‘If I was a fan of that club, I would go ‘Wow’. Because how could you do it any better?”

The year was 2011, the man doing the talking was Stan Kroenke and the subject of the Arsenal owner’s lavish praise was the Glazer family’s much-derided ownership of Manchester United.

Wow. Just wow, Stan. It was easy enough to treat Kroenke’s comments with disdain at the time, when United were Premier League champions, having reached three Champions League finals in the previous four seasons — never mind eight years later, now that the full impact of the Glazer effect can be felt. It is not just the hundreds of millions of pounds that have been drained from United’s accounts to finance the Glazers’ leveraged takeover