Clockwise from far right

United fans welcome the Glazer troop; Roman gets his bang for each of those big bucks; “Wouldn’t United look amazing in orange crush?”

George Gillett and Tom Hicks in 2007 – that went well. The same year, Thaksin Shinawatra took control of Manchester City, before Sheikh Mansour muscled in. Even Abramovich wasn’t top dog any more.

As transfer fees grew ever- more dizzying and the offer of a £ 55,000- a- week salary was now so pathetic that players almost crashed their cars in horror, deadline day transformed into a box- office hit. Step forward an increasingly yellow Jim White, excitedly trying to ascertain if that shadow behind a curtain actually was Dimitar Berbatov, whether Robinho genuinely realised he was signing for Manchester City, and how on earth Benjani had managed to fall asleep at an airport.

It was a far cry from the start of the decade, a quainter time when football managers – well, Steve Bruce specifically – penned novels with names as varied as and the latter featuring an abduction by an Israeli Nazi hunter whose favourite player was Celtic midfielder Eyal Berkovic.