It is a luxury the players are not afforded in Asia, where they can barely walk down a hotel corridor without an army of autograph hunters swarming on them.

The scenes on Wednesday morning in Function Room 4 of the Kerry Hotel in the Pudong district of Shanghai, where United are staying on the first leg of their eight-day tour of China, typified the hysteria that takes hold whenever United are in town.

After a long, rambling and occasionally awkward press conference when Wayne Rooney, Ander Herrera and new signing Henrikh Mkhitaryan had to field some peculiar questions as part of the commercial launch of the club’s new three-year global partnership with Gulf Oil International, the trio had to be hurriedly escorted from the room by three concerned United security staff as an expanding scrum of eager supporters, media and VIPs scrambled for photographs with the mobbed players.