After Jose Mourinho started against West Brom with seven players who were already at Old Trafford during Sir Alex Ferguson's tenure, club-legend Gary Neville criticised United's recruitment policy in recent years.
David De Gea, Antonio Valencia, Phil Jones, Chris Smalling, Ashley Young, Jesse Lingard and Marcus Rashford were at Manchester United when Ferguson retired in 2013, and they all started Sunday's Premier League match at the Hawthorns.
This has led Neville to believe the club's strategy in the transfer market has not worked, especially when considering the £660 million invested in the last four seasons.
The defence has been a particularly tricky issue for the Red Devils, with Luke Shaw, Daley Blind and Marcos Rojo (2014), Matteo Darmian (2015), Eric Bailly (2016) and Victor Lindelof (2017) failing to provide stability to the back line.
"If you look at that back five today then they were all there when Sir Alex Ferguson was at the club," said Neville before kick-off at West Brom. "They've signed eight defenders in the last four or five years and not one of them is in the team today."
"You've got Valencia, Jones, Smalling, Young and De Gea and you obviously have Lingard and Rashford, who were also at the club as well, so seven out of that 11 were there five years ago," he added.
"The recruitment has not been good enough in the previous five years. It's been disjointed with David Moyes came in, then they flipped upwards towards Louis Van Gaal and then backwards with Mourinho in terms of the profile of players."
"It hasn't been good enough the recruitment, it's been all over the place and you can see still quite a lot of the players in that squad have been at the club for a long time."