The Chilean forward is the latest scapegoat at Manchester United but the real problems come from the very top

With 32 minutes gone at Old Trafford an unusual event took place. Alexis Sánchez did something. Not something to make the highlights reel. Or indeed to pay back any significant part of the £130,000 of actual human wealth Sánchez earned for being a Manchester United player on Tuesday .

With the score 0-0 and the game drifting – unless specifically stated otherwise, this game was always drifting – United won a free-kick 30 yards from goal. Sánchez spotted it, paused, then punted the ball hard and flat on to the head of the nearest defender.

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OK, it wasn’t much. Had it been on target it would have counted as Sánchez’s fifth shot at goal so far this season. But he did at least earn £200 in the couple of minutes or so it took for this to happen, perhaps the most money anyone has earned for doing next to nothing in front of a vaguely curious audience since David Blaine stood in that glass box on the River Thames while people with drones flew Big Macs past his face.

Sánchez did run at Valencia’s defence a couple of times. He gave the ball away 16 times, but then he always does. Beyond this he just looked devoid of vim and spirit, without any clear plan of how to make United’s attacking combinations work.

And even now, looking on at his damp lettuce of a United career, it takes a few moments to fully grasp the numbers behind the highest paid footballer in British history. Sánchez got a £75,000 lump sum just for starting this game. He has to date been paid £14.5m by Manchester United. If he gets to January he will receive a £1.1m annual bonus, just, well, because.

In return for this Sánchez has now played 24 matches and scored three goals. A couple of years back during his golden period at Arsenal Sánchez had speculated on what he might yet become, suggesting it was his destiny to match the Messi-Ronaldo ultra-galacticos.

He has instead become something else, the embodiment of the drift and decay at this ghost ship of a sporting giant; perhaps the most profound individual expression to date of elite football’s hurricane of waste and inanity.

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The numbers are of course reductive on their own. Sánchez didn’t make the rules. Hate the game not the player. Plenty will argue players really should be paid this much because of “the market”, never mind the effects on such basic sporting virtues as team, motivation, structure and spirit.

Either way it has been Sánchez’s turn this week, the player ahead of this Group H game to be singled out from the fringes as a wonky part, a toxin in the system. We have of course been here before. Once again a José Mourinho season has become a break-up song, the old drama of departures with its familiar scapegoating, the soap opera face-offs.

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It is easy to point the finger at Sánchez and indeed to point several of them at Mourinho. Even in its role as an annihilating defensive block this United team is underperforming. Even as spoilers they are failing to spoil. Against Valencia United did run more, but they lacked fluency. Daniel Parejo and Gonçalo Guedes passed nicely and took the ball on the half-turn, a contrast with United’s clunking, giant-sized midfield.

But Mourinho is by no means the sole author of this current Manchester United. His team may look fractured in vital points, like a bag of biscuits that’s been battered about with a meat hammer. But why should it be anything other than this? Look above the skyline, beyond these randomly assembled players under a motley lineage of managers. Gary Neville is right on this one: laugh at José, call for his head after another dour 90 minutes against a mid-ranker from La Liga. But teams reflect the structures behind them and the wider issue is the power vacuum above.

Remember those green and yellow scarves, the fear of the Glazer ownership that once permeated this place? Well, it turns out they were right. An avalanche of commercial income may have disguised it, but United are reaping what their owners have sown. There is no evidence of a guiding plan here, no sense of anyone at the top who really cares or knows about the most minute footballing details, who feels this with a genuine passion.

Hence the odd-job of stars and leftovers in red shirts for this 0-0 draw. Money has been spent. Pogba-Matic-Lukaku-Sánchez all started here, the only-intermittently-fab four. With Eric Bailly in defence five of the starting XI were Mourinho-era players, signed for a combined £230m, plus of course one insanely overpaid bit-part free transfer.

There was a loud cheer as Sánchez left the pitch with 14 minutes to go. It wasn’t for him. Anthony Martial has become a cause célèbre for some supporters during the last days of José, emblem of this team’s stifled ambition. It is, for now, the only title he seems likely to share with Sánchez this season.