Are Manchester United ‘back’? Who knows, but they’re definitely a lot better

There was a time in the mid-2000s when Manchester United were enduring one of their occasional troughs under Sir Alex Ferguson and all the talk was of a crumbling empire.

Old Trafford was a miserable place: unrest on the terraces; a rare sense of dysfunction on the pitch, with some senior players unconvinced by youngsters like Cristiano Ronaldo; anxiety in the boardroom, with the threat of the Glazer family’s takeover looming. Chelsea were emerging as the new force in English football under Jose Mourinho and for a time it was hard to see where United’s next Premier League title was going to come from.

Of all the many words spoken and written about Ferguson and United around that time, one line in particular sticks in my mind.

“The brain can tell the arm to write off Manchester United,” the venerable Paul Hayward wrote in the Daily Telegraph. “But the pen will not move across the page.”

It went against the prevailing mood of the time, but Hayward, not unusually, was proved right. Because United re-emerged with a team built around a new-look defence and the precocious but fast-maturing talents of Wayne Rooney and Ronaldo, going on to clinch five Premier League titles, one Champions League title (plus runners-up twice), two League Cups and one Club World Cup in Ferguson’s final seven seasons in charge.

It’s funny how times change. From the moment Ferguson headed into retirement in 2013 and the empire really did crumble, requiring all of us to look at the club with a different perspective, Hayward’s dictum was reversed. Rather than resisting the urge to write off United, it became the opposite: do not be swept along into thinking United are back.

There have been moments over the past 10 years — no, let’s be fair, spells — when it would have been easy to fall into that trap.

United are in contention in several competitions (Photo: OLI SCARFF/AFP via Getty Images)

In the spring of 2015, towards the end of Louis van Gaal’s first season in charge, there was a run of six consecutive Premier League wins, including a 2-1 victory over Liverpool at Anfield and a thrilling 4-2 defeat of Manchester City. In November that year, in Van Gaal’s second season, a dramatic stoppage-time winner at Watford took United top of the Premier League, prompting excitable talk of a title challenge.

That was around the time a senior United executive casually told reporters the club had no concerns about Pep Guardiola joining Manchester City because United had their own “genius coach” in Van Gaal. From that win at Watford, United went eight games without a win and their hierarchy soon decided they did need a new coach after all.

There were various spells under Mourinho when they built momentum and looked serious. Winning the League Cup and the Europa League in his first season and then finishing second in the Premier League a year later, with a creditable total of 81 points, tells you that.

At one point, even Paul Scholes,…