Manchester United's chaotic strategy proves how far they have fallen as Man City show them the way forward

Three-and-a-half years is a long time in football, but it can also pass in the blink of an eye, depending on how well you believe those three-and-a-half years to have been spent.
If you take September 1, 2008, as a starting point and move forward three-and-a-half years, you land in March 2012, with Manchester City having progressed from being perennial mid-table also-rans into a club on the verge of winning its first league championship since 1968.

Money helped, obviously. September 1, 2008, was the day that Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al Nahyan arrived in English football to turn the game on its head and, at the same time, transform Mancunian rivalry into something more than the one-horse race it had become.
Neither club particularly likes it, but everything that one of them does is automatically compared with the other, so it is an interesting exercise to put Manchester United through the ‘three-and-a-half year’ test, with the starting point being the day Sir Alex Ferguson’s retirement was announced on May 8, 2013.
Give or take a day or two either side, United will hit the three-and-a-half year mark in two weeks’ time, but it is fair to say that their trajectory is not quite as impressive and reassuring as City’s was back in March 2012.
City, do not forget, began from a much lower base – a club with a squad of has-beens and expensive misfits, known only for its endless trophy drought and propensity to make a mess of things.
Three-and-a-half years ago, however, United had just secured the club’s 20th league title with a winning margin of eleven points.
Ferguson was walking away from a club at the summit of English football. His squad was in need of evolution, with ageing players in need of replacement and younger ones needing to prove their worth, but still, David Moyes and Ed Woodward, the new manager and executive vice-chairman, inherited a winning machine.