor and his brother Martin, relying on their insight and his own evaluations of players. The genius lived inside Ferguson’s head. There were no reference points left behind for those who followed. It had all been utterly intuitive and old school and as such utterly alien to his successor.

Moyes’ reputation as a shrewd operator in the transfer market was built upon the forensically-detailed systems in his ‘secret room’ at Everton’s Finch Farm training base where the whiteboards had colour-coded annotations.

At United the tactical analysis office was enhanced with whiteboards, touchscreens, iPads and a central database of targets, but it was all painfully rudimentary. Only months after Ferguson’s decision to go, United were already struggling.

‘All of a sudden there’s a huge power vacuum,’ says one ex-employee. ‘We started to bring in “experts”. Analysts all over the place. The club did need to move on, but it went from one extreme to the other and for all the new additions we didn’t replace the authority or the power that we had lost with Sir Alex.’

The only summer transfer window Moyes oversaw was a disaster. He pulled the plug on a move for Thiago Alcantara as United pursued deals for Gareth Bale, Cesc Fabregas and a return for Ronaldo.

None got off the ground, and United’s only summer signing ended up being Marouane Fellaini from Moyes’s old club Everton. The fee on deadline day was £27.5m – £4m more than Fellaini’s buyout clause, which had just expired.

Woodward accepts now that the club failed Moyes. Back then a disconnect between the men was clear – ‘either he’s a genius, or a f***ing clown,’ said Moyes privately.

Woodward had no compunction in sacking Moyes in April 2014 but it was what happened next that shaped so much of what has gone wrong at Old Trafford.

A one-season mistake should have been quickly corrected. Instead, United simply threw money at a problem and threw much of it the wrong way.

For more than a decade, players with global profiles and glowing reputations would arrive at Old Trafford and be spat out – their reputations and output vastly diminished.

In the four-and-a-half years that Louis van Gaal and Jose Mourinho were in office at United, tens of millions were lavished on transfer fees and wages for Galacticos such as Di Maria, Radamel Falcao, Memphis Depay, Bastian Schweinsteiger, Anthony Martial, Ibrahimovic, Paul Pogba, Romelu Lukaku, Nemanja Matic and Sanchez.

Amid United’s many missteps in the transfer market, the club would occasionally comfort themselves – and indeed their shareholders on quarterly investor calls – by looking at the social media and brand optics.

Never was that more apparent than in the summer of 2016 when, having countered Pep Guardiola’s appointment at Manchester City by installing his old nemesis Mourinho in the Old Trafford hotseat, Woodward’s United signed Pogba and Ibrahimovic.

Rather than embarrassment at paying Juventus £89.3m for a former academy player who had left Manchester for Turin four years earlier for £1.5m, Woodward was cock-a-hoop that the world-record fee had put United firmly back on the map.

With Ferguson’s hatred of social media no longer holding United back, the Frenchman’s return was trumpeted in an adidas-sponsored video of him dancing to a Stormzy rap with the hashtag #PogBACK.

For Ibrahimovic, having quickly realised United were not the force he expected them to be, he began to grow exasperated at what he encountered on a daily basis, not least at Carrington.

He recalled: ‘I’d lower my window and say to the person at the gate, “Listen my friend, I’ve been coming here every day for a month, I’m the best player in the world – if you still don’t recognise me, you’re in the wrong job”.’

Ibrahimovic was very, very far from being the best player in the world by then. He had never been, but that was not what his ego told him. And that made him another perfect fit in United’s arc of dysfunction.

Pogba’s antics were a distraction for Mourinho, Solskjaer and interim boss Ralf Rangnick, before he returned to Juventus on a free transfer. His relationship with academy product Lingard also rubbed people up the wrong way, particularly their habit of posting light-hearted dressing room videos when things were going badly.

‘It’s obviously knowing the right time to do things like that,’ Lingard tells us now. ‘But ruining culture? We only tried to make it stronger.’

Henrikh Mkhitaryan also fell out with Mourinho but the significance of his otherwise forgettable time at the club lies in the fact he was used as a makeweight in the ruinous Sanchez deal.

The swap valued Sanchez at £35m even though he only had five months left on his Arsenal contract. Wikileaks subsequently revealed that United, desperate to fend off interest from City, agreed to pay Sanchez a £20.35m-a-year salary, plus £75,000 for every game started and a £1.1m annual signing on fee.

Everybody in football could see Sanchez was signing for the money but United, in thrall by then to the cult of footballing celebrity, seemed utterly blind to the dangers.

