United’s players know that another round of change is coming and many will leave in the summer. That includes some of those who played on Friday night, including Paul Pogba, Juan Mata, Phil Jones, Dean Henderson as well as the absent Jesse Lingard. It is a squad in flux with divergent priorities and their minds largely elsewhere. They had been fortunate to beat West Ham in their previous game at Old Trafford 13 days earlier and the winter break that followed has seen no material change in performance amid the tumult going on at the club behind the scenes.

There is still the Champions League round-of-16 tie against Atletico Madrid to cling onto, a team whose own run of form has been equally poor of late. The strange extremes of United means that they may well triumph in a one-off game, but over a season that pattern is emerging again. Nothing has changed and, once again, United cast around for the man who might save them. Mauricio Pochettino, Erik ten Hag, Roberto Mancini, Graham Potter and then the list tails off into the waifs and strays of managerial no-man’s land.

The worse it gets the more limited that list of candidates becomes. United are hedged against the kind of decline that threatened them in past decades, by sheer dint of their size. But that too has its own consequences – a club so big that it can feel impossible for one man alone to steer back to where it once was.