I remember having a discussion at least a decade ago about things you just couldn’t say in a football press box, the kind of stuff that could get you excommunicated from polite society. The opening suggestion was something along the lines of: “So, Paul Scholes. Not that great is he?”

Even now I can hear the snorts of rage and the sound of newspapers hurled to the floor. And rightly so. Under current UK law criticism of Scholes is still punishable by anything from a lifetime ban to being stabbed through the ear with a skewer by the Queen while weeping, reproachful children stick pins into the back of your hands.

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This sanctity is well-earned. First because Scholes was such a fine player, both very English in his bearing and his manner, and also exotic in the range of his craft, the way he could drive and unpick a game.

Part of the joy of Scholes was the way he just so clearly loved kicking the ball, which seems an odd thing to say until you remember how much he loved it: backspin, fade, drift, those vicious little pinged crossfield nudges and volleys and spanks, the way the ball just seemed to come alive with some other kind of intelligence at his feet. Leave him alone on a Pacific island with only a ball for company and within the year he’d have it following him around, hunting for squirrels, building an irrigation system, lovingly trimming his beard.

Plus Scholes had that patina of authenticity. He played for only one club, albeit the most famous and wealthy and successful one, but you get the idea. He refused to preen and prance, to such an extent he would occasionally draw attention to the fact he didn’t preen and prance; so humble that his humility just isn’t something he likes to talk about except when he’s talking about it. This is also very English. In retirement Scholes has become a devastatingly good misery-pundit on BT Sport, a brilliantly salty and astringent presence, as English as winter rain, with special responsibility for the struggles of Manchester United. His ability to twang the most painful exposed nerve ends is compelling. In this sense he is a very good pundit. He frames the debate. He has become a part of it.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Paul Scholes has been very critical of José Mourinho but has failed to pour scorn on the owners and directors of Manchester United. Photograph: Mike Egerton/PA

But there is a problem here too, bound up in the enduring weight of his own status. Scholes is right. There do seem to be quite a few problems at Manchester United. But it is hard not to feel that this sense of unhappy voices-off and star names constantly sniping might just be one of them.

Unexpectedly, Scholes the no-bullshit team-man has become the single largest public irritant for every manager that has followed Alex Ferguson. “He’s killed me there” was David Moyes’s response as he stood with the players watching Scholes pick his United team apart after the 3-0 defeat to Manchester City in March 2014. Moyes chose the wrong moment to be right. A month later he was gone.

Louis van Gaal was also routinely eviscerated towards the end. Right now it’s both barrels for José Mourinho, a manager Scholes clearly doesn’t like and about whom he will say anything he fancies. This week there was the suggestion even Lionel Messi would be unable to function in this current team, and that Romelu Lukaku is also a part of the problem. Really? And Pogba? And Mourinho too? Are we dealing in certainties here, or throwing out lines, trying to be right, trying to win the narrative?

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It is all great television. I’m already hoping Scholes is up for Huddersfield versus Liverpool this Saturday so he can pronounce on United’s early kick-off at Chelsea. But there are a couple of things worth saying about all this. First, for all his first-hand experience, his brutal eloquence, maybe Scholes isn’t actually the best person to talk about things being dysfunctional at Manchester United.

Scholes speaks from a position of immense privilege. He was an astonishingly talented player who spent his whole career surrounded by other astonishingly talented players under the greatest manager of the age. United were the richest club in England for most of that time. When the first billionaires began to turn up conditions were perfect. The bigger question back then was: what would it have taken for United to fail? If Scholes sounds genuinely baffled at bad choices, teams that turn sour, irresolvable structural problems, then perhaps he is.

Whereas in the current era nothing makes much sense. The defining quality is frantic, misdirected energy. United have a £90m midfielder. Great news. But is he actually any good? And how much does he hate the manager? United have spent hundreds of millions on bolt-on parts. Why aren’t they better? Maybe because a club built on aristocratic continuity has spent hundreds of millions on bolt-on parts, an operation overseen by successive mismatched managers and a puzzled-looking banker in a baggy suit.

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Anyone can see the glitches on the surface. How much more worthwhile, how much more illuminating if Scholes could turn his fire on the structures behind the disposable faces. Where is the criticism of the club hierarchy? Where is the anger towards the owners, who continue to use one of the nation’s great sporting institutions as a cash-sluicer, and who have overseen this period of piecemeal, self-interested stasis?

Plus, of course, there are the wider inanities of modern football, the billionaire-ball short-termism, the shrill tides of contrary opinion and vested interest. It is easy to goggle at the fallout from this process. But at some point you also have to decide which side of it you want to be on.