His unveiling was an extravagant production, filmed playing Glory, Glory Man United on the piano in his new kit. The Chile star probably thought he had joined a footballing orchestra but he was now part of a circus. He went on to score just five goals in 45 games for the club and left 19 months later.

As the United malaise has deepened, the club has attempted to modernise. Woodward was happy with changes put in place by the time he stepped away in January 2022, even if an uptick in recruitment patterns and standards was not immediately apparent.

Today, United are making some progress with signings such as Matheus Cunha and Bryan Mbeumo. Director of football Jason Wilcox recorded a club podcast recently in which he outlined the art of a transfer deal. Confidence appears to be growing.

As always, it has been impossible to please everyone along the way. Mourinho, for example, was scornful of the club’s recruitment policy, mocking the fact they had three options for every target position.

The Portuguese – a control freak to this day – was also opposed to the idea of a football director and was known to be bemused by the size of a scouting network that had ballooned to 58 around the world since the days of Ferguson’s black box.

United’s drive for expertise and their attempts to embrace modern player tracking and transfer strategy had led to some departments becoming rather bloated. From one extreme to the other in just a few years.

The Ferguson inner circle had been replaced by an army of experts. When Erik ten Hag took over, the number of scouts had risen to 140 – 90 full-time scouts and 50 casual weekend observers – feeding into an extensive database called TrackerMan.

In the summer of 2019, when United signed Aaron Wan-Bissaka from Crystal Palace, Woodward boasted that the defender had been singled out from a long list of 804 right backs. Sceptics wondered why – after such intensive scouting – United had ultimately settled on a bloke they could just have watched on Match of the Day.

Palace chairman Steve Parrish, meanwhile, is said to have nearly fallen off his chair when United agreed to pay £50m. Wan-Bissaka is now playing his football at West Ham, which is probably his level.

United have for too long lagged behind many of their rivals partly because, despite the growing numbers of staff and a willingness to embrace latest technology and methods, there was too often a palpable vacuum where there should have been football expertise. It’s no good having the gear if you can’t use it.

Murtough, one of two men behind TrackerMan along with then head of recruitment Steve Brown, was not appointed as the club’s first director of football until March 2021. That came at the same time as Matt Judge became head of football negotiations, having been doing the job for a number of years under the incongruous title of head of corporate development.

United were, belatedly, turning to numbers and technology when they went after players rather than just sloshing cash around European football. In October 2021, Dominic Jordan was hired as the club’s first director of data science.

Still, there have been obvious mistakes. United spent the summer of 2022 waiting for Barcelona midfielder Frenkie de Jong to join them. He never did. So, at the last moment, they plumped for Real Madrid’s veteran midfielder Casemiro – whose parting shot at the Bernabeu was to tell team-mates he couldn’t believe how much his new club were about to pay him.

Casemiro, who cost £60m and earns £300,000 a week, is 33 now and still in United’s midfield. He has had moments of excellence but mostly, he has looked like a player who gave his best years to another club. It’s a familiar theme at Old Trafford.

After a poor start under Ten Hag in 2022-23, meanwhile, United once again made what appeared a panicked signing, paying £86m for the Brazilian winger Antony, even though he had been available for £60m two months earlier. He has been moved on at a huge loss.

At one point it even looked like the supporters were in charge of recruitment, as a move for Marko Arnautovic was abandoned amid protests from fans over signing the former Stoke and West Ham striker.

Too many of the incomings during Ten Hag’s uncertain tenure seemed to be linked to his own agent Kees Vos, had played for him before or in leagues with which he was familiar.

When Ten Hag was told Matthijs de Ligt would not be a natural fit for United – the recruitment team labelled him ‘a Dutch Harry Maguire’ – the manager put his foot down and the club paid £42m for him.

United’s academy recruitment has also dipped, which led to two overhauls in eight years to try to compete with City and Chelsea.

Murtough had become an increasingly prominent figure until being swept aside by Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s new broom. He was at least credited with ensuring there was more focus on player care. Claire Robson, daughter of United legend Bryan, was handed a key role ensuring those at the club were well looked-after off the pitch.

‘You’d get kids coming here who had no idea about Manchester,’ an insider revealed. ‘Back in the day someone like Rio Ferdinand or Wayne Rooney would tell them about the area and the best places to live.

‘There was one young lad who bought a mansion in the middle of nowhere and quite quickly became isolated. When his form dropped off, he didn’t really have anyone to speak to.’

United’s academy conveyor belt had been failing for some time pre-Ineos. Despite the overhauls, United are not always considered by the best young players, who often go to Chelsea or City.

