When Sir Jim Ratcliffe spoke of a "missing culture" at Manchester United in February, he probably did not mean reviving Ed Woodward's compliant culture.

With the defenestration of Dan Ashworth, there are eerie parallels between chief executives past and present. Omar Berrada is surrounded by two fellow Manchester City alums. Woodward was flanked by two Bristol University alums.

As the Manchester Evening News revealed six weeks ago, Berrada drove United's approach for Ruben Amorim. Ashworth pushed for Gareth Southgate. From then on, Ashworth's face did not fit.

The vast majority of United supporters will breathe a sigh of relief that Ashworth was overruled. Ashworth is, or was, "clearly one of the top sporting directors in the world", according to Ratcliffe yet his support for Southgate was misguided.

READ MORE: I saw Ashworth getting escorted out of Old Trafford after leaving United

EXCLUSIVE: Ashworth pushed for Southgate amid Amorim move

Berrada has Jason Wilcox at the Carrington coalface to support Amorim and former City employee Toby Craig to oversee United's communications. The halcyon days of strolling around the Los Angeles sunshine feeling buoyant about United's chances this season feel an awfully long time ago.

There was plenty of buck-passing in Ratcliffe’s PR disasterclass with United We Stand when the current mess is on regimes past and present. The past doled out excessive five-year contracts to Luke Shaw and Marcus Rashford, frittered more than £150million on Casemiro and Antony and extended Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s contract only to sack him in the same year.

The present frittered millions on Joshua Zirkzee and Matthijs de Ligt, lost their nerve over Erik ten Hag’s position in May, extended his contract to prolong the agony by five months and it cost them £21.4m.

Ashworth was prised from Newcastle for between £2m and £3m, a relatively meagre amount. Yet United supporters are footing the bill with rising ticket costs as Ratcliffe introduces London prices to Trafford Park.

Ratcliffe and his Ineos cohorts, meanwhile, are ferried to and from Old Trafford in luxury limousines by a firm in Mayfair that also chauffeur some of the United players around. That does not exactly scream cost-cutting.

United's "data analysis... doesn't really exist here. We're still in the last century on data analysis here", according to Ratcliffe. John Murtough would dispute that. So would the incumbent academy head Nick Cox.

"We set up... a pre-Brexit development structure which meant we could look across every territory and then bring it down to the five and then pick one after talking to the scouts," Cox told me in February, "analysing the data and filter and we eventually came to Alejandro." That is how United signed a 16-year-old Garnacho in 2020.

Murtough made inroads as football director, opting for Ten Hag over the dressing room’s preferred pick of Mauricio Pochettino, and hiring a data scientist. The bespoke TrackerMan scouting database underpinned recruitment, allowing United to identify targets for a specific position at a specific price with "a push of a button".

There were still far more misses than hits. Murtough and United allowed Ten Hag to have excessive sway and Murtough was a compliant appointment, yet it was less than two years ago United were being heralded for their more sophisticated set-up.

Ten Hag was such a dead-man walking in May that United could have replaced him with a kit man (one not made redundant) and they would be in a better position now. That is not to denigrate Ten Hag’s coaching credentials or his two-and-a-half year tenure with United. He had long since passed the point of no return and was undermined by a hierarchy that ultimately kept him when they had planned to sack him.

If Amorim had enjoyed the benefit of a pre-season at UCLA, hot-housed the players in the 3-4-3 formation and the recruitment been objective, United would be better off than 13th in the Premier League. Instead, they are at their lowest position 15 games into a league season since 1986-87.

Can you spot the common denominator? The United manager was sacked in the autumn. Ten Hag was the earliest post-war mid-season sacking by United, beating Ron Atkinson by a matter of days. Amorim, like Alex Ferguson 38 years ago, has a different culture to address.

United’s defeat on Saturday was bookended by errors by Diogo Dalot. He conceded the corner Nottingham Forest scored from and brainlessly fouled Anthony Elanga by the corner flag in added time.

At Arsenal, Dalot daftly gave away the first corner of the evening and reacted by high-fiving Andre Onana. What kind of a mentality is that? Thomas Partey then should have scored. In the second half, Jurrien Timber and William Saliba did. Others almost did, too.

United do not require another data-driven, pseudo-intellectual review to conclude where they need to strengthen. They have the coach but he will require two centre backs, a left back, two midfielders and a striker next summer, minimum. If the Ineos brains trust is worth its salt, they ought to know who should make way, too.