Hello and welcome to episode 37 of Libero, the podcast about the least important of the least important things, as the notorious BIG once said.

I'm Rory Smith of The Observer and Men in Blazers. Today I'm joined by Jonathan Wilson, who you may know from such productions as Behind the Curtain and Wilson's World, party time, it's excellent.

And John Bruin, largely, but not exclusively, of The Guardian.

Today we're starting a two-part mini-series, the last resort of the damned,

on the malaise of the modern Manchester United.

Mark Odden, our friend of all of us from ESPN, did a piece along these lines a while ago

and described

United as being too big to fail, which is both a good way to think of them and also quite

funny because that was at least a year ago and they've got much worse. We're going to start out

by channeling our inner gibbon and examining the reasons for the decline and fall of this

particular empire. And then we'll finish today by discussing the broader

phenomenon of clubs getting stuck in this sort of farger of mediocrity. We get the sense that they

can't quite see their way through the problem. Maybe that's not quite the best metaphor. We'll find

out what the best metaphor is. And then on Friday, I think Miguel, James and maybe maybe Tarrick, or possibly Jack, will look at how

United get out of it and they'll put it into context of the other major teams going through

similar stuff elsewhere across Europe. I have a feeling their conclusion will be that United

is the most extreme example, but that's up to them. But given that we've got a historian of Manchester

United and a lifelong fan here, those are two separate people, let's try and pinpoint when exactly United kind of went wrong.

John, I would go back to 2013 in my own personal kind of assessment of it. Where would you start? I have a feeling you prefer a deeper cut.

Yeah, I would go much further back, and you would almost go further back to the club's

first golden era, first post-war golden era. I know Jonathan will start talking about

Ernest Mangal or whatever. Which war, John? Which war?

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