Manchester United have made their worst start to a league season for 40 years and face Aston Villa at Old Trafford on Sunday having not won in the Premier League for 70 days.

Nottingham Forest’s victory over Manchester City on Saturday evening left United languishing in 18th position, two points adrift of safety and facing a fight to get out of the relegation zone.

Tuesday’s dramatic 3-2 comeback victory at home to Roma in the Champions League offered some grounds for optimism, but it was only their third win in 14 matches in all competitions and head coach Michael Carrick’s future remains perilous.

Telegraph Sport analyses those seasons in United’s post-war history in which they have been embroiled in relegation battles or scares.

1961-62

United were still in the process of rebuilding in the wake of the Munich air disaster in 1958. Matt Busby was slowly assembling the makings of a great team, but the early 1960s were a turbulent time for the club and this was the first of two seasons in which they were scrambling to retain their top-flight status.

In 1961, stories that United’s players were involved in match-fixing were investigated by newspapers. Striker David Herd settled in quickly after arriving from Arsenal and the season did not start too badly. But between the end of September and start of December, United suffered eight defeats during a 10-game winless run in which they managed just eight goals.

1962-63

When United lost 2-1 at fellow relegation battlers Birmingham City with three games remaining, it set the stage for a titanic tussle against derby rivals City, who had given their own hopes of survival a huge boost by beating Tottenham 1-0. United would claim a 1-1 draw at Maine Road before overcoming Leyton Orient, who were already down, to stay up by the skin of their teeth, despite a 3-2 defeat at Forest on the final day. City were not so lucky.

It was not all doom and gloom at Old Trafford, though. Inspired by new signings Paddy Crerand and Denis Law, who scored 29 goals in an impressive debut season after a British-record £115,000 move from Torino, United would go on to win the FA Cup, a triumph that sounded the starting gun on the most glittering era of success under Busby.

1972-73

Much as Sir Alex Ferguson continues to cast a shadow over the current United, the post-Busby landscape was a tumultuous one for the club. United failed to win any of their first nine league games and this was the season when the “Holy Trinity” of George Best, Law and Sir Bobby Charlton “finally disintegrated”, in the words of Tommy Docherty.

Frank O’Farrell had been sacked as manager in December 1972, a couple of weeks after the increasingly AWOL Best was transfer-listed. O’Farrell’s replacement was Docherty and he kept them up thanks to a run of five wins and three draws over a five-week period late in the season, but this was a club on a seemingly unstoppable slide. Shortly before O’Farrell’s dismissal, Busby had uttered words that would probably chime with those in charge today: “Everywhere I go, I am asked: ‘What’s wrong with United?’ A poor run for us seems to be an international disaster, let alone a national one.”

1973-74

Things were so bad that by the third week of October, United’s top scorer was their goalkeeper, Alex Stepney, who was on penalty duties in the absence of the regular taker Willie Morgan. Best walked out on the club for good in January 1974, after turning up late and worse for wear for an FA Cup tie against Plymouth. Law had rejoined City at the start of the season and the popular myth is that it was his backheel goal in City’s 1-0 victory at Old Trafford that relegated United for the first and only time in the post-war period.

But even if they had beaten City and their final-day opponents Stoke City, Birmingham would still have finished above them. Yet any fears Docherty had of being sacked were quashed when the United chairman Louis Edwards and Busby arrived at his house with a crate of champagne and told him his job was safe.

1986-87

United had won their first 10 games of the previous season to raise hopes of the club finally ending their championship hoodoo – but they ended up finishing a distant fourth. Ron Atkinson went into the next season under pressure with the club plagued by reports of ill-discipline and a dressing-room drinking culture, and wrestling with falling gates and complaints over his transfer policy.

Mark Hughes had left in the summer for Barcelona and when United lost six of their opening eight games they were second from bottom. A 4-1 hammering at Southampton in the Littlewoods Cup proved the