The dust had still to settle on Manchester United’s humiliating Champions League exit against Sevilla on a chastening Tuesday night at Old Trafford when it was being suggested Jose Mourinho needed to throw more money at the problem. It is a theory that has become synonymous with any United post-mortem but what is to say chucking any more players into the mix would help if the system they encounter is so laden with fault lines, the team so much less than the sum of its already expensive parts? You don’t just hurl more sand and cement into a sinkhole in the hope it will correct itself, you examine the entire structure first, identifying root causes and failures before getting on with the rebuilding process.

Steven Gerrard, the former Liverpool captain, claimed after United’s 2-1 surrender to a Sevilla side everyone else will be hoping to draw in the quarter-finals that they were still three or four world class players short. But one need only look at the struggles of Alexis Sanchez and Paul Pogba, two players signed at enormous cost precisely to help get United back up to the level to which they aspire, to recognise that even talent can be rendered impotent in an aimless fog of muddled thinking. And that’s the thing with this United side under Mourinho – they look so aimless, so joyless.