Manchester City could not have predicted the dizzying extent to which Alexis Sanchez’s star would plummet but the Premier League champions did conclude that signing the Chile striker on the money he was asking for would have obliterated their wage structure and opened a very expensive can of worms.

It was a bullet they were determined to dodge and, as they now look on from a safe distance at precisely those problems being encountered across the road, City must doubtless view the move to withdraw from the race to sign Sanchez as one of their shrewder business decisions.

Manchester United’s most pressing problem with Sanchez has, of course, been on the pitch, where a player who was supposed to provide an immediate uplift has instead become a liability, to the extent where few will have considered his current absence through injury as any particular loss.

Yet the repercussions of that signing are also being very keenly felt off the field as the club begins to count the destabilising cost of his £500,000-a-week wages, a doubly whammy that is quickly elevating it among the worst pieces of transfer business by a Premier League side for years.

It is hard to know how much consideration United gave to that in the rush to land Sanchez – certainly a lot less than City, that much is clear – but they will have a very real understanding now of what their neighbours feared.