The dominance of Manchester United under Sir Alex Ferguson either side of the turn of the century made Old Trafford the home of the greatest dynasty in the history of the English game.

Everything seemed to be in place for that dynasty to rule on and on. But instead the biggest club in England marched itself into the wilderness.

This is the untold, astonishing, bewildering, behind-the-scenes account of how they did it.

It is the story of the Glazers' greed, of the wide-eyed ineptitude of the executives they appointed, of a series of managers unable to turn the tanker around and a collection of signings that have plumbed depths of disappointment and mediocrity.

Now, a team of Daily Mail Sport journalists has compiled the UNTOLD UNITED dossier that sheds new light on the club’s demise. In detail after painful detail, it paints an extraordinary picture of just how far United have fallen since Ferguson's retirement in 2013, and assesses if there is any way back from oblivion.

Between them, The Mail's team of Chris Wheeler, Ian Ladyman, Mike Keegan, Ian Herbert, Oliver Holt and Jack Gaughan have covered the patch from the glory years that led to the Treble in 1999 through to the blighted era from which the club is still trying to escape.

Now, read UNTOLD UNITED - only on DailyMail+. We begin with the big beasts that tried, and failed, to fill Ferguson's shoes.

It was the summer of 2014. Manchester United were at FedEx Field just outside Washington DC, preparing for the second game of their pre-season tour of America in the heat of an East Coast summer, and the forwards were practising penalties.

Wayne Rooney, well on his way to becoming the club’s record goalscorer, was about to take his turn from the spot when a shadow fell across him.

The club’s new manager Louis van Gaal, who had been appointed after United lost their nerve and dismissed Ferguson’s successor David Moyes, walked over, stretched out both arms at shoulder height and proceeded to show Rooney how to take a penalty.

‘That was the start of it,’ reflects a member of the incredulous United group on the pitch that day. ‘We had replaced someone who gave us the impression he didn’t know what he was doing with someone who thought he knew everything. Wazza was speechless.’

United was not the club for Van Gaal’s style of micro-management. It was not that kind of squad. They hadn’t respected Moyes, and found Van Gaal oppressive and old school.

It was to become a familiar and paralysing pattern. United bounced from one manager with one defined style to another manager with a philosophy that often seemed diametrically opposed to his predecessor’s. There was no method. There was no continuity.

More than 11 years on, the stone is still rolling. In November last year, when Ruben Amorim was introduced as the latest manager, he was burdened not just by his own inexperience but also the inconsistencies and failures of those who came before him.

United accept now that they asked too much too soon of Moyes, the man chosen by Ferguson as his own successor amid the secrecy and dread that accompanied the Scot’s decision to step down.

The club kept it quiet for as long as possible. An executive first uttered the coded words ‘The Queen is dead’ on Monday, May 6, 2013, at a meeting of United’s media and marketing departments. The attendees thought they had been brought together to discuss a new signing or sponsor.

When Sir Alex did leave – having wrestled the league title back from Manchester City – he was given two gifts from his players. A Rolex watch made in 1941 (the year of his birth) and a book of photos and memorabilia, said to be bound in the same luxury red leather used by Ferrari for the interior in their sports cars.

But what he bequeathed them was wrapped in uncertainty. Ferguson was a control freak. He was a man of his time, one of the last of the great patrician managers who controlled every aspect of the club and set its rhythms and its rules. Succession planning was difficult.

‘When Sir Alex walked away there was nothing left for David Moyes to work with,’ says someone who was inside Old Trafford at the time. ‘All the genius, all the magic, all the very basics were inside Sir Alex’s head.’

United struggled immediately when he left. Ferguson settled into retirement, always heeding the advice to put on a pair of shoes and not slippers when he dressed. He spent his mornings at Le Petit Delice, a cafe in Wilmslow where he lived, reading the Racing Post and enjoying his favourite egg and mayo baguette - washed down with a coffee.

This regimented approach was at odds with the behaviour of the club he left behind. In the years of uncertainty and repeated failure that have followed, United have been scuppered by their own lack of planning, nerve and vision, faults ingrained at all levels of the club.

It was not the appointment of Moyes or Van Gaal that was the problem. Big clubs can weather mistakes made in isolation. What has torpedoed United has been cumulative. Each misstep has been compounded by another.

