Back in the dark days of the 1980s, Manchester United used to run an advert in their official match programme with the slogan: “This season we mean business!”

It became a standing joke among fans once this slogan was not only retained beyond the miserable first few months of one campaign but well into the next. But there was always a belief within the game that United, having fallen into decline after winning their first European Cup in 1968, would rise again.

Liverpool were English football’s dominant force, but the Merseyside club’s chief executive Peter Robinson often warned of the danger that “that lot down the East Lancs Road” would “get their act together” sooner or later.

Sure enough, they did. After years of struggle, Alex Ferguson (no knighthood in those days) got to grips with that faltering institution and, through sheer force of will, dragged United out of the doldrums, winning the club’s first league title in 26 years and establishing them as the dominant force in English football.

Rarely has a club “meant business” like United did under Ferguson’s management through the 1990s and 2000s – right up to his retirement in 2013, at which point the Glazer family started to run it their way and the footballing empire Ferguson had built so painstakingly was allowed to crumble once more. If the Glazers meant business, it was strictly in the corporate sense.

The extent of United’s struggles in the post-Ferguson years is remarkable. So much money spent, so little success, so little joy, so little sense of direction or purpose. Their trophy successes have been beyond the dreams of most clubs – the FA Cup under Louis van Gaal, the League Cup and Europa League under Jose Mourinho, the Carabao Cup and FA Cup under Erik ten Hag, but for a club of United’s size, history and wealth, those have been meagre, miserable pickings.

And yet the same feeling has persisted among their rivals: that the darkest hour is just before the dawn; that at some point, “that lot” will get their act together and start competing for the biggest prizes again; that the confused recruitment strategies of the past decade will give way to something coherent; that they will eventually find a manager who can win hearts and minds and take the players and fans on a real journey, rather than reaching the first staging post and losing his way completely.

That is the challenge that awaits Ruben Amorim, should he choose to take over from Erik ten Hag, who was sacked on Monday.

United sit 14th in the Premier League and 21st in the Europa League standings, sandwiched between Viktoria Plzen and Elfsborg. In all competitions this season, they have won four games out of 13 (against Fulham, Southampton, Brentford and Barnsley). Going back to the start of last season, they have won just 21 matches out of 47 in the Premier League, scoring just 65 goals and conceding 69.

In terms of expected goals (xG), a metric that reflects the quality of chances teams create and concede, United’s tallies since the start of last season – per Opta – are 71.7 xG for and 85.5 xG against.

To be polite, none of this is good. Whatever Ten Hag’s inevitable protestations, the problems went a lot deeper than profligacy in front of goal or an unwelcome VAR intervention at West Ham on Sunday.

Ten Hag was in some ways the quintessential modern-United managerial tenure: a challenging first transfer window, early struggles, a call to arms, back-to-basics football, an improved work ethic, a significant upturn, a trophy success, an upbeat declaration that “this is only the start”… and then looking helpless as the whole thing unravelled, a dysfunctional group of players reverted to type and another would-be saviour was quietly ushered away.

Even at the best of times, whatever technical and tactical vision Ten Hag had when he arrived in Manchester seemed to have been sacrificed in favour of pragmatism. It remains startling that a coach who initially wanted to build a team around Barcelona playmaker Frenkie de Jong ended up drifting so far from that concept, signing so many midfielders and trying so many combinations in that department, none of them remotely convincing.

That word: drifting. United have spent far too much of the past decade drifting, going nowhere. One step forward, two steps back, more bust than boom, far more bad signings than good. There are parallels with Liverpool’s decline in the 1990s – not just in the way things crumbled and standards slipped so quickly but in the naive assumption that this is all just a bit of a readjustment after a little turbulence and that, sooner or later, the natural order will be restored.

That was a theme in this piece exploring the journey between Liverpool’s 18th league title in 1990 and their 19th three decades later. Their former defender John Scales, one of several big-money acquisitions in that mid-1990s period, reflected that “there was still a feeling at Liverpool that it was a matter of when – not if – they got back to winning titles”.

Steve Nicol, a Liverpool stalwart of the 1980s, recalled suddenly feeling in the early 1990s that “OK, we’re not in the best shape here. This is going to take a little bit longer than I thought.” “Before you knew it,” he said, “it was five years, 10 years, 20 years…”

Sounds familiar? United are not approaching the 20-year stage yet, but it is 11 years since their last Premier League title (and while Mourinho and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer still proudly trumpet their runners-up spots in 2018 and 2021, those were two of the most distant second-place finishes in English top-flight history). It can already be taken as read that 11 will become 12 after the way they have started this season.

The greater concern might be that, by prolonging the misery under Ten Hag into this campaign, by lacking the courage to go with their original conviction at the end of last season, United’s much-vaunted new executive team have risked this being another wasted season rather than phase one of the latest rebuild.

This was supposed to be a season when United “meant business”, to judge by the numerous bold statements from petrochemicals billionaire Sir Jim Ratcliffe when he bought a minority stake in the club.

Short of pointing fingers directly at the club’s majority owner, Ratcliffe could hardly have been more scathing of the culture of mediocrity that has developed under the Glazer family’s ownership. Addressing that, he said, would be a question of appointing the right people at all levels and changing attitudes and culture in the boardroom, dressing room and office floor alike. Some of these noises were encouraging, as were the moves to lure Omar Berrada from Manchester City and Dan Ashworth from Newcastle United as chief executive and sporting director.

• A Tell report / Republished from The Athletic