Manchester United: What Man City Can Never Be and What the Rest Should Fear

As a child of the 1980's, the period during which my football awareness first blossomed and eventually flourished, was dominated largely by one club. Assuming control in 1986, Alex Ferguson had one thing on his mind and that was to make Manchester United the most successful club in the land. At the time, the notion itself was ridiculous given the supremacy of a Liverpool side that for a decade had tormented not only English opposition, but across Europe as well.

As we all now know, it took a few years for Fergie to bring success of any kind but once it came, boy did it come. Through the 1990's, Ferguson was able to create, exploit and rebuild 3 top-class sides with a mix of homegrown youth and world-class experience (the former eventually growing into the latter as well). The phases would traditionally go: United dominate for 2-3 years, suffer a blip, the manager rebuilds and they're away again.

In my opinion, what has happened over the course of the last 18 months is something different - and a little bit special.

Nobody who watched last season's Premier League effort would have said United has been at full flow. The Red Devils had not played their best football and indeed they were downright lucky to escape from some games with as much as they did (a shockingly fortunate result at West Bromwich Albion instantly springs to mind...). Nevertheless, they once again showed that steely determination that seems to be inherent with putting on the famous shirt and scraped over the line and won the title. Number 19. Making them the most successful club in English football. Just as Fergie said they would be once they had "knocked Liverpool off their f*&^ing perch".

However, rather than sit back and count his trophies or watch his beloved racehorses, what did the great man do? He focused only on the fact that for the second time his boys had been beaten in the European final by FC Barcelona. Then, he set about planning his revenge.

The retirement of Gary Neville and in particular Paul Scholes saw the end of two remarkable careers spent at only this club and a massive dent in the collective experience of the squad. There was aspects of the team that needed strengthening, some that needed tweaking and in the likes of Javier Hernandez and Nemanja Vidic, some that needed maintaining.

Venturing out into the transfer market and securing some of England's finest young talent in the form of defender Phil Jones and marauding-midfielder Ashley Young, as well as bringing back the gifted duo of Tom Cleverly and Danny Welbeck from loan spells, the manager pulled off a master stroke. The immensely-able, often-frustrating goalkeeper David de Gea was brought in from Atletico Madrid to replace the incomparable Edwin Van Der Sar and it seemed the piece were fitting rather nicely.

A fantastic preseason saw the team gel and produce football that indicated one glaring truth. The side was being prepared and developed towards a new, contemporary brand of football involving the one-touch flow