When Sir Jim Ratcliffe – the leader of United’s latest tilt at salvation – vowed publicly to give Amorim three more years recently, it jarred because this is a club that has lacked a clear and sustained direction at managerial level for so long. The six permanent appointees that have followed Ferguson were installed by four different people. Each time, the need and the desperation has grown.

Moyes was chosen - and given a six-year deal - because Ferguson felt the club needed someone cut from his own Glaswegian cloth, a nurturer capable of overseeing a gradual evolution, and an authoritarian. Moyes lasted 10 months of that six-year contract.

Van Gaal followed because executive vice-chairman Ed Woodward felt he was a planner, someone to lay pathways and also the best tactical mind on the market.

But Woodward was a naif. A brilliant marketing man with keen financial acumen, he was widely regarded as gullible and weak within the game. Woodward was so impressed with his Van Gaal hire he allowed the Dutch manager to dictate recruitment. It was a disaster.

Two years later, when Jose Mourinho entered the increasingly chaotic narrative, the goalposts had moved again: all talk of the future and of long-term strategy had been jettisoned. Mourinho was the arch-pragmatist. He was only interested in the now. 

United were quickly being stripped of the coherence and planning and authority for which they had become so admired under Ferguson. In its stead was something that resembled barely concealed panic.

The chaos and the panic have been punctuated by illuminating vignettes: minutes after Van Gaal’s United won the FA Cup against Crystal Palace in May 2016, his wife was reading about his imminent sacking on her mobile phone.

At the post-match press conference, Van Gaal grew indignant and angry when journalists tried to warn him of what was coming. Everyone knew but him. Whatever Van Gaal’s failings, he was one of the great managers of modern times. To treat him like that was indicative of a lack of authority at the top.

In Mourinho, Woodward and his flunkeys were hiring a man with a managerial bomb in his briefcase, who the zeitgeist had moved on from. But in the desire to win another title they were already past worrying about how it looked, or about what might be the long-term impact on the club of the inevitable explosion of paranoia, infighting and rancour.

‘There was a compromise about hiring Jose,’ says another Old Trafford source. 'He tightens the group and breeds paranoia. Some players get broken and kicked out. But the idea with Jose was we would swallow the pill, put up with the chaos and at the same time get this monkey off our back and win the league. But it didn’t work. Again.’

United had become so accustomed to winning during Ferguson’s glorious tenure that they were unnerved and disconcerted by failure. They did not possess the experience to hold their nerve. They flip-flopped.

And as they procrastinated and veered one way and another, their noisy neighbours shouted them out of town. The continued rise of Manchester City under Pep Guardiola, then Liverpool under Jurgen Klopp, terrified them. United were being left behind.

The same damaging problems ran through the tenures of the first four post-Ferguson managers like a seam of poison. Inadequate recruitment, problems with individual players and a rotten dressing-room culture that at times sat so far from the us-against-the-world ethos of Ferguson that it was impossible to reset. Change, and all that came with it, has only added to that chaos.

Of all of them, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer had the best chance of reinstalling harmony and key values. The Norwegian, hero of the 1999 Champions League final and the embodiment of selflessness, arrived in late 2018 after Mourinho's reign of shock and awe finally blew up in his face.

Solskjaer walked into Carrington at 7.55am on a cold Thursday bearing gifts: Norwegian chocolates for Carrington's much-loved receptionist, the late Kath Phipps, and a kitbag of healing balm for everybody else to soothe the scars of Mourinho's toxicity.

'It felt like someone had drawn back the curtains and let the sunshine in,' says one United staffer.

At a Christmas party for more than 500 staff down the road at Lancashire County Cricket Club two days later, Solskjaer took the microphone and told everybody: 'Enjoy yourself, because it's Christmas. And remember that you work for Manchester United - you should enjoy yourself every day.'

Over the next three years, Solskjaer leaned heavily into what United had once been. He took much from the Ferguson playbook: focus on your strengths, embrace the collective. He asked players to wear suits on matchday again.

There were moments when it felt as if United were back, such as a Champions League victory at Paris Saint-Germain in March 2019 that took them into the quarter-finals of the competition. It was a false dawn.

Solskjaer left Carrington in tears in November 2021 after the death knell of a 4-1 thumping at Watford, on the heels of Liverpool winning 5-0 at Old Trafford. Another manager broken by the brutality of life at a failing club.

