While it is clear that Manchester United suffered a major decline in the past few years, sourcing the cause of their problems is not so simple. Some still tend to put the blame on David Moyes, the man who took the reins after the departure of Alex Ferguson.
Moyes' only season at the club was somewhat of a disaster, with the club limping to a seventh place finish. Whether he should shoulder the blame for that decline can be debated, and he certainly feels there was going to be issue no matter who took the manager's job.
Speaking on beIN SPORTS, he feels he should have been given more time to continue the evolution he had started at the club, as well as mentioning he came close to getting in some big name players:
Really interesting from David Moyes here on his time at #mufc.
Speaks about their attempts to sign Bale & Fabregas that summer, but only ended up with Fellaini. pic.twitter.com/Ic2hqSnwMm— Derek Ryan (@derekryan) March 18, 2019
I felt at the time that only being given 10 months in the job wasn't long enough. I think people looking back at Manchester United would realise that there were a lot of problems. My time at Manchester United could not be a revolution, it had to be an evolution. It had had to take time to change, it could not be changed overnight...
Marouane Fellaini was to be part of a group of players that would come in. By the time we got to the end of the transfer window, we thought we had a chance of getting Gareth Bale. We hoped that we could talk him out of going to Real Madrid, because that was already half done. We had offered more money and tried to entice him.
Cesc Fabregas was also very close. We spoke to him and hoped to bring him from Barcelona...
During the season I had met Toni Kroos, and had agreed that Toni Kroos would come to Manchester United. But somewhere in there I lost my job, and Toni decided to go elsewhere.
Ultimately, there is very little Moyes would do differently given the opportunity. It has been suggested in the past that he was too quick to remove Alex Ferguson's staff from the club, and that Mike Phelan should have stayed on as assistant manager.
Moyes claims he did try to keep one member of staff, but it was not Phelan:
The question I get asked most is 'what would you do different David?', and I wouldn't do anything different. Maybe a couple of small things. I might have tried to keep one of the members of staff that were there when I arrived, which I did try to do...
I offered René (Meulensteen) the job, but he decided not to stay. In hindsight, if I had known he wasn't going to stay, I would have been better keeping Mike (Phelan).
