After 26 years of “failure”, Manchester United’s success in the Premier League era is due to the influence of one man, writes Joyce Woolridge
“Guess what, Mum, Manchester United never won the League once between 1967 and 1993. That’s 26 years!” To my numerate nine-year-old, this statistic is mind-boggling. He just cannot conceive how that could have happened. I could have fobbed him off with the platitudinous “no team has an automatic right to win anything, son” spiel by way of explanation. But it is an unfair world and big clubs, with all their advantages, should win big titles. Over that quarter-century of “failure” (in inverted commas in a vain attempt to mollify those supporters of clubs who never win anything and are doubtless chewing the carpet while reading this), Manchester United had the wealth, the players and the opportunities to be League champions but only rarely even came close. The inescapable conclusion is that the difference between then and the subsequent pot-laden decades is simply, as I informed junior, the arrival of Alex Ferguson.
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