It is a wide, straight road leading to Manchester United’s training ground, with the power station on the right, the riding school on the left and the burger bar, Gail’s, where a few years ago Gary Neville and brother Phil filmed that mobile-phone advert, huddled under the canopy, sheltering from a Mancunian downpour and blowing into their steaming mugs of tea as their old mate David Beckham sent them picture-messages of life in sunny Madrid.

A sign went up outside the main entrance a few years ago explaining that the players will not sign autographs because of internet profiteering and, true to word, most of them zoom by behind their darkened windows. Yet there is still a corner, by the second set of barriers, where the supporters wait in hope and, to give Louis van Gaal his due, rarely a day goes by without him stopping to unwind his window and scribble his name on whatever is passed to him.

What he maybe did not expect, on his drive into work on Thursday, was that the piece of paper one man pushed into his hand was for him to read, rather than sign, and an indication perhaps that not everyone is satisfied with the club’s summer business. It was entitled “Transfer tips for the next ten days”, featuring a list of possible replacements for David de Gea, three different names of centre-backs who might be available and a line-up of the “marquee forwards” now Wayne Rooney is huffing and puffing a lot more than in the old days. Van Gaal smiled politely, thanked the author and then passed through the barriers, into a world where it is not quite so simple as “sign Thomas Müller”.

Inside those buildings there is a sense of weariness and bemusement that in the era of social media and irritable Interneters there is so much obvious discontent even though the club have filled two of their long-standing problem positions, at right-back and central midfield, and brought in a new left-sided attacker, Memphis Depay, who showed against Club Brugge on Tuesday that he could be an ideal wearer of the club’s No7 shirt.

There have certainly been more stressful transfer windows in United’s recent history given they have brought in a player of Bastian Schweinsteiger’s class and achievement for £6.3m. Matteo Darmian has slotted seamlessly into defence and Morgan Schneiderlin has played with enough distinction during his three previous seasons in the Premier League that Jamie Carragher, always an astute judge, predicted the other day he would be the best transfer of the summer.

United are now trying to sign another Southampton player, Saido Mané, although it will not be straightforward – not least because of the broken relationship between Van Gaal and Ronald Koeman – and they may have to pay more than £20m to make it happen.

On the other hand, it is perplexing they have fixed various areas of the team yet left themselves conspicuously short and vulnerable elsewhere, particularly with the over-reliance on Rooney, and there can be no doubt Pedro’s move to Chelsea has stung United’s supporters when it was only last Friday that Van Gaal was talking about him being precisely the kind of quick, penetrative player he needed. Van Gaal clearly wanted it to happen – “write it” he instructed – and that was followed by reports of the club’s chief executive, Ed Woodward, flying to Barcelona to arrange everything on Monday.

For it to end as it did is strange to say the least and, if United decided ultimately not to meet the buy-out clause, there are some obvious questions to put to Van Gaal at Friday’s press conference about what changed and, just as pertinently, is it normal for a club of their size to be flip-flopping so indecisively?

In today’s terms, Pedro would have been cheap, at £21m, and capable of illuminating a sometimes bland United attack bearing in mind it was only because of Lionel Messi, Luis Suárez and Neymar he was not featuring more regularly for Barcelona. However it is dressed up, the player has a record of achievement that makes United’s apparent volte-face a cause for legitimate scrutiny.

At the same time United’s supporters are trying to figure out the ongoing issue with De Gea and Real Madrid and the complex set of circumstances that has left the most friction between the two clubs since Cristiano Ronaldo was in a similar position and Ferguson was mentioning General Franco in his long polemics and raging – inaccurately, as it turned out – that he would not “sell that lot a virus”.

The saga has been going on for the best part of a year and, astonishingly, Madrid have still not made a single bid for the player. Instead they have opted for their own tactics: drip-feeding information through Marca, their newspaper of choice, then sitting back and waiting for the selling club to lose their nerve. It has not worked in this instance and, though United cannot be blamed for wanting to show they are no pushovers, the impasse is really no good for anybody.

United’s view is that Madrid are taking liberties and that De Gea – still young at 24, and their player of the year by a country mile – should fetch a world-record transfer fee for a goalkeeper, currently set by Gianluigi Buffon at £33m, regardless of the fact the Spaniard is a free agent next summer. Initially they wanted a player-plus-cash exchange with Gareth Bale and, when that got them nowhere, the second option involved Sergio Ramos.

Madrid would rather do it their own way and still, perhaps, suspect United will buckle approaching the end of the transfer window. But it is far more likely now that De Gea will stay in Manchester, against his will, for the rest of the season.

United heard several weeks ago that Madrid had put two financial packages in front of De Gea. One was a straightforward salary and signing-on fee if United sold him now. The other was a huge payment, reputedly £12m, if he joined them as a free agent a year later. De Gea has, however, lost more than that by turning down a new contract offer that would have seen his current salary, as one of United’s lowest earners, multiplied five times to take him over £200,000 a week, and backdated to the start of last season.

If United were guilty of anything, it was believing that Ramos wanted to join them when the common suspicion was that he was using them to engineer a new contract from Madrid. The alternative argument, presumably, was that, if a player of that quality alerted United to his potential availability, they would be foolish not to explore it further. Yet there was no doubt United came out of that episode looking as if they had been strung along – and weak for it.

Nicolás Otamendi was available and, like all of Jorges Mendes’s clients, the Valencia player was persistently linked to Old Trafford. That, however, was a red herring and not even Manchester City, his new club, are claiming they beat off United to sign him.

Does Van Gaal agree with Manuel Pellegrini that Otamendi was “the best defender in La Liga last season”? Maybe we will find that out at Friday’s question-and-answer session but Woodward has apparently been describing the Argentinian to colleagues as “this year’s Nicolás Gaitán” – in reference to the Benfica midfielder, who is linked to United every summer without a semblance of truth in it.