Manchester United isn't merely a football team nowadays, it's a brand that spans the globe and is about as synonymous to football as Coke is to fizzy drinks.

If you ask a person to name a football team, I can pretty much guarantee that the first name off their lips will be "Manchester United", and that's pretty much a testament to the immense pull of gravity that brand United possess. This iconic status on the world stage didn't come through chance alone though. It came through years of success, good management, good implementation of an all-round footballing philosophy and a great youth academy that's still plucking the best of the rest from around the world.

So what makes a great title winning Manchester United team? It's hard to get into the mind of the great Alex Ferguson, but every united team I've ever watched has always primarily consisted of a good, solid goalkeeper at the back (Schemichel, Van Der Sar), a tough "hard as nails" defender (Vidic, Bruce) beside a more classier counterpart (Rio Ferdinand).

In central midfielder, there's practically always been a good pairing between your hard-working, no nonsense midfielder (Roy Keane, Darren Fletcher) and a player that's great and comfortable at distributing the ball under pressure (Paul Scholes, Michael Carrick). This part of the pitch is what's integral to making or breaking a team in my opinion. You need your hard battling midfielder to assist in defense and break up play, but you also need a good distributor to act as an "anchor point" for both the defense and attack. Take care of this part, and the rest will sort itself out.

Up front and on the wings there's always been a great goal scoring talisman to lead the way (Rooney, Cantona, Van Nistelroy) and a pair of fast, pacy and intelligent wingers to provide service (Giggs, Ronaldo). But when you're a team like Manchester United, it's pretty easy to buy flair. It's the other parts (most notably central midfield and defense) where you need to find an elegant balance in order to really make things click.

This is all just a matter of my opinion really. I don't have a thorough knowledge of the inner workings of Ferguson's tactical brain and I've merely drawn up this conclusion from years of watching united team after united team win practically every trophy imaginable.

Now that we've got that general and purely subjective analysis of what makes a good United team out of the way, I'm going to leave you with an article by the English newspaper The Guardian that goes into more detail on Manchester United's day-to-day training regime then I ever could. It makes for a great read, and should give you some great insight on how to thoroughly drill and train a team on a week-by-week basis. There's also a few drills mentioned, including one of my personal favorites called "the box" where a 2 versus 2 match is played within a small, compact box and the object of the game is to keep the ball through one touch passing between you and your team mate. This not only increases your reaction times and touch but also dramatically increases your peripheral awareness whilst playing under pressure.

So there you have it. If you're looking for a more general analysis on how to drill a team in a number of disciplines (counter attacking, defending etc), head over to my previous post "How to Play Like Arsenal" where there's an extensive list of drills at the bottom of the article.