In Jose Mourinho’s first weeks at Manchester United he was informed that one of his key summer signings Henrikh Mkhitaryan could not undergo out-of-hours rehabilitation in the club’s own swimming pool because there was no lifeguard on duty to oversee the session. It was not the only bureaucratic brick wall United’s newly installed manager ran into.

With his family living in London Mourinho was working long days at the Carrington training ground and sometimes sought to use the training ground’s well-appointed gym after hours. Another no-go without proper supervision.

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When Mourinho wanted to change the desk in the manager’s office or present a signed United shirt to a visitor he had to battle to have the expenditure cleared. At a club en route to announcing a record annual revenue of over £500million such inefficiency frustrated the Portuguese.

Penny wise, pound foolish? Just examine the squad Mourinho inherited following three summer windows of work from predecessors Louis van Gaal and David Moyes in tandem with executive vice-chairman Ed Woodward.

That group contained Wayne Rooney, the most richly remunerated English footballer in the history of the game (and an individual Sir Alex Ferguson was ready to offload long before his last contract renewal), plus Bastian Schweinsteiger, recipient of another hugely lucrative pay package whose various fitness issues had limited him to a grand total of 95 League starts over the preceding five campaigns.

There was Luke Shaw, still the most expensive full back ever in terms of transfer fee; Memphis Depay, the most expensive transfer out of Dutch football ever; and Morgan Schneiderlin, a midfielder who’d started less than two thirds of the League games under the manager who’d sanctioned his £25m purchase.

Read More: Ed Woodward speaks out over Man United transfers

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Two-thirds of a season later, United have played 2250 minutes of Premier League football under Mourinho. Rooney has been on the pitch for 926 of them, appearing in just eight fixtures from kick-off. Shaw has six starts and 527 minutes; the last of them in October. Depay, Schneiderlin (both sold in January) and Schweinsteiger have 31 minutes of League playing time for United between them.

This extraordinary misallocation of transfer fee and salary resource has been at the core of Manchester United’s decline since Ferguson retired from management in 2013. With the Scot’s trusted and experienced chief executive David Gill stepping down with him, the Glazer family handed control of recruitment negotiations to Woodward, who’d excelled in his previous role, greatly expanding the club’s commercial income.

More or less overnight, United changed from a club known for acting early on key purchases, maximising income from sales, and controlling salary, to one whose chief executive extolled the virtues of the super-expensive ‘Galactico’ buy. United began selling extremely poorly – losing players of the quality of Patrice Evra, Javier Hernandez and Nani for minimal fees or on subsidised loans – while simultaneously developing a reputation for taking an age to conclude the paperwork on deals.

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