Manchester United captain Harry Maguire praised his team's mentality to secure a top four finish, and believes Bruno Fernandes' arrival was the catalyst for their fightback.
Fernandes' penalty and Jesse Lingard's late strike clinched a 2-0 win over Leicester City to seal third place in the Premier League table - and Champions League qualification for next season.
United looked out of the running for back in February after a home defeat at Burnley saw them six points adrift of Chelsea, and a massive 14 points behind Leicester.
But Ole Gunnar Solskjaer's men embarked on an impressive run, picking up 11 wins in 19 games to finish the season unbeaten in 13 matches, leapfrogging Leicester heading into the final games of the season.
Maguire, an £80million arrival from Leicester last summer, says he expected the club to qualify for the Champions League but believes their turnaround shows their character.
"Third in the Premier League, as a club that's where we expect to be, we expect to be in the Champions League," he told Sky Sports.
"The last few years have been tough for the club. The majority of people probably didn't expect us to be in the top four at the end of the season, but we always had great faith in ourselves.
"We started the season far too inconsistent, dropping silly points, performances weren't good enough in parts of games and we would get punished. We've been a lot better of late and that shows the great character we've got in our group."
Asked about what changed for United, Maguire pointed to the signing of Fernandes in January from Sporting Lisbon as a defining moment in their season after scoring 10 goals and registering eight assists.
"Obviously Bruno coming in January, he's made a big difference and put us 1-0 up today," he added.
"But we've worked hard on the training pitch and we knew we would have to get better. We dropped silly points where we shouldn't. We'd fail to defend set plays and find ourselves 1-0 behind in some games, and it would be tough to break teams down.
"That's got much better apart from the game against Southampton. We have shown great character to get what we started out to get at the start of the season. Now we've got to keep building and improving."
