Jose Mourinho being denied a new centre-back is a crisis of recent provenance, but the ideological void at the heart of his Manchester United tenure has been there from the very beginning.

A lack of investment from the Glazers during the late-Ferguson era and an absence of football knowledge to link boardroom and dugout are United-specific problems that precede Mourinho's arrival. They do not fully explain however, why Mourinho's United have consistently amounted to less than the sum of their parts and never more. His limitations as a coach and the diminishing returns yielded by his methodology do that.

Mourinho and Arsène Wenger, the manager he relished belittling at every opportunity, may have divergent tastes in the fields of aesthetics, philosophy and ethics. They do have one thing in common however, and it is not their collection of three Premier League winner's medals. Both are (or should that be were in Wenger's case?) laissez-faire managers, in an era when rival coaches are centrally planning their team's approach like command economies.

Discussion of the demands of 'modern football' can often stray into the trite and faddish, but it is undeniable that coaching is becoming ever more prescriptive and diagnostic. Players, youngsters especially, crave clear instruction with and without the ball. Mourinho and Wenger by contrast, place responsibility on individuals to find their own solutions on the pitch, though in different ways.