Nostalgia, like so many other things in life, isn’t what it used to be. Unless, it seems, you’re Manchester United, in whose slightly troubled shadow a vibrant, vigorous, youthfully progressive nostalgia scene has mushroomed in recent times. The internet in particular is quietly blooming with United nostalgia, from antique shirts and skinny-legged video clips, to pictorial histories, on-this-day obsessionism and beatifically retro-facing Twitter feeds. Elsewhere in the slightly more real world the members of the Class of 92 – promoted now to all-seeing young fogey sages – are pretty much ever-present, tending their potters’ wheels, pipes stuffed with parsley, keepers of some William Morris-style lost footballing idyll.

There is nothing new here. Football fans are sentimentalists by nature. The good is gone. The bad is to come. Sic transit gloria Arthur Albiston. This is the standard cheerfully maintained footballing lament, a sense of nostalgia-hued loyalism that seems to attache itself to some clubs a little more than others, and to United more than most. “Manchester United is not merely a football club: it’s a beautiful memory,” Eamon Dunphy wrote in his (brilliant) biography of Matt Busby, published before the most recently yearned-over set of beautiful memories – oh my Jesper Blomqvist; my David May – were even conceived. This is a club for whom successive eras, whether through circumstance or simply the natural sporting cycle of change, have often a little like the end of things, whose history has often come in grand, stuttering moments of collapse and rebirth.

And so here we are again. When United play Queens Park Rangers at Old Trafford on Sunday they will do so with a team that already feels like a decisive marker between old and new. United are likely to field four intriguingly pick-and-mix debutants – Radamel Falcao, Luke Shaw, Daley Blind and Marcos Rojo – in a team also containing fellow newbies Ángel di María and Ander Herrera. It is, let’s face it, a startlingly alien-looking team. Not to mention a moment that might come to capture the basic strangeness of this energetically reconditioned United, at a club where development, and the ability to refresh from within, has always been a point of pride; but which would appear to have been replaced now by a bullish short-term acquisitiveness.

Manchester United’s manager Louis van Gaal at a press conference, flanked by Radamel Falcao and Daley Blind, left. Photograph: John Peters/Man Utd via Getty Images

And yet, this all feels a little overdone doesn’t it? Not to mention wrong in essence. Blink a little, feel that pounding pulse, and somehow at the end of it all Manchester United appear to be still very much with us. The fact is, for all the concerns voiced in the last fortnight, this has always been a restless, hungry, big-spending football club. Even in the Busby days the player production line was as much about scouting and sourcing and hoovering up than some self-contained organic process. Busby himself may look a priestly figure these days but in his own time he had plenty of flash about him: a Crombie-clad, modernising, working class entrepreneur of a football manager, and a perfect fit in what was throughout his time an aggressive and aspirational sporting entity.

There is still a mark of this in the way a club of United’s scale embraces its new players, a reminder of how those who enter as a price tag and a salary can separate out almost instantly into wholly absorbed individuals. Di María, for example, may be a little overpriced, perhaps even a slight double-take as a British record transfer. But never mind that, what a player he is! There he goes now haring about like some super-evolved footballing species, all lithe, fevered and entirely natural sporting grace. Cash-sluicing plc business models may come and go, brands may be wrung dry, corporate waffle spouted. But football’s base units remain the same and supercharged, nimble-footed wingers will always be deeply, inexorably Manchester United.

Plus more importantly – and this seems the key in all this – the stories around this alienated, Glazer-fied United remain as vibrant and indelible as ever. It is a concern often lost in the middle of these anxieties, but the jumping-off point for the current period of change, that dead-cat bounce of a final Sir Alex Ferguson title-winning season already looks like a grand, unignorable, slightly chilling piece of sporting drama. Who needs long-range nostalgia when that final match of the season at Old Trafford, in particular, already has a brilliantly cinematic quality: Fergie on the pitch, mic in hand, dividing his kingdom like some deluded footballing Lear (David Moyes – poor David – his own doomed Cordelia); and behind him a team in the process of falling apart, bones sticking out through holes in the flesh, but driven along by a last calculated splurge on Robin van Persie, brought screeching in through the gates in his Corvette like some tuxedoed Mr Fixit in order to fillet and sort and expertly divvy up the decomposing cadaver.

It is part of the beauty of the game that no matter how contorted and dragged out of shape it might become football will always find a way to renew itself. Loyalties survive; histories continue to be written; the world keeps ending and still people keep turning up asking where the party is. My own favourite memory of that gripping final skeleton season under Ferguson was United’s away fans singing on gleefully as their visibly decelerating team just kept on winning against the head, held up by the dying momentum of Fergie-power and the indelible romance of that red shirt.

At the end of which here we are, all ready for the latest thrillingly glitzy attempt at defibrillation. At which point it turns out this is not so much a story of dwindling away or irreversible corporate transformation; but instead just the latest instalment in football’s own never-ending tale of glory and operatic, managed decline. Grand, isn’t it? Not to mention – now you come to mention it – all very Manchester United.