Manchester United are now finding out the true cost of their failure to qualify for next season's Champions League.
Newly-appointed boss Erik ten Hag has identified the players he feels can launch United into a new era under him and enable him to take the world's most famous club back to the top. But ten Hag's hopes of recruiting the players he wants have hit a wall over United's inability to offer them the chance to play in European club football's elite competition.
Barcelona midfielder Frenkie de Jong is the most glaring example. Ten Hag worked with the Dutch midfielder at Ajax and wants to build his new-look United midfield around the 25-year-old. But while Barca are keen to sell £75million-rated De Jong, to go some way to helping ease their financial crisis, the player himself is less enamoured with the prospect of moving to Old Trafford.
The reason? No Champions League football. United may have been able to lure Paul Pogba back in 2016 for a club record £89m fee, despite only being able to offer him Europa League football. But that was as much to do with the pull of then boss Jose Mourinho and the very real chance of United challenging for the big prizes again, something which ultimately never materialised.
Now, United are at an even lower ebb, with ten Hag facing a major overhaul that could feasibly see them miss on the Champions League for another season or two, while he plots his rebuild. Players like de Jong, it would seem, from his current reluctance to make the switch to United, are simply not prepared to wait that long and grub around in the Europa League, when they could be feasting at European football's top table.
Another United target, Benfica's £85m-rated Uruguay striker Darwin Nunez, is said to favour a move to their arch rivals Liverpool, because they can offer Champions League football and because he would be going straight into a team challenging for the major prizes.
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Against that backdrop, United are finding it hard to land the targets they want and need to drive the ten Hag revolution and are likely to have to revise their strategy and go for less high-profile players who are hungry for the chance to prove themselves at Old Trafford.
It is a brutal reality check for a club that had the pick of the world's best players in the Sir Alex Ferguson era, when they dominated the Premier League and were a major force in the Champions League, reaching four finals and winning it twice under their legendary former boss.
Yet nine years of mis-management and lamentable player recruitment, with ten Hag the fifth permanent boss since Ferguson stepped down in 2013, have left United in a position where their name, history and ability to pay top-end wages is no longer enough to attract the world's best talents.
The likes of De Jong and Nunez want to be competing for the big prizes now, not wasting the prime years of their career at a club where there are no guarantees of getting back to that exalted level in a year or two.
Of course, there will be players willing to join United this summer, yet the fascinating aspect of ten Hag's rebuild is how he goes about it if, as seems likely, he is forced to do so with players who are essentially the club's back-up options, while their first-choices spurn their advances, in search of guaranteed glory.
