On and on and on. And then on just a little bit more it would seem. Manchester United: always crashing in the same Carrick.

The obvious question after this 2-0 defeat at Stamford Bridge is how much longer United will continue to lose games under the current manager, as opposed to losing games under the next one. But it is also a mark of the dysfunction of this club, its ambient levels of sadness, that this matters so little.

Here we have another staging point in the progress of the Manchester United ghost ship, where even sacking a manager carries almost zero tension, where it feels like something that has basically already happened. This is a club that can make you into a relic of the past even while you’re still walking around taking training and drawing a cheque.

Michael Carrick is miles away from being the actual story here. For the record, the current United manager is now a little more pre-doomed, pre-sacked, pretty much already lounging around in one of those holiday adverts with Tony Pulis joshing about what’s for lunch. Defeat here means United haven’t won a game since early September. At full time only the fact that Coventry and Sunderland would be playing each other later in the afternoon ruled out the prospect of an end-of-day bottom place.

Chuck in a Carabao Cup exit and 20th spot in the Champions League mega-table. Troubled times, then, for the latest semi-permanent navy wool suit in the United dugout. Something will now happen, most likely Carrick’s removal once the appropriate replacement is lined up. What happened here was almost by the by. Although it still provided some pretty vivid evidence of where this club is right now.

If there was a key moment, it arrived with 48 minutes gone and the score still 0-0. At which point Morgan Rogers scored a goal that captured entirely what Manchester United is. In real time this felt like one of those football moments, where the metaphor, the symbolism is almost too much, the nudge in the ribs a little too hard.

Rogers took the ball on the edge of the centre circle and just kept running in a straight line through sudden empty spaces where there should have been a thing called Manchester United. Instead he found an anti-United, a non-United. Manchester United as an absence. So much analysis of this club evolves around what is it for, where should it turn, what can it be? Maybe it’s not really anything at all.

We do remember Manchester United. It has a cultural memory, a set of shapes and colours, a gripping centre. Or does it? There was once a dream that was Manchester United. You could whisper its name. Anything more than a whisper and it would vanish. So Rogers just kept running in a straight line, moving fast now, finding no resistance, nothing of substance, fibre, no flesh, no will in front of him, like opening up the curtains and watching the shadows disappear.

How many times has this happened at this level, that a player is able to take the ball and run 40 yards through a packed opposition half without having to dribble, beat a player, or even swerve around some tangible object?

This is not to diminish Rogers’ skill and drive. The finish was really nice, a little dink as Senne Lammens came out and made a strange shape, as confused as anyone else by the sudden appearance of a living, moving, actual human in front of him.

Teams are often described as having been found out, their patterns solved and learned. It turns out this is the way to score against Manchester United. Just run straight through the middle of them. This is basically just laundry.

Before long it was time for Lisandro Martínez to get sent off, again playing football that wasn’t really there. Chelsea took a corner from the right. At which point Martínez rammed his arm into Wesley Fofana’s neck with the ball miles away. Maybe Martínez just wanted to touch another human being. Sometimes you just need to feel something.

Cole Palmer buried the penalty to make the score 2-0, with United a man down and not existing, just a little bit more. And OK, OK, you’re still thinking about the good news, aren’t you? Well, presumably Sir Jim Ratcliffe will see the material gain here, the chance to save on hotel costs with another nonexistent team. No, we don’t need any rooms. We are non-corporeal.

On a more positive note, at least the players are annoyed. Really. It has been seen as a sign of dysfunction, the ravens leaving the tower, that United’s senior players have begun to speak in public. But really, wouldn’t it be weird if they didn’t? What is the correct human response to this state of complete, top-down lack of care, of managed disintegration?

The first half was lively enough. Bruno Fernandes was back in the United starting XI on a lovely crisp October morning, the sun sharp but soft, the grass a deep lime green. It is said that United lack leaders. But what is a leader anyway? Someone who shows you how to win, makes winning more likely, walks you right to the door. Well, good luck with that around here. The sub-Saharan desert also lacks grass. This isn’t really the fault of grass.

And so here Manchester United started with one bloke who thinks the hierarchy has betrayed the club and another who thinks the manager is tactically poor. And the thing is, they’re both right. Fernandes in particular broke the code, undermining his manager, talking tactics when you are housefly playing like a performatively unhappy jack russell.

But it is hard to blame the players too much for losing the run of themselves a little. This is a club that takes a bite out of everyone, that makes everything wrong, a club that spends and spends and still seems short, that is somehow ludicrously profitable but also ludicrously in debt, where to be a supporter is to be left always feeling short-changed, owed so much more.

By the end the game had basically become a shooting practice session for Chelsea, who were good here, even if they were playing a team that didn’t exist. The most significant element was the performance of Estevão Willian, who tortured Diogo Dalot on the right flank. When Estevão came off the home crowd stood on all sides. He is very obviously going to be a proper player.

The last knockings were accompanied by the familiar iconic shots on the big screen of Omar Berrada and Jason Wilcox looking doomed and sombre, in a way that was arguably the most sustained United performance of the afternoon. You try looking sombre for the cameras for a full 90 minutes. It is at the very least a sign of some excellent media training (no, Jason, you look wistful, I need urgently alarmed).

These people will now pronounce on Michael Carrick, who they hired knowing he was Michael Carrick. But who shall pronounce on them? And will it make any difference, unless someone pronounces on the people who pronounce on the people who pronounce on every single area of interim mediocrity installed at this giant ATM of a football club. Root out the problem. Well, we can do that. But we’re going to need new roots, bark, branches, leaves.

When it comes to Carrick, everybody knows United are just waiting, finger hovering over the gunge tank. Alternatives are being lined up, terms thrashed out. There is an international break soon. Funny, isn’t it? An organisation of squawking, howling incompetence. But the one place you feel suddenly in the hands of the experts, safe hands, is this part. Stand back, let the experts in. Masters of the mid-season sacking. Seen it, done it. We know this world.

Carrick himself has played his part well through all this, and said all the right things. He is what he is: a coach who is not at the peak of his profession, who is engaged in weekly micro-battles with people who are. It’s not his fault he’s not cut out for this level. He didn’t hire Michael Carrick.

As for the rest of this thing, the ghost players, the latest pressed men and padded overcoats in the seats of power; they continue to perform to their own level too, at an organisation that has by now fully embraced mediocrity and misdirection as a business plan.