Ed Woodward's 2018 comments come back to haunt him as Liverpool show up Manchester United

For some years, ever since the formation of the Premier League, Manchester United have been leading the way when it came to pulling in the big money.

The success that they enjoyed at home and abroad under Sir Alex Ferguson saw them become the dominant force on the pitch, and that dominance was leveraged to great effect off it as sponsorship deals rolled in at record sums and their global appeal continued to increase year after year.

They were the first English club to really try and harness the power of the globalised nature of sport and realise just how strong the Premier League brand had become, with tours of the Far East and their infamous shunning of the FA Cup in order to take part in the Club World Cup in Brazil in 2000 only serving to increase their global following and enhance their appeal to potential new partners.

And with United having been the dominant force at a time when media revenues had exploded, even a leveraged buyout of the football club by the Glazer family, while deeply unpopular, didn't stop the money rolling in or the enormous transfer fees and wages being paid.

When Ferguson retired after the Premier League triumph in 2012/13 it would have been hard to imagine that almost a decade on from that title, which was their 13th in a Premier League era that was only 20 years old, would have been the last that they picked up.

But while the drive for success for United came from Ferguson, the years that followed have been a milking of the brand for financial gain, with little in the way of competitive success or any kind of visible strategy.

"Playing performance doesn't really have a meaningful impact on what we can do on the commercial side of the business," said former vice-chairman Ed Woodward during a