When FSG took control of the club, they can hardly have known the size of the task that awaited them.
Despite all the mockery they had taken for not being "football people" or not "understanding the game" it had become more painfully apparent with every passing year that the previous regimes, who qualified for both these monikers, failed to bring home the League Championship since the 1989-90 season.
In comparison, Everton, the team we love to mock, last won the same title in 1986-87, which is a damning statistic. Yet how could it have come to pass that England's most successful club had fallen so far from grace?
Part of the reason is that our winning habit was lost through complacency. All dynasties end and all regimes pass - like weeds forcing their way through tiny gaps in concrete, complacency seeps into every foundation upon which success is built and causes fatal cracks which causes the whole edifice to come crumbling down.
Instead of sticking to the principles which had helped guide us to success previously, we became lazy and decadent and thought that success would arrive just because of our name and our history.
We forgot that this club is built on a special relationship between the supporters and the manager and that nothing can be achieved without that support.
We forgot that players need time and patience to bed into a team and to learn their craft.
We forgot that the team comes first and that no individual is greater than the collective.
And we forgot the crucial role that money plays in professional sports, this from the team that was the first to put a sponsor on our shirts.
When FSG bought our club, we were rescued from potential armageddon in more ways than one. Without backing from an owner you could quickly discount us from any further attempts at the title - or even of staying in the league. Gate receipts and TV deals only take you so far in a world where the average employee is earning tens of thousands of pounds a week.
And if we had been bought by an Arab or Russian oligarch, our club would have been used as a plaything, with all our history and culture tossed aside at the whim of an individual, as we have seen in the blue halves of Manchester and London. Possibly the worst option of all we narrowly survived - which was the debt-leveraged buyout forcing a millstone around the club's neck and which could easily have lead to bankruptcy.
Somehow, we ended up with the best possible option available in which we had a self-sustaining model where the owners didn't take money out of the club but instead grew rich by making the club rich and thereby increasing their worth.
Of course, choosing this path did not guarantee success and called for much sacrifice.
In order to compete with the dizzying sums lavished by our competitors we had to ensure that every single pound spent was put to use and that nothing was wasted. That entailed moving players on who were not providing value for their contracts. It meant spending money on targets we needed rather than spending just for the sake of it. It mandated that we we ruthless, bold and efficient with all of our dealings and that risks would have to be taken to outsmart our competitors.
None of this would be easy and it would require unity and support from within the club in order to have a slight chance of success.
But instead, we find more and more voices who seek any opportunity to disparage the owners or the manager. We find more support for sentimentality rather than hard-headed financial or footballing sense. We find voices supporting our ambitions shouted down in a miasma of negativity and pessimism.
I was struck by the following, utterly depressing, post by Bigmick on another thread challenging the manager to get himself off the hook of supporter opinion:
Listen to us. He isn't on no hook, what have we become? This is our manager we're talking about here. Even in the past when I've totally disagreed with things our managers have done, I've never ever relished putting the boot in to anything like the same extent as some of the people these days.
Well I believe the time has come to make a choice about where this club is going. The time has come to either back the project we are trying to undertake here or to sit on the sidelines and carp. To support our principles or to rail against them.
Make your choice but be in no doubt; if FSG and Brendan are ultimately successful in bringing this club back to where it should be it will be despite a section of the so-called "supporters" not because of them.
Those fans who have called for their heads at every turn, or accused them of "bullshitting" or invented conspiracy theories would do well to remember the words of the great man after which this thread is named.
