Manchester United legend Gary Neville believes the club's board are to blame for their current predicament.
United find themselves two points off the bottom three places in the league after a 1-0 loss away to Newcastle United.
While many believe boss Ole Gunnar Solskjaer is out of his depth at United, Neville believes the Glazers and Ed Woodward are bigger issues.
Speaking on Sky Sports, Neville said: "Away from home, they're not set up to win in a sense of the mentality. They let games drift, I think they play OK in games, but they're not ruthless, they're not clinical. The quality is not right, the depth of their squad is not good enough and they have taking a step back.
"Their recruitment has been woeful for many years and they've been all over the place in terms of different styles of managers who are bringing in players. They now need to fix the style, fix a way of recruiting and go and get the players. They got three in the summer of the right type, they've done OK so far but they need another five or six.
"They need another centre-back, they need a left-back, they need two central midfield players, they need a wide player and they need a top centre-forward. They need five or six top players in that squad and they're going to cost a lot of money. Hopefully they can be supplemented by the young players coming through, because there is some talent in those players.
"The board need to hold their nerve. They're responsible for this with poor recruitment, poor selection of managers, going with them and then pulling off them. They've also gone for different styles of managers, with Ole Gunnar Solskjaer now taking the club in a completely different direction.
"If you change direction as a board every two years, investing 250m along the way in each manager, you're going to have big problems.
"Manchester United are now getting the pain they deserve for poor decisions at board level and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer needs to make sure that the clean-up job he's doing, which needs to be done for the mess that's gone before him, that he gets the opportunity to spend the money the others have had to spend.
"If Man United recruit well in the next three or four transfer windows, they've got the bones of something. If they recruit badly, they'll end up suffering."
