At the end of February last year, Sir Alex Ferguson's Manchester United were twelve points clear at the top of the table and had just held Jose Mourinho's Real Madrid to a battling draw at the Santiago Bernabeu. Real would eventually triumph in the return leg -- no shame in losing to a team that -- but United would go on to secure the Premier League title without breaking a sweat, briefly flirting with the overall points record in the process.
Fast-forward a year and the scene is enormously different. Languishing in sixth place (and just barely at that), United travelled to Athens and were promptly slapped around by Olympiakos, who limped through the group stages and promptly sold their best player to Fulham. To say it was a shock victory would be to give United far too much credit. A defeat was a very real possibility from the moment the starting lineups were announced, and the Greeks simply outplayed their guests, earning a routine 2-0 victory.
Something rather terrible has happened at Old Trafford.
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It's tempting to blame this all on David Moyes. 'The Chosen One' has the look of a man in over his head, and the results have been little short of appalling. After a particularly distressing 2-1 loss at the Britannia, the manager's response was upbeat but hardly reassuring: "I don’t know what we have to do win this game. I was pleased, we made opportunities and I thought we played well in difficult conditions."
Moyes' training methods have been questions since his days at Everton; his tactics seem more suited to a plucky mid-table side than to the defending champions. His first transfer window was a disaster, and he followed that up by signing the Premier League's best pure number ten, then handing Wayne Rooney, who prefers playing in the same position, a monster five-and-a-half-year contract. As cunning plans go, that one's more Baldrick than Odysseus.
United's other option this summer, allegedly, was two-time Champions League winner Jose Mourinho, currently top of the table with a Chelsea side that limped to third place last season and was sixth the year before that. There's no doubt that the self-style Special One is a top-tier manager, and it's natural to wonder what might have been had the club's board overlooked his volatility and brought him to Manchester.
But even if it was Mourinho helming the ship at Old Trafford, it's not as though all of the club's problems would simply have vanished. Moyes is almost certainly a contributing factor to United's problems, but the seeds of these issues started well before Ferguson's retirement.
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In many ways, this disaster of a season represents Ferguson's chickens coming home to roost only to find that nobody had bothered buying a roost in the first place. The transition from 26 years under one hugely successful manager to anyone else was always going to be lined with difficulties, and Ferguson's stubborn ability to coax championship-winning performances out of players who had no right to be producing at that level only served to hide how difficult things would be.
In 2012, the Premier League was won without anything so much as resembling a midfield. Ferguson seemed to take an almost perverse pleasure in inverting Pep Guardiola's fetish for central players, seeing if United could do without while the rest of the world was ascribing almost biblical importance to the position. Bizarrely, they could. Winning the league with a midfield that had more in common with profiteroles than a football team has to be considered one of the finest accomplishments of an incredible career.
But it was also one of the most damaging. If not for Ferguson's ability to somehow stitch together a side from essentially nothing and their immediate competitors going through their own private crises, expectations for the current squad wouldn't be nearly so high, and that would have allowed far more scope for ruthlessness in a summer clearout. Had Manchester United not won the league last season, they'd almost certainly have been far more active in the transfer market.
As it stands, their summer activity was a farce. The only player who arrived in a squad in need of massive reinforcements was Marouane Fellaini, and the big Belgian's injury-riddled time at Old Trafford has, so far, not been as successful as Moyes would have liked. Despite that, Fellaini's been their best midfield signing in years, which only serves to highlight how severe a problem United have had in the centre.
Elsewhere, life doesn't look much rosier. If we include Adnan Januzaj -- the only pleasant surprise of United's season so far -- there is elite, young talent at three positions. Robin van Persie, Wayne Rooney and Juan Mata combine to fix another two problems, which is a little amusing considering the money committed on the trio. Everywhere else, the squad bears the stench of what is at best a mid-table side.
Ferguson's genius allowed him to operate farther and farther from footballing reality and get away with it. The squad's been left in tatters and the scouting network was tailored so close to the old manager's whims that it'll take Moyes years (if he gets them) to unravel it. Appointing a serious, sensible Scottish manager was intended to continue Ferguson's legacy, but even his hand-picked heir had no hope of matching his all-conquering predecessor.
By now, the problem may very well be psychological. United have gone through bad runs before, but they've never managed to lose their very aura of United-ness until this season. Conceding early no longer guarantees a late comeback, scoring early no longer guarantees a win. Without Ferguson's magic, the players look both lost and thoroughly demotivated, and the famous halftime blastings they used to receive are either un-administered or utterly ineffective this time around.
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Manchester United's biggest problem is, of course, fixable. Even if the club fails to make the Champions League group stages next season, they wield enough financial power to effect a major squad overhaul in summer, and it would be foolish to assume that their position as the power in English football is irrecoverable.
But it's not going to be a quick fix, and it's probably safe to assume that the conflagration will consume more than a few managerial careers before it's all burned out. Ferguson always warned of the perils of letting players become 'bigger than the club', showing even the most sublime talents the door when they even hinted that they were getting too big for his boots, but the carnage that's followed his retirement shows just how dangerous it can be to let a manager, no matter how brilliant, become the club.
This is the legacy he leaves. Row upon row of gleaming silverware attest to his legendary ability, but Moyes' abomination of a year is a reminder of the cost of that success. Ferguson launched Manchester United skyward, then kept them aloft through sheer bloody-minded genius. But, alas, he neglected to pack a parachute.