Imagine the scene: standing high in their ivory tower, casting a glance at all and sundry below (because more than most are indeed below) and surveying the busy territory stretching out as far as the eye can see.

Manchester United are the last to every party, but they’re always the best dressed. They can afford to be.

The Premier League giants are one of the biggest clubs in the world, only Barcelona and Real Madrid have the digital media reach the Red Devils have, for example, and pretty much no one has the commercial power they do. United are the beneficiaries of being in the right place at the right time when the Premier League boomed to worldwide fame at the end of the 1990s, and were the holders of every competition worth winning at the turn of the Millennium.

That’s why United, this quintessentially modern public limited company, boasting appendages in every corner of the globe – and replete with millions of fans latching onto them – can waltz into YouTube in 2018 – well over a decade late to the party – and simply ask “so what have we missed?”

United have quite a few videos already, all uploaded around the same time on Thursday (22nd February) as the club had clearly prepared for the announcement, treating their fans to what promises to be a binge-worthy midweek session on YouTube this evening: Thursday nights are no longer match nights for those of a United persuasion, you see.

Such is the power built up by the club that Manchester United can afford to let others play around with these new-fangled digital things to see if they’re any good. Then if they are, then like Apple, they’ll do it themselves and they’ll do it well. Just as it took until 2013 for the club to launch on Twitter before accumulating followers at a frantic pace, it took just three hours for their new YouTube account to surpass 60k subscribers. For context, that’s about as many subscribers as Leicester City have at the moment, and more than the likes of Marseille and Monaco. In three hours.

United are a behemoth, and their many worldwide partnerships and products may often make it difficult for the club to be first when it comes to innovating with digital technologies. Instead, they can come bounding in some day and blow the competition away. When you’re bigger than big, you don’t have to be agile.