Sooner or later the decision Manchester United will have to make will be between backing the judgement of their manager Jose Mourinho or their most famous name, Paul Pogba, and it is a measure of the uncertainty around the club that it could either way.

It has become the relationship at the very heart of the training ground: the popular, garrulous star player, who wears his fame with an ease that his team-mates admire and a manager determined that this team will conform to his expectations and his ambitions. It was Pogba whom Mourinho wanted most when he joined the club in 2016 and looking back it feels like neither really knew what he was getting into.

Mourinho’s decision to tell Pogba that he would never again be captain of United after his performance on Saturday and the comments that followed was a move that will echo through the season. There is no easy way out of this, and Mourinho knows that – the kind of move that has typified his career post-2012 when he has refused to duck conflict with the biggest personalities at the clubs he has managed.

At Real Madrid with Iker Casillas and others, and later at Chelsea in his second spell when he bullied and cajoled a team into winning a title and then throwing it all away – this has been a familiar path in recent years. It was the same in the final months of his first spell at the club too, for all that those concerned tried to cover it up in the years that followed. Mourinho does not wait around for his own reputation to suffer – he will ensure that others are under pressure first.

As for Pogba, there will be many who feel that Mourinho has a point. The pistols were really drawn during the World Cup finals when it was hard to disagree with the United manager’s observation that the bubble of a tournament suited his player in protecting him from distractions. It has always been the view of those around Mourinho that Pogba is not a rebellious player in the traditional sense. He does not take his manager on face-to-face in the dressing room or on the training pitch. He is no Roy Keane. But the threat to the manager’s authority comes from elsewhere.

Paul Pogba criticised Jose Mourinho's tactics against Wolves credit: reuters

The interview that Pogba gave after the draw with Wolverhampton Wanderers was the latest in a series of remarks that he will have known would provoke his manager. Mourinho might just have been able to wear it if he felt his player’s form warranted being indulged but that has not been the case.

The assumption that Mourinho is a manager who stages these kinds of disputes is to miss the nature of a very emotional man. He has acted on his instincts regardless of the consequences and in doing so thrown all the cards in the air. It is easy to look back and note that under Sir Alex Ferguson it would have been Pogba who left the club, as indeed he did once before. But football has changed immeasurably in the period since Mourinho began managing, never mind the career-span of his most famous Old Trafford predecessor.

Jose Mourinho has stripped Paul Pogba of the United captaincy credit: getty images

Now the division of power is very finely balanced. It could go either way and one suspects it will not be long until we hear from Mino Raiola, the agent of Pogba who has a habit of writing his own part in these disputes. Mourinho will have known sanctioning Pogba was a risky move, but eventually judged it more of a risk to ignore.