A £1.1bn tale of woe: the story of Manchester United’s lost decade

Manchester United: the Lost Decade. If Amazon Prime wants another blockbuster sports series then start production to document what next season will be 10 years searching in the wilderness for the title.

For added depth, perspective and poignancy feature a narrative strand about how the final league derby with Manchester City (Sunday, 4.30pm) before that landmark campaign was entered found United in role reversal with their crosstown rivals: the record 20-times champions have become the club in freefall while City are the slickly run serial trophy winners.

United were last champions in May 2013. Ralf Rangnick’s tenure as interim manager will not end in a 21st crown – United are 19 points behind City with 11 matches left – so the drought will stretch into a barely comprehensible 10th season.

Since Sir Alex Ferguson’s vintage triumphed, United’s finishing positions are seventh, fourth, fifth, sixth, second, sixth, third and second. Also damning is how none of the sides assembled by David Moyes, Louis van Gaal, José Mourinho and Ole Gunnar Solskjær were true contenders. Of the two runners-up finishes, Mourinho’s 2017-18 squad trailed 19 points behind City and last term’s team, under Solskjær, were 12 behind Pep Guardiola’s third champion team.

The post-Ferguson era has been a catalogue of sorry mismanagement, the chief culprits being Ed Woodward, the former executive vice-chairman, and the co-owner Joel Glazer for failing four times to hire the right No 1 and overseeing a dysfunctional transfer policy yet to be corrected.

If United were bound to be Ferguson-centric after his 26-and-a-half-year reign, Moyes did not possess the vision for empire reconstruction. When Woodward and Glazer sacked him in April 2014, 34 league