Gary Neville's former Manchester United teammates Paul Ince and Jaap Stam are taking a dimmer view of the Red Devils' prospects next season than the hopeful Sky Sports pundit.
Former United right-back Neville believes that United's displays of late plus the current factors at play in football's transfer market will mean that his old side can get closer to the top of the table in 2020/21.
United currently sit in fifth, a huge 37 points behind champions-elect Liverpool, but Neville thinks they can improve.
"I don’t know why it is, but I feel a little more confident in Manchester United ’s ability to challenge next season just because of what’s happened, and the fact they started to play a lot better before this lockdown," Neville told Sky Sports.
However Ince and Stam aren't as hopeful for their former employers.
"It will take a long time to catch up and if anyone at Old Trafford thinks it can be done in a couple of years with some big money signings, they are kidding themselves," Ince told Planet Football.
"There has been a lot of damage caused by the instability at the club over the last six years and at the same time, Liverpool have had stability, especially since [Jurgen] Klopp came in.
"Liverpool have had a plan, they stuck to it even when things didn’t go great for Klopp in his first year and now they are getting the rewards.
"At United, managers have come and gone, they’ve had their own ideas on players, spent fortunes on terrible signings.
"Because of that they found themselves 30 points behind Liverpool at the halfway point of the season, which is embarrassing for a club of United’s stature."
Meanwhile Stam, speaking to Goal.com, thinks that while United have impressed with the odd good result, they still lack the stability needed to challenge Liverpool.
“Against [Manchester] City they have had a good run of results,” he said.
“But you can’t look at individual games and say we can go for winning the league because we’ve beaten them several times.
“I think you need to be very stable as a team throughout the whole league, which Liverpool is. You need to play in a certain way now and build your squad in a certain way, then eventually you can build that challenge for winning the league again.
“If I look at it now, I think they still need some more quality players in the squad to make that challenge.”