'This lot will get me sacked,' he had said to his staff about his players on more than one occasion and he was right. When he spoke at a dinner in Manchester some time after his departure, he labelled his former players 'snowflakes'.

His issues came, in particular, with Anthony Martial and Paul Pogba. He was in good company there. Moyes had struggled with managing Robin van Persie. Van Gaal couldn’t get on with goalkeeper Victor Valdes and defenders Rafael and Marcos Rojo. And there were issues between Mourinho and Luke Shaw.

United's lumbering recruitment policy also saddled Solskjaer with the return of Cristiano Ronaldo, whose second coming began with a bravura performance against Newcastle but was ultimately characterised by the Old Trafford icon grumbling a lot about how things were not the same as they used to be.

He was right. If they had been, they would never have thought they needed him to come back and save them.

United’s players felt Solskjaer was too soft and they took advantage. Van Gaal had been too much like a schoolteacher – even changing the shape of the tables at which the players ate – while Mourinho, after charming everyone early on, was soon fighting everyone, particularly if their name was Pogba.

For a while after Moyes, the club did try to follow a philosophy of recruitment and managerial DNA put together by Woodward, Ferguson, Sir Bobby Charlton and Bryan Robson.

The template was: United would be humble but arrogant on the field, play attacking football with X-factor players and give players from their own academy a chance. And they would win, too.

It wasn’t the worst plan but, over the following decade, it has been persistently undermined by signing the wrong players and hiring the wrong coaches. Certainly, there have been too many of both. And throughout it all, there has not been so much as a hint of a pattern.

Van Gaal was more culpable in signing the wrong players than anybody. United were, at the time, in the process of moving away from Ferguson’s old-school and brilliantly effective recruitment strategy to a modern, data-driven system that would serve them for the future. They pressed pause on all that when Van Gaal arrived.

Senior scouts tell now of being blindsided by some of United’s transfer business at that time. For example, the club weren’t supposed to sign a player unless he had passed through several levels of verification and assessment.

‘Then on the last day of the window in September 2015, Anthony Martial turned up,’ says one former staffer. ‘Nobody had ever heard of him.’

On Van Gaal’s direct say-so United also signed players such as Angel Di Maria, Radamel Falcao, Memphis Depay and Bastian Schweinsteiger.

Di Maria never seemed interested at Old Trafford and United’s players used to laugh that Falcao – the once great Colombian striker – had become so beset by injuries he couldn’t walk straight, never mind run.

Depay was written off by one United executive after listening to his opening press conference. When Rooney told him to keep a low profile after angering the manager, Depay turned up to the next reserve-team game in a Rolls-Royce.

And Schweinsteiger, for all that he talks up his United connections now he is retired, never showed anywhere near enough commitment to satisfy senior team-mates. ‘He came for the money and to say he'd played for United,’ said one. ‘It was scandalous.’

Under the weight of such flawed recruitment, United laboured. That period of mistakes in the market set off a pattern of confusion that has never been resolved and each of their managers - for all their individual faults and idiosyncrasies - have suffered as a result.

Mourinho certainly didn’t get all he wanted in the market and that proved to be a key factor in the complete collapse of his relationship with Woodward. ‘By the end he was coming after me and I knew it,’ Woodward has told friends.

It had been little different for Moyes. He maintains to this day that United didn’t deliver the players he wanted. He asked for Toni Kroos, Gareth Bale and Cesc Fabregas. He got Marouane Fellaini and Juan Mata. Of his relationship with Woodward, Moyes said privately: ‘He is either a genius or a f***ing clown.’

Equally, some who were at Old Trafford at the time were dismissive of the former Everton manager's suitability for the United job. ‘We tried for Bale as we knew he was leaving Spurs,’ says a top-level source. ‘But who are you going to sign for? Carlo Ancelotti’s Real Madrid or David Moyes’ Manchester United?'

Moyes was never a fit. Some now say that – given the way he has repaired his reputation with stints at West Ham and now back at Everton – he should have been given more than his eight months in charge. It may be accurate and fair to say that the task of replacing Ferguson was bigger even that it seemed but equally, Moyes never quite came to terms with it.

He admitted trying out Ferguson’s office chair and feeling as uncomfortable as he feared. ‘Sitting in the chair for the first time felt odd,’ he said. ‘I did it myself with nobody looking.’

