Manchester City have overtaken their rivals United just as Sir Alex Ferguson always feared they would

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They were advertising Manchester United’s ‘official tractor sponsor’ around the pitch perimeter and shifting £400 jackets in the Megastore. The club’s commercial juggernaut really does know no limits. 

But this was the day which revealed beyond any doubt that Manchester City are the more progressive, intelligent, incisive club in town: the ones with a plan. They have overtaken the enemy, just as Sir Alex Ferguson always feared in his heart that they would.

It was a sometimes scruffy and less than virtuoso performance from the side who sit 11 points clear at the top, though that must not obscure the fact that a United side displaying minimal ambition did not come close to squeezing the life out of their challengers. 

Manchester United players look on in disappointment after succumbing to defeat to rivals City 

Jose Mourinho was unusually undemonstrative in his technical area after City's second goal

City delivered the game’s best players - Kevin De Bruyne, David Silva, Raheem Sterling – and its finest passages of play. They played the football. 

The resilience of a United axis formed by Marcos Rojo and Nemanja Matic created a point of interest for a while - yet it was not so much a matter of if, but when, a breach of Mourinho’s defence would happen.

It will be a matter of pain to the losing side that the defeat washes away the prospect of eclipsing the 40-game unbeaten home record set by Matt Busby’s United in the mid-1960s, though no one here is seriously suggesting that the two legions really bear comparison. 

Manchester City goalkeeper Ederson stops a shot from Manchester United's Romelu Lukaku

Busby’s United represented something quite exceptional. It has been no coincidence that both Eric Cantona and Andrei Kanchelskis, each an artist, have recently said the poetry and the philosophy are to be found at City, now.

For a time, after the Abu Dhabis had first delivered the sky blue side of Manchester with wealth beyond their wildest imagination in 2008, Ferguson could characterise City as the arrivistes, against whom he would maintain a football purism. 

‘We're not like other clubs who can spend fortunes on proven goods,’ he said after City’s 2012 title had represented a giant encroachment onto United turf. ‘We invest in players who create the character of the club. We're good at it. If you are good at it, then stick with it.’

Pep Guardiola is building a Manchester City team with young players to mould in his style

Well, that notion has long gone. This game brought together the most expensively assembled group of 22 players ever to walk onto the same football pitch, with a combined total of £692.6m and City were only marginally the bigger spenders.

United will perhaps have taken some satisfaction from the Financial Times suggesting at the weekend that City might be wasting their time with a business model of owning affiliate clubs on other continents to create a vast pool of talent – the ‘Disneyfication of football’ as they put it. 

Yet some data accompanying that analysis would have made sobering reading. Pep Guardiola’s club have signed younger players than ever for this campaign, giving them more game time than ever, are firing off 18 shots per game and facing only six. Yes, that pretty much summed up a first half in which they stamped their mark.

Even David Silva proved he is more than a slight playmaker and got stuck into United 

The midfielder proved more than once that he can play the English game as well as the Spanish

In the manner of most champions, they were not all sweetness and light, either. They tackled and blocked in a way which did not entirely contradict Mourinho’s pre-match trash talk about them being cynical. David Silva, who cost £24m, looks as much a British footballer as a Spanish one, at times.

Yet for once Mourinho did not seem to have an answers. Uncommonly undemonstrative in his technical area, he appeared to know the game was up. His press conference propaganda about City’s ‘luck’ cut no ice.

It was left to others to maintain the pretence of United’s pre-eminence. ‘Stand up for the Champions’ is stamped across the wall in the Megastore and the stadium announcer still extends a welcome to ‘the home of Britain’s greatest football club.’ 

No longer. The balance of power here shifted some time ago. This occasion merely confirmed the fact.