With the Everton defeat, though, a line was plainly crossed. The consensus was that the club where United went shopping for Wayne Rooney and Marouane Fellaini (sending Phil Neville and Darron Gibson, among others, in the opposite direction) came to Old Trafford with more ambition, more verve than the hosts.
It is anathema to United fans to see their team in a subservient role at Old Trafford, except in a big Champions League tie against a fellow giant, when reaching the next round is all that counts.
Mitigation was plentiful for Moyes when he took over from Sir Alex Ferguson. He had never managed at this level. The United midfield was weak (by their standards). Ferguson was a Colossus who had marched out on top.
The summer transfer trading had not engendered a sense of starting again. Soccer's golden rule about adding talent to a title-winning side had been broken by the failed attempts to sign Gareth Bale (late on), Cesc Fabregas, Ander Herrera and Leighton Baines.
Fellaini, whom United did manage to sign, has become a lightning rod for all these gripes. He is inextricably linked in supporters' thinking to a dimming of ambition in the transfer market and to the relative conservatism of Moyes. Relative to Ferguson, that is. United are slightly slower now, more direct and less imaginative. The orchestral heights of Ferguson's best years have been replaced by a steady banging of a big bass drum: not forever, necessarily, but in this phase when Moyes is making the team his own.
But older, more established players are hiding behind Fellaini and they are hiding behind Moyes. The new manager and the culture-shocked new midfielder are taking all the stick for a collective loss of spirit that Ferguson would have stamped on right away. As Nicky Butt told me last week, "You'd be sold and gone." Lacking this power, Moyes could only hope the Carrington hard core he inherited would display the same level of obedience voluntarily.
Few have. Rooney is certainly one: a neat reversal of the uncertainty surrounding him in the summer. Application aside, though, the whole club face a reckoning. This week, Moyes is entitled to reach for a sheet of A4 and divide it between players who are good enough to play for United and those who merely looked as if they were when Ferguson was inspiring them to be more than the sum of their parts.
In other words, with the exception of Rooney, David de Gea, Robin van Persie, Adnan Januzaj and a handful of others, the squad should be put on notice that all the Aeroflot and beer-partner money will be used next summer to buy a new team unless they return to the standards of the past 20 years. The word is that Moyes realised straight away he would need time to evaluate his squad. For an assortment of reasons, Anderson, Ashley Young, Tom Cleverley (for the lack of an end product), Chris Smalling, Nani, Fellaini, Wilfried Zaha and Shinji Kagawa will not be scoring highly in any Christmas term reports.
Again and again the briefing from United is that the Glazers would pay 80 million ($159 million) for a star.
They have already tried to, when Bale's move to Real Madrid was in temporary doubt. As some United fans start to question his suitability, Moyes is entitled to be not only ruthless with the players but also be clear with the board about who he wants to add and subtract next summer, and burn less energy pleasing sponsors.