The Scot attempted to be his own man. He jettisoned Ferguson’s coaching staff and banned chips from the Carrington canteen. After some negotiation, they returned, only ‘bigger’ with a smaller fat-to-potato ratio.

But Moyes could appear terribly gauche. On the plane home from a Champions League defeat, his players sniggered as he read a book about management techniques.

On another occasion, with his starting XI regularly being leaked to a tabloid, he chose to banish the journalist from his press conferences rather than tackle the actual mole – even when he was told exactly which player was responsible for the leaks.

On his one and only pre-season tour – a mammoth trip to Thailand, Australia and Japan, signed off by Ferguson before he told anyone he wouldn’t be around to lead it – Moyes met United’s beat reporters for a meal in Sydney.

He arrived holding a list of things they had written that had already upset him. Had Ferguson done that, it may well have worked. Moyes? It all felt a little like a pale and unnecessary imitation.

Moyes could have helped himself had he kept one or two of Ferguson’s coaches around him to smoothe the transition.

Equally, he rightly expected more than he got from senior players such as Van Persie, Rio Ferdinand, Nemanja Vidic and Patrice Evra, champions who had won a title the previous season but seemed diminished when Ferguson left. They failed Moyes at United and they know it now.

‘We asked too much of him and didn’t give him the tools,’ says a source close to Woodward. ‘We liked him and we let him down.’

The past 12 years are littered with examples of how United have struggled to modernise – some deeply damaging, others apparently trivial. But Chipgate, mentioned above, shows you cannot underestimate just how trivial footballers can be.

During the Fergie era, players loved one particular staple of the club canteen: fish fingers, chips and mushy peas. Ferguson would often make himself a fish finger and mushy pea sandwich. But Moyes didn't see how a comfort food could fit into the diet of a modern athlete, and banned it.

Hardly a culinary revolution, some 15 years or so after Arsene Wenger transformed nutrition in the Premier League. But the players clearly held a fish finger-shaped grudge – and the moment Moyes was replaced by caretaker Ryan Giggs, the 'meal of champions' was back on the menu.

Van Gaal could be clumsy and insensitive, dishing out diagrams on pieces of paper to try to explain why his team had not deserved to lose at West Ham and calling a reporter from The Sun ‘fat man’ after a setback at Newcastle. At lunchtimes, he asked that players eat separately from staff, thus disrupting the inclusive ethos cultivated by Ferguson.

‘Sir Alex’s thing was that we were all Manchester United but under Louis that started to slip,’ says an insider.

In terms of the football, the Dutchman arrived from the World Cup heralded as a trend-setter for subbing on a goalkeeper for a penalty shootout win over Costa Rica in the quarter-final. The reality was that his methods appeared to be stuck in the past.

Van Gaal would send the players emails with instructions about games and training. When he realised they weren’t always reading them, he requested an email read receipt.

Players felt overwhelmed and tactically confused by uber-technical and stodgy training sessions. Van Gaal would often stop a game with a shrill blast of his whistle, march on to the field and physically move a player – often a seasoned international – half a yard to the right. ‘Now you can play,’ he would announce.

Once again, United failed with a manager. ‘We tried to build a plane while flying it,’ is a phrase Woodward used about that period. But why? What would have been wrong with slowing down?

Foundations and principles laid down by Van Gaal at Ajax and Barcelona in the 1990s were to stand the test of time but at United there was to be no such show of faith.

The big Dutchman with the retro quiff is still remembered by some at Old Trafford as a kind, approachable soul, someone who cared for those he worked alongside, for and with.

They do not remember Mourinho the same way. Woodward appointed the Portuguese having read eight books on him. He thought he knew what he was getting. He was wrong.

One established member of United’s in-house media team described every interview conducted with Mourinho as ‘like talking to someone in a hostage cell’. He couldn’t shake such a countenance, even in moments of triumph.

When suggesting to a senior United source before kick-off in Stockholm that they could be about to beat Ajax in the Europa League final of 2017, Daily Mail Sport was met with a blunt reply. ‘Right now, I'd just take a smile from the manager as a sign of progress.’

What made Mourinho – who lived for his two-and-a-half seasons in charge at the Lowry Hotel – so emphatically angry and confrontational during his time in Manchester? Those who know him put it down to the fact he knew, deep down in his soul, that he was not going to win the Premier League. United were not good enough.

