These teams have a clear idea of football drilled into their players from day 1 and is reflected in their recruitment for years now.
Teams don't suddenly pick up Tiki taka football in one or two matches. They practice it again and again until they get good at it. They build a transfer strategy around it and iterate until it gets really good. Teams that keep switching approaches from one game to the next end up like Ole's United.
We are not any good at pragmatic football judging by how this season has gone. We now play pragmatic football and don't win.
unfortunately this club never have that kind of coherent integrated vision... even fans are infected with that blindness, every time you hear from this club and it's fans about buzzwords like defense, grinta and hardworking etc are symptoms of that problem.
because the mental focus on those preferred "brand/style" reflected in what kind of players we bring in and what kind of players we keep neglecting to acquire... to elaborate on this point, think about this... try to realize that there are very very few wingers that ever succeed in this club, it doesn't matter since when you started following this club, the result would still be the same... then you remember that CR7 and messi started out as wingers... other big european teams at one point had robben, hazard, di maria, etc you can also count players like griezmann, mbappe, etoo, henry as wingers-strikers hybrid... even 2nd rate players like sterling, gervinho etc at some point played at those big clubs...
we? who do we have? who did we ever have as wingers? between the time of nedved-camoranesi and chiesa, I can only remember krasic as the most notable, others like elia, turdeski, kulusevski etc are either somehow turned as complete trash here or never got proper chance... and here's what I also think, our play system never accommodate them, we throw those kind of players on the field without any systematic support from the rest of the team, they didn't work and we deemed them not good enough.
and then this club and the fans wonders why this team can't play like other big european clubs.