At Manchester United, the football club’s multilayered travails, the misery of the manager and the palpable sense of soullessness around Old Trafford are all stark reminders of how quickly the world can change. United won the Premier League with a final farewell to Sir Alex Ferguson as recently as 2013, and Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan of Abu Dhabi bought their noisy neighbours only 10 years ago. Yet the long modern era, when United’s conveyor-belt successes were further highlighted by City’s repeated mishaps, is already becoming a little hard to recall.
One United veteran lamented to me this week that City now not only eclipse United so vividly on the field, in the style and brio with which Pep Guardiola’s winning teams are playing, but in all areas. United, owned and financially exploited by the Glazer family, and run by Ed Woodward, the former banker who orchestrated their debt-loading takeover, are floundering. Yet if they have needed a model for how to do things much better after bungling their challenge, albeit fraught, of replacing Ferguson, they can see it across Manchester.
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