His arrival in Manchester was supposed to herald the next episode of the Jose-Pep Show after their famous tussles as managers of Real Madrid and Barcelona. But it never took off.

Instead, it was Guardiola and Klopp who occupied star billing as their City and Liverpool teams developed a style of exciting, possession-based football that Mourinho’s instinctively more pragmatic and prosaic outlook couldn’t match.

Mourinho has rewritten the history of his time in Manchester to suit him. He ranks his second-placed Premier League finish in 2018 as one of his greatest career achievements, which is palpable nonsense. Mourinho has won eight league titles across the continent and five European trophies and, anyway, United finished 19 points behind champions City that season.

It was evident in so much of what Mourinho did that we were watching a once great coach railing against the dying of the managerial light. Jose was at war with everything, including the club.

He was used to Real Madrid, where the club could manoeuvre in the background to plant stories in the media and brief to get his message out there. At times, Mourinho took matters into his own hands.

On tour in the US in 2018, after telling the media at a press conference in San Jose there was no guarantee that Anthony Martial would be allowed to leave, he left the room and then secretly summoned three reporters to tell us that he would do everything he could to sell the Frenchman.

Mourinho’s toxic relationship with Pogba formed the backdrop to his demise at United, with insiders likening it to Fergie’s fallout with Beckham. Their disputes were extraordinary and public.

Mourinho instigated that training-ground argument once he knew the Sky cameras were rolling. It got the exposure the manager wanted but, like many of his actions, at the expense of dressing-room unity.

Mourinho dropped and subbed Pogba, and then pointedly described his replacement, Scott McTominay, as having ‘a normal haircut, no tattoos, no big cars, no big watches, humble kid’. Shaw – considered by most in football to be of sound character – did not escape. By the summer tour of 2018, Mourinho was openly mocking the England defender.

Coming back from training one day in LA on golf buggies, Mourinho pointed at Shaw’s transport and, in a dig at the player’s weight, said: ‘I will have to go with James Corden.’

Sources at Carrington spoke of an obsessive coach ‘who would smile at you one minute and blank you the next’. It was left to his assistant Rui Faria to raise morale as stories emerged of Mourinho distancing himself from the players in training and using a side entrance to avoid mingling with them in the canteen. By the time he left even his great ally Ferguson could hardly speak his name.

In 2018, United executives were horrified by Mourinho’s decision to wear a hoodie underneath his club blazer rather than a shirt and tie at a public ceremony, attended by Munich survivors Sir Bobby Charlton and Harry Gregg, to mark the 60th anniversary of the disaster.

When the decision was made that 2012-13 was to be Ferguson's last season, Woodward held conversations with potential candidates, including Mourinho.

‘The problem was that we were too late,’ admits one insider. ‘All the obvious targets were sorted.

'Laurent Blanc had agreed a deal with Paris Saint-Germain, Guardiola had been taken by Bayern Munich, Ancelotti had agreed to replace Jose at Real Madrid and Jose himself was going back to Chelsea.’

Regardless, all the managers who have followed Ferguson have been increasingly handicapped by the same flaws. Poor players, poor attitudes, poor policies, poor recruitment, poor executives, poor leadership.

Each new arrival has found an even greater mess than their predecessor. And, too often, when they have looked upwards, they have seen only confusion there, too.

Solskjaer was given a new contract in July 2021, with Woodward saying: ‘Ole has worked tirelessly putting foundations in place for long-term success.'

The Norwegian was fired four months later. He had only been given the new deal to dampen media speculation about his future.

‘It meant nothing,’ reveals a source. ‘It had the same compensation figure in it as the old one.'

Perhaps the most damning trend in a landscape littered with chaos, panic and failure was that, over time, expectations of a once-great club have dropped almost without anyone noticing.

United’s lack of direction has been mirrored by its managers as much as it has been driven by them.

By the time the erudite German theorist Ralf Rangnick was invited to hold the fort for six months after Solskjaer’s sacking, the club was so stuck in its vortex of confusion it was prepared to give just about anything a whirl.

Rangnick told the world the United squad needed ‘open heart surgery’. But, by then, there was only the faintest beat beneath that famous badge.

TOMORROW - Read Volume 2: The farce of the false 'Messiahs'