Future starts now for Moyes

Out of the Champions League, out of the title race, out of the battle for the top four, the FA Cup and Carling Cup both a distant memory; Manchester United’s miserable season is now complete and their 2014-15 campaign will begin almost immediately — in the boardroom rather than on the pitch.

There is no disgrace in going out of Europe in the quarter-finals in Munich, even for a club of United’s stature, and having gone ahead in the Allianz Arena — and having battled well in the first leg at Old Trafford — there were moments in this tie to provide some hope for the future.

But nevertheless it will be an unaccustomed and uncomfortable feeling today as the English champions consider the prospect of more than a month remaining in the season but nothing to play for.

The very best David Moyes’ side can hope for now is an unwanted place in the Europa League by finishing fifth in the table; and you suspect the next few weeks — with so much time for reflection and so much time for regrets — will be the most painful of all for everyone involved both on and off the field at Old Trafford.

There wasn’t a football pundit or a football fan on the planet who didn’t expect a dip in form of some kind this year following the resignation of Alex Ferguson; but nobody could possibly have predicted the heaviness of the fall or the rapidity of it — and no-one surely foresaw it happening primarily at Old Trafford where United’s home form has been simply abysmal.

Losing in Germany to a team that is quite clearly the best in Europe will not, then, be the abiding memory of this campaign; but losing at home by three goals to both Manchester City and Liverpool will be. And, really, there is absolutely no escaping those painful memories as the serious business of analysing a year of failure begins in earnest.

The frightening prospect now is that the Manchester United fans who travelled to Munich and saw Patrice Evra score the opener, before the Bayern monster was awakened, may just have watched their team’s last Champions League tie for a very long time.

So what United — Moyes and board in unison — need to do now is sit down and come to terms with what went wrong, and why it went wrong. It cannot only be the change in the dugout, a tweak to training methods here and there or bruised egos amongst some of the senior players that is to blame; the season has revealed serious flaws in the make-up of the United squad and in the club’s transfer policy.

The fact that United failed so spectacularly to address the problem of central midfield in the transfer market last summer will haunt them for many years to come; had they made a more serious attempt to take the likes of Wesley Sneijder or Mesut Ozil to Old Trafford instead of settling on Marouanne Fellaini as a stop-gap option then who knows how the campaign could have panned out and who knows how many goals could have been created.

Of course now the task is harder than ever, attempting to persuade the world’s top players to move to Manchester with no European football on offer; but how the board handles the summer market is key to any chance of a revival next season with Nemanja Vidic leaving for Italy and a string of other players close to retirement.

The season may be over on the pitch but the biggest test of all is about to begin off it; and it is one United cannot afford to fail if they are ever to drag themselves back to Bayern’s level in the near future.