After Moyes, United went for the opposite. Louis van Gaal had the trophies, the personality and the experience of managing European giants. On paper, he offered the authority they had so desperately lacked.
Yet his football too often turned Old Trafford into a waiting room. Possession became an exercise in patience, with supporters watching the ball move sideways and backwards while wondering when somebody might take a risk. An FA Cup triumph offered a memorable farewell in 2016, but little evidence of a sustained revival.
Jurgen Klopp looked a far more natural fit for the football United supporters wanted. His Borussia Dortmund side played with speed, aggression and conviction. He had challenged Bayern Munich while developing players into stars, rather than relying exclusively on buying established ones.
Klopp was committed to Dortmund and United could not simply demand his arrival, and lacked the ambition to pursue it too. Nevertheless, he represented the direction they should have pursued. His subsequent transformation of Liverpool makes the failure to persuade him particularly painful: their greatest rivals found the energy and identity United were losing.
