The situation is dire now at Old Trafford. Champions League qualification is becoming an ever more ambitious target as while the league is unprecedentedly unpredictable this year, Leicester and Tottenham are displaying relative consistency.

Van Gaal’s team are three points worse off than David Moyes was at this stage in his ill-fated solitary season and tellingly, thirty seven points is the club’s lowest-ever Premier League total at this stage of the season. Fans are justifiably angry.

There hasn’t been this much contempt on the terraces since the controversial Glazer takeover and funnily enough, that is still what fans ought to be most incensed about. While he was a banker at J.P. Morgan, Ed Woodward advised the Glazers on how to takeover United, loading the club with a then debilitating debt in the process.

He then came to the club in a financial planning role, before rising to commercial director. Impressed by Ed Woodward’s significant commercial nous, the Glazer family appointed him as the club’s most senior official after David Gill’s departure, despite his lack of football experience.

Woodward made a mockery of the club in his first transfer window in charge, which effectively left David Moyes with an impossible job. He then hired Van Gaal thinking he was a manager who played an attractive brand of football. It is worth quoting what Woodward thought he was getting with Van Gaal at this point:

“He’s got incredible energy and very importantly he likes attacking football…that’s the kind of football Manchester United fans love. It’s part of our DNA.”

It is amazing to think that a club of United’s resource hired a manager on a false premise but that may be the reality of the situation. In 2011, Bayern Munich’s club president Uli Hoeness noted that the players had worn “a mental straitjacket for months” under Van Gaal.

“Football should be enjoyable, but there has been nothing enjoyable about football at FC Bayern for a while now,” he said.

There has been a procession of bad decisions since Sir Alex Ferguson left and that can be attributed to the lack of a footballing structure to the upper echelons of the club. The management structure did not go through any great change between 1986 and 2013 because Ferguson made it work.

The club need to accept that there will not be another Sir Alex in modern football and consequently, the structure needs to change. The club needs a long-term sustainable model – perhaps something similar to what Bayern Munich have behind the scenes.

Managers come and go in Munich but the focus on player recruitment and development remains constant. Achieving this style of continuity at United would likely entail following the lead of other clubs in bringing a director of football arrangement whereby an individual with a football background can work on club matters.

Managers may no longer be long-term propositions but that does not mean you have to slash-and-burn each time there is a new appointment. Gary Neville has explained that while he used to be opposed to a director of football arrangement, he thinks it is now the future for most clubs as it leaves you “better equipped to make good decisions.”

“The average lifespan of a manager is going down by the year. But with a director of football there is far less upheaval and the identity of the club, continuity of the majority of the staff and link between youth and first team remains intact,” Neville said.

This perhaps is the major concern with a Jose Mourinho appointment. Sam Wallace of The Telegraph has noted that Mourinho desires the United job precisely because of the flaws in the football structure outlined above.

There would no other presence behind the scenes to curtail his power. He aspires to have the same level of control as Ferguson, a level of control no other club has given him.

That should be a concern to United, as well as the long-standing issues with Mourinho’s approach to football. No other elite club bar maybe Arsenal has one man ruling all.

A much better proposition for United would be to modernise their infrastructure, so a modern coach akin to a Mauricio Pochettino or Thomas Tuchel could come into an environment where scouting, the academy and recruitment are well-run departments of the club. That certainly is not the case at the moment.