Unfortunately their latest panic buys of ageing mercenaries in Ericsson and Casimero do seem to be working out for them for now.
In fact rather annoyingly many of their ageing mercenary buys have done a job for them over the years in terms of temporarily papering over the cracks, going as far back as Van der Sar, Van Persie and more latterly Mata, Ibrahimovic, Cavani and I'd even include Ronaldo purely for the crucial goals he did contribute in the early part of his return to the club when they had no other reliable goal scorers at the time.