United's decline is not yet a fall but alarm bells ringing

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His name was Richard and he came from Manchester. He was the first caller to MUTV and what he had to say made the presenters squirm on a channel known in media circles as Pravda TV, where the interviews with Sir Alex Ferguson are traditionally about as demanding as Hello! magazine. The Premier League champions had just been bundled out of the FA Cup by Leeds United, of League One, and feelings were running high. "It's not good enough," Richard announced. "We have to change the manager."

There is always that danger of the classic knee-jerk reaction when Manchester United have put together a string of bad results and the team have temporarily lost their wow factor. Ferguson loves nothing more than toasting another title by reminiscing about the frequency with which he has seen headlines declaring the end of the empire. "Bloody hell, you had in me in a bath chair down on Torquay beach!" he announced during one press conference last season, eyes sparkling, while the journalists did what we always do in those moments – stare sheepishly at the floor.

There can be no doubt, though, that United's supporters have authentic reasons to contemplate the future with more trepidation than has been the norm since Ferguson started greedily accumulating all those trophies. Fabio Capello, the England coach, has already said that United are not the "war machine" they were and it is not just a question of the artillery being downgraded now Old Trafford is no longer bedazzled by Cristiano Ronaldo. It is an issue of whether this is a team in decline, and whether the money is there to prevent the downward trajectory. The only logical conclusion is that yes it is, and no there is not.

When Ferguson was asked to respond to Capello's observation recently he argued that the perception of United regressing was a "media thing". He insisted that his second-placed side's experience and strength in depth make them "better placed than most teams" and that their challengers "all know that and they always have to look at Manchester United – there's no getting away from that".

The most successful manager in the business was even more forthright when some of his younger players came under scrutiny. The question was asked whether the likes of Darron Gibson, Danny Welbeck and the Da Silva twins were equipped to take over once the club had lost the services of Paul Scholes, Ryan Giggs and Gary Neville. Ferguson called one journalist an "idiot" and said he should be "bloody sacked". He found the debate "unbelievable".

His team, he is entitled to point out, are hanging on to Chelsea's coat-tails at the top of the league, only two points behind the leaders, and have qualified for the Champions League's first knockout round, as well as having the first leg of a Carling Cup semi-final against Manchester City tomorrow. Yet this is a question of what lies ahead and to try to pass off everything as hunky dory is to ignore the fact that the failure against Leeds was, in one strange way, not actually as shocking as it first appears.

The truth is that Ferguson's men have been struggling for fluency and cohesion for longer than they would care to remember and that, by the halfway point of the league season, they had already lost to Burnley, Liverpool, Chelsea, Aston Villa and Fulham. The defeat by Leeds was the first time they have been eliminated from the FA Cup third round in the Ferguson era while, in the Champions League, facing moderate opposition, they found themselves behind in all of their home ties, against Wolfsburg, CSKA Moscow and Besiktas.

What Ferguson needs, above all else, is a show of strength in the transfer market but there are rules in place, financial constraints imposed by the Glazer family at a time when United owe about £700m to banks, financial institutions and hedge funds.

At the same time the club have made the long-term decision not to sign any players aged 26 or above for large transfer fees. Dimitar Berbatov, who was 27 when he joined from Tottenham Hotspur for £30.75m, has been described as the "last of his kind" and the age-before-ability policy means United will entertain big-money deals only if the players involved will still retain a significant market value at the end of a five- or six-year contract. At a stroke, the Glazers were essentially telling Ferguson they would not pay large sums for established international players such as David Villa or Franck Ribéry.

The effects cannot be overstated at a time when the miracle of perseverance otherwise known as Giggs has to be used more sparingly while, in defence, Rio Ferdinand has joined the club's thirtysomethings and almost instantaneously found his body betraying him. Nemanja Vidic, the club's player of the year, is reputedly agitating for a summer move to Spain, and nobody can be certain of Edwin van der Sar's position when the 39-year-old is out of contract at the end of the season and his wife, Annemarie, is recovering from a brain haemorrhage.

It can only alarm Ferguson that so many celebrated players are coming to the end of their professional lives. From time to time, Scholes can turn back the clock, with exquisite results, but this is no longer a guarantee. He and Neville are also out of contract in June and you wonder whether one or both will choose a personally choreographed exit. Neville increasingly looks like a champion boxer who has had one too many fights and, if that does not strike you as an original line, it is because it is not. It was first used three years ago.

That leaves Ferguson relying to a certain extent on the players coming through the ranks and waiting for Gibson, for one, to show he is more than just a decent player. At Old Trafford it is not enough to be "decent". Superlatives are required. Anderson has made a striking lack of progress. Welbeck may be an exciting prospect but it was also one of Ferguson's more preposterous statements last summer to say the player, then 18, would make Capello's squad for the World Cup.

So who else? Zoran Tosic has made a grand total of two substitute appearances since arriving last January as part of the £16.5m joint deal that was supposed to bring his Partizan Belgrade team-mate Adem Ljajic to Old Trafford a year later. Ljajic was marooned after the Glazers decided it was too expensive a gamble and operated a get-out clause in the deal. Nani? United made it clear what they think of his efforts to take over from Ronaldo when they offered him to Benfica as part of a proposed cash-plus-player exchange for the prodigious Angel Di María.

The lesson of history is clear: we should not doubt Ferguson's ability to reanimate a championship team. The awkward moment on MUTV on Sunday afternoon was edited out from the replays yesterday.

Yet there are more concerns for United right now than at any point since the team failed to qualify from the Champions League group stages in 2005 and Roy Keane went on the attack in another moment MUTV did not want us to see.