Those who were there will never forget the utter chaos of Michael Carrick’s last act at Old Trafford. But as the outgoing United manager clung on to his dignity like a life raft in those mad closing moments against Aston Villa, the current poster boy for United’s desperate demise sat on the bench in his tracksuit.

Diogo Dalot is an honest and by all accounts fully committed Portuguese full-back who has been a United player for more than eight years.

The 27-year-old was bought for his teenage potential by his compatriot Jose Mourinho in 2018 but has never trained on. He has never been good enough for a really top English club yet has made more than 250 appearances for the most famous one of all and has played for five different permanent managers.

On Sunday he was booed off by his own supporters when substituted after an hour. His had been a particularly grim performance but the boos were not about him, not really.

No they were not about Dalot but instead about the fundamental truth of what he represents. Namely a steady, grisly and unforgivable drain of footballing standards at United that actually began in the final days of Sir Alex Ferguson and has subsequently never stopped.

It is this that has taken United from Ferguson’s final valedictory title of 2013 to where they are today, the bottom three of the Premier League. It is this that has drained United of all their clout and reputation. It is this that has cost yet another United manager – a seventh – his job.

Carrick is not a good enough manager for United. His appointment was an emotional mistake, one of many made by Sir Jim Ratcliffe and the band of misfits and hopefuls who are currently in charge of football operations.

With a better manager – a better coach – in charge of the current team, United would be in the top half of the league. The fact they sit 18th and resemble a Sunday League team that never gets going until they have shaken their hangovers off is squarely down to him.

Nevertheless, United are a football club that exists to win trophies, no matter what the majority owners the Glazers may have said recently. But United will not win the big trophies again until they buy better players and by that I mean better footballers and better people.

It sounds simple, trite even. But it’s a simple truth of our game. Until United can reverse a seemingly addictive habit of paying too much money for too little, the difference made by a manager will only ever be a matter of six or seven places in the Premier League standings. And United needs a much greater improvement than that until this vicious cycle of self-harm comes to an end.

There is so much wrong at the modern Manchester United away from the field. Much of it begins and ends with the hideous hubris and self-regard of Ratcliffe, a man so shot through with misplaced self-confidence that he still insists on being tailed everywhere by a journalist he has hired to write a book on United’s journey back to the top of the mountain. Suffice to say that one won’t be ready for this Christmas.

But the thread that links the final days of Ferguson and his chief executive David Gill through the years of Ed Woodward, Richard Arnold and John Murtough to these dark days of Ratcliffe’s INEOS control is simple. It’s sub-standard players.

Despite the financial drain of the Glazers’ stranglehold, United have spent in the region of £1.75bn on their first team in the last ten years.

It takes quite something to do that and take a club backwards. It takes quite something to do that and buy only one player – captain Bruno Fernandes – who can claim to have been consistently effective over his time at the club.

Somehow, though, United have managed it and it is this hideous trail of bad judgement and waste that follows the current team and those that have come before it every time it runs out on to the field.

United are weak off the pitch and even weaker on it. Their football mirrors their off-field strategy. Haphazard, wasteful and inconsistent.

A number of years ago – at a time when previous CEOs Woodward and Arnold were trying to mend a broken club - they enlisted the advice of Fergsuon, Sir Bobby Charlton and former captain Bryan Robson to help them work out what exactly a United team should be.

‘Exciting, daring, confident and humble’ were the key words they laid down. Well, what on earth happened to any of that?

United have a huge decision to make – yet again – over a new manager. The field of suitable candidates is not as big as they would like. Nor is United as attractive a proposition as it was. The demands are enormous yet the foundations shake. It’s not a good combination.

A good coach would improve them. Carrick has had two central defenders on his staff in Jonny Evans and Jonathan Woodgate. What on earth have they been doing for the last two or three months?

But United remain four or five good transfer windows away from where they need to be and the last time they put a run of good business like that together at Old Trafford Carrick was probably in the first team.

United need proper talent but they also need proper people, not the kind who would rather moan to TV cameras after a defeat than go home and think about their own part in what has just happened.

Last summer’s strategy seemed to have come straight out of Chat GPT and reflects terribly on the current football director Jason Wilcox. To ‘fix’ the midfield through three signings with the need to ‘fix’ the back four kicked down the road for 12 months is not so much a strategy as an exercise in transfer suicide.

Some think Wilcox should follow Carrick through the door on the back of that and it’s a reasonable point of view. Viewed through the mist of an autumn afternoon on Sunday, Wilcox looked as grey as his recent track record. An alternative take is that the recruitment of players like Bryan Mbeumo and Mattheus Cunha is indicative of an uptick in returns, at least in part.

Whichever path you wish to walk, it simply has to lead to an improvement in the one area that will either nourish or starve a football club. With that in mind, the first question a prospective manager should ask is who is buying the players and on the back of what long-term strategy.

Carrick’s United team have looked like exactly what they are this season, a group put together by different people following different principles for different managers. How strange that it hasn’t worked.

United, as we know, needed a left-back over the summer. Lewis Hall, of England and Newcastle, may have been an option. Instead, United placed their faith in Luke Shaw, a 31-year-old with a long history of injuries.

Shaw, unsurprisingly, is currently injured which brings us back to where we started, namely the sight of the right-footed Diogo Dalot labouring out of position on the left of Carrick’s back four against Villa on Sunday.

You could say we saw this coming. Many did. In the dressing room and in the stands at Old Trafford. Carrick? He knew about it, too, but then he was only the manager.

His exit will hurt for a while. He is an emotionally intelligent and empathetic individual who will reel from the trauma of the last ten weeks. Over time he will realise that he is well out if it, though. When he took the job last summer, Ferguson is known to have been concerned about what it may do to him. As often, Carrick’s old boss was right.

United are set up to fail and Carrick’s replacement will realise that soon enough. When he walks into the first team dressing room for the first time and looks for those upon whom he can rely to consistently help him, too many eyes will be focussed on the floor.

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