It is not far off a decade now since Manchester United last won the Premier League.
Indeed, over 2,800 days have passed since Sir Alex Ferguson guided the Red Devils to glory in May 2013.
The current holders of the title - Liverpool - know what it feels like to go without the English crown for longer than expected, with Jurgen Klopp securing the coveted silverware as recently as June after a 30-year wait.
Their Manchester rivals are showing no immediate signs of a resurgence - with just two wins amassed in their opening six league fixtures - but a change could be on the horizon that would drastically improve their fortunes if it was to happen.
As per the MEN, United have approached Mauricio Pochettino with a view to lining him up as a potential replacement for Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, and although the Argentine boss isn't quite on Klopp's level, his work at Spurs is enough to suggest that he'd improve the Old Trafford outfit significantly.
Pochettino was tactically adaptable at White Hart Lane; he improved the players at his disposal, boasted a total net spend of just £90m during his tenure and - most notably - he turned Spurs into a high-performing team.
The level of the team can be captured by the numbers beneath the surface, as they essentially act as performance indicators.
Simply put, the general objective in football is to score as many goals as possible while preventing the opposing team from doing the same; that is the crux of what many sides want to achieve in every match.
Goals are simply shots that manage to find the back of the net, and Spurs reached a point under Pochettino between 2016 and 2018 whereby the north London outfit averaged around 17 shots per match in the Premier League, while facing only 9.4 on the defensive side of the game.
More often than not, if you shoot 17 times while allowing the opposition to post around nine efforts, you're going to secure a healthy result unless your attempts originate from very unrealistic locations.
Klopp's side - for example - shot 15.4 times per league match last season as they secured top spot, while allowing their opponents to muster just 8.9 efforts at the opposite end.
Spurs were certainly open to an attempt from long range under Pochettino, but they generated 1,298 shots between 2016 and 2018 in England's top-flight, which was the exact same total posted by Pep Guardiola's Manchester City outfit.
Meanwhile, Spurs dominated the ball having regularly posted over 60 percent of the possession share, and that coincided with Pochettino's men pressing their opponents with great intensity, with a defensive action happening in the final 60 percent of the field roughly every eight opposition passes.
Each of those performance indicators - once combined - allowed Pochettino's players to control their own environment similar to how Liverpool do. Very little was left to the element of chance as they won the shot count, dominated the ball and kept it away from their own goal more aggressively than most of their rivals.
Results in football can be influenced by a variety of factors including luck, refereeing decisions and moments of individual quality but - typically - ticking the performance box offers compensation against any random occurrences that might emerge over 90 minutes.
The most points that he delivered in a single campaign was 86, which would have been enough to win 12 of the 28 titles since 1992 but placed his team second at the time behind Antonio Conte's Chelsea. This tally was accumulated in the 2016/17 season, in which Spurs scored more goals than any other team (86) while also conceding the fewest (26).
United are far from Liverpool's current level at present and even if Pochettino takes the reins at Old Trafford, it will almost certainly take him a number of years to establish the principles that served him well at Spurs.
Klopp's Reds are likely to remain at the very top of England's top-flight in the near future and possibly for years to come but in Pochettino, United would have a head coach who has proved that his teams are able to post similar performance numbers to those witnessed at Anfield in recent years.
United's time without a Premier League title will continue in the meantime, but Pochettino has the ability to shorten their wait and challenge the holders at the top.
