As a club they are the very definition of all fur coat and no knickers. They strut round like they are still the big cheese of world football but in reality they are a shell of a club that’s been hollowed out by a host owner who has bled them dry.
You're spot on with almost all of that, but I'd stop well short of pinning most of it on the current owner ''bleeding them dry.''
They've spent an absolutely obscene amount on players and managers. They've not exactly tightened the purse strings. They've handed over wads of cash every time the entitled fanbase has rioted or sent bomb threats to their own players. They brought the prodigal son back 'home' as requested too.
I think the facts are that the club simply reached the end of its success cycle and went into the natural decline that affects us all at some point in time. They had their time in the sun (Ferguson era) but their sheer arrogance and monstrous ego meant they were sneering towards the lessons of other clubs' declines. Basically, they thought they had made it, and that was that. They'd arrived and were now well established and wouldn't or couldn't be moved. This flies in the face of what human history tells us, and you snub the lessons of history at your peril. All empires fall, but they thought theirs was above all that. Well, it wasn't and it isn't.
They endured (without a scrap of grace) the Liverpool FC empire built on the foundations laid by Bill Shankly. They saw it rise to previously unimaginable peaks and sustain for a couple of decades. They also witnessed the inevitable, eventual decline too. There were many lessons to be learned from observing our rise to such heights, and just as many to learn from looking at how it eventually fell into relative decline. United thought they were above learning such lessons. Another problem for them was their success wasn't built on United values, it was built on Ferguson values. Ferguson was the rug beneath their feet, and once pulled from under them United had no firm foundations of their own to stand upon. Since then, they've acted like headless chickens from boardroom to fanbase, trying to recreate the past.
Basically, the entire mindset of the club and fanbase is wrong. This goes far, far deeper than the ownership. An ownership that has thrown billions at the problem. The lot of them have bought into their own ludicrous hype and indulged their egos for too long. They have no humility and, as a result, learn virtually nothing at all from their experience and the experiences of others they observe. It's not their ownership that's killing them. It's the Man United psyche itself that's doing the real damage.
