It took a while. But here we are at last. Not only is Louis van Gaal in retreat at Manchester United, it seems the nature of his ultimate departure – which always seemed likely to centre on his otherness, his intellectualism, his notebook – has also been settled. Studying the gleefully outraged coverage of Van Gaal’s struggles with his stuttering team you half expect to flick on the rolling sports news and discover United’s manager has been found wandering around Salford in a Napoleonic hat demanding the immediate return of Giza and the pyramids to the Greater French Empire.

As Van Gaal himself has no doubt noted, there is a particular tone and texture to managerial failure in the Premier League. Or at least, there is when it comes to managers who make the mistake of being academic, methodical and foreign. “Arsène who?” was the famous headline over coverage of the risible French nobody’s unveiling as successor to Bruce Rioch. And for all the thrilling cosmopolitanism of the Premier League it is a skein of native insularity that remains.

This is not to excuse the current team. Clearly Van Gaal’s United are a disappointment. The style of play is stodgy. Some of the signings look substandard. Whole areas of the team are worryingly undermanned. The Champions League exit was a genuine, perhaps decisive point of failure. Perhaps some steadiness and another top-four finish is the limit of what an aged Van Gaal, in his final job, was ever likely to achieve at this transitional United.

More interesting, and indeed more significant for the wider culture of English football, is the way this failure is interpreted. Managers such as Van Gaal do not just fail, or make mistakes here. They’re exposed, unmanned, rendered mad, bonkers. With Van Gaal we’re already into the Loopy Louis stuff. References to his dossiers (briefcase wanker!), his refusal to stand up and shout at his players are now dropped in, rather sadly, as a matter of course.

A particular photo of Van Gaal (who is 66 and in good shape) looking frighteningly bemused and unkempt has already become a kind of hostility-signifier above the latest pitying editorial. This week even a minor point about United’s manager wanting to meet his players’ parents to assess how they might age (which coaches in football, cricket and basketball all do) was portrayed as a hilarious eccentricity. Here he comes now. Bonkers Louis, with his words. And his notebook. And his hair. And his trying to understand things. And while we’re at it, here comes Mad Jürg too, Liverpool’s manager who has in the space of few short weeks gone from charming, ultramodern antidote to Brendan Rodgers, to “still learning about the Premier League” to the first few snuffles and sniffs and shivers of crazed foreign failure.

In Van Gaal’s case it is not hard, at a stretch, to offer an apologia for his current constipated United. The Van Gaal way has always been to keep a structured sense of position. Attacking players stay wide as much as they dare. The game is stretched. You wait for the opponent to blink, trust your players on the ball. It has worked at times. Against Liverpool at Anfield in March United scored two brilliant goals borne out of swift diagonal passes to players who held their positions and created space.

The problem is the works have gummed a little now. Premier League players grown, or nurtured or recruited to follow orders and chase the ball are standing still, unable to perform with both the discipline and guile in attacking areas required to make the system work.

Wayne Rooney, they say, has gone backwards, an “instinctive” player overburdened with tactical instruction. Which is of course Rooney’s own failing, and a familiar English sticking point. Similarly Van Gaal has always liked young players because they are more receptive, keener to take on board new ideas. Welcome to England, Louis, land of the barrack-room hierarchy where the ability to think on your feet and read the game has always suffered in the face of a more robust, less academic culture. A 45-year-old Van Gaal might have been able to wring this out of his team. The pensionable version has presided over a sullen, lateral stasis.

There is no need to make these excuses though. Whatever the structural reasons, no matter how outdated that prototype possession game may have become, compared to the more varied tactical experiments elsewhere in Europe, Van Gaal has simply failed in the normal way: a routine, everyday, entirely explicable kind of failure, borne out of the usual bad decisions, injuries, bad luck, poor judgment, poor timing.

And yet so much of the analysis remains unhelpfully hysterical and ad hominem, tinged with triumphalism at the sight of the venerable old European master brought low, testament to the indomitable strength of English football, its physical challenge, its notebook-free sense of basic human decency and so on.

The paradox here is that Van Gaal still represents, in method if not outcome, so many things English football has traditionally neglected. And about which it should still be eager to learn: things like coaching and development, the willingness to theorise and develop a football borne out of ideas as much as sweat and inspiration. Van Gaal will remain a managerial great, no matter how energetically he is jeered from the Premier League. What we do with him, what English football can learn even in failure, is the more interesting point.

For a start it is worth noting the nature of the job Van Gaal is being asked to do at United. The requirements are clear. A title-challenging team. Last 16 in Europe. Thrilling style of play. All within the space of 18 months. Plus in England this means not just improving, or bolting on some finishing touches, but pulling an entire team out of the air from one to 11.

Two domestic cup competitions, no winter break and no easy games is one thing. The requirement to produce a team from scratch in the middle of it is something else. Luis Enrique could mould his Champions League winning Barcelona around six players – four home grown career Nou Campers – who won the competition in 2011. Of United’s team that day only Rooney, Michael Carrick and Antonio Valencia remain.

Van Gaal is accused of spending badly, a mortal Premier League sin. But spending is not really his game. Development, improvement, integration: these are his skills. Instead he’s being asked to disco dance. Still, Anthony Martial, Morgan Schneiderlin, Luke Shaw, Ander Herrera, Matteo Darmian and Daley Blind all look decent enough buys in isolation. But not all at once, not without a spine to cling to. As we hear so often, Van Gaal has spent £250m. But you can be pretty sure he’d prefer to do this another way.

Similarly Klopp, who took three settled years to create his thrillingly disciplined Borussia Dortmund team, is struggling to untangle the threads of a squad acquired by three different managers, under different conditions, to entirely different coaching and tactical ends. In the last five years Liverpool have signed 50 players, almost a team a year. In Alex Ferguson’s last season United lost Paul Pogba for nothing and bought five players for £53m who have all since left the club. To stutter in these circumstances, to be still sifting and sorting 18 months on is less a sign of loopiness and over-theorising, more evidence of how frantic elite level English football has become.

Perhaps it might even be time to acknowledge – and here’s a thought – that sacking your manager might just be the problem here not the solution. Getting rid of Van Gaal may even be the best option right now. But it also creates another set of problems, propagates its own failure, offers the next man the same set of pitfalls.

This is not just a Premier League fixation. At Real Madrid Zinedine Zidane has now followed Rafa Benítez, who followed Carlo Ancelotti, who followed José Mourinho, who followed Manuel Pellegrini: different styles, different tactics, different training methods. The result is emerging talents get lost, tenderly nurtured careers come to an abrupt halt . Even star players – witness Gareth Bale’s tentative reflowering in recent weeks – need to start again.

Some can cope with this challenge. André Villas-Boas never stopped paddling in his 256 days at Chelsea. Mauricio Pochettino, who never complains, who has a clear set of methods, who takes the tools he has and polishes them vigorously, has flourished at two relatively sensible English clubs.

Otherwise patience is key. Van Gaal took three years to win his first league title at Ajax, and four to win the champions league. It took Klopp three years to finish above fifth place in the Bundesliga. Then came ignition and two league titles built around a team that had grown together. In these circumstances failure, friction, stuttering methods become part of the game, an object of interest, even losing a part of the wider groping towards sustained success.

Mad Jürgen will get plenty of time. Those who fit his system will self-select in the current squad. Others will be added selectively. A team will emerge. Klopp is too much of a star at Liverpool to be hurried. Not so Mad Louis, for whom the end will most likely come sooner than planned, with the suspicion, even in the thrill of ground zero fresh starts, that United will still be burning the throttle in first gear, still trying to pull success out of the air.