Ole Gunnar Solskjaer wanted Erling Haaland, Declan Rice and Jude Bellingham. He got Jadon Sancho, Donny van de Beek and a 36-year-old Ronaldo.

United paid £73m for Sancho in 2021 and, currently on loan at Aston Villa after a spell at Chelsea, he will leave as a free agent when his £250,000-a-week contract runs out next summer. He has not played for United for two years.

Ronaldo, on the other hand, was different and the parallels to the misguided and costly signing of Sanchez three years previously were clear but also ignored. The deal was a masterstroke by super-agent Jorge Mendes, who put the fear of God into United that Ronaldo ‘had the pen in his hand’ and was set to sign for City.

‘It created a panic,’ says one source. ‘The idea of him scoring for City against United was too much for them. They were frightened to death about how the fans would react when the reality was that signing him would go against everything that Ole was trying to do.’

Buying one of the world’s best players for £19.8m can rarely be seen as a bad thing, but Ronaldo was a disruptive presence from the moment he walked back into the club on more than £500,000 a week. A split is believed to have been created by his desire to take the captaincy off Maguire. Years later, Solskjaer said: ‘Maybe it affected the whole dressing room, the dynamic. He was top scorer that year, but I was out of the job 10 weeks in!’

Solskjaer needed to be braver over the issue of Ronaldo’s return. Could you imagine Guardiola at City or Jurgen Klopp at Liverpool being dictated to in this way? Having made so much of a return to the principles of Ferguson – unity and meritocracy – Solskjaer allowed all that to be undermined by the return of the one player in Europe who was arguably bigger than the club itself.

In 2023, United abandoned a bid to sign Harry Kane partly due to the cost but then paid £72m for Hojlund, who was valued at a third of that price by other clubs.

Hojlund joined Napoli on loan last summer with a view to a permanent £38m move. Antony has been sold to Real Betis at a loss of around £60m. Manuel Ugarte – signed from Paris Saint-Germain for an initial £40m in the summer of 2024 – sits on the bench while Fernandes – a naturally attacking player – occupies his berth in the centre of midfield. And so the vague sense of make-do-and-mend rolls on.

Overspending was one of the many issues highlighted by Ineos during Ratcliffe’s £1.3bn investment in the club last year. 

The due diligence concluded that United didn’t move quickly enough to sign players and were too ready to extend existing contracts to protect their assets when it would make more sense to let them leave.

Whereas Woodward relished his blockbuster deals, Ratcliffe aspires to unearthing ‘the next Kylian Mbappe’. He wants to drive down the wage bill and make a profit from the academy by selling off homegrown players, something only encouraged by Premier League profit and sustainability rules.

The hierarchy has been completely overhauled once more and it now carries a strong Manchester City influence – chief executive Omar Berrada, director of football Wilcox, who stepped up following the rather embarrassing decision to sack Dan Ashworth after 159 days, director of performance Sam Erith and new academy head Stephen Torpey all have a City background.

Christopher Vivell is director of recruitment and Ratcliffe brought in Mike Sansoni from the Mercedes F1 team to improve United’s ‘last-century’ data operation.

The aim is to improve the culture and recruitment at the club with a ‘no d***heads’ policy after 12 years of expensive mistakes. Moving Garnacho on to Chelsea was, at least, a step in the right direction from that point of view.

Not only has the quality of player been allowed to plummet post-Ferguson, so too have standards. One first-teamer, who was not well liked, secured a move away but left his mark. ‘He had a ridiculous supercar,’ a source explained. ‘When he left, he just abandoned it in the car park at Carrington. It was there for about six months. That was how little he cared.

‘There’s a strip of grass next to the players’ car park in between two buildings. One player appeared to be too lazy to reverse out and instead started driving over the grass to turn around instead.

‘One of the players left from Sir Alex’s time pulled him up on it, to be fair, and told him that it was a fancy car he was driving and it was surprising that it didn’t have a reverse gear.’

We can assume it didn’t belong to defender Eric Bailly, whose modest choice of vehicle was mocked by his team-mates. They took to jumping on the roof and bonnet when it was parked at Carrington and, on one occasion, were joined by manager Mourinho.

There is a widespread view that a complacent United have traded off their illustrious name for too long, and the harsh reality identified by Ibrahimovic, Ronaldo and others has been allowed to erode the club from within.

As we approach the 13th anniversary of Ferguson’s departure, and after numerous attempts at a cultural reset, it feels like a long way back. The legacy of years of United’s malfunction in the market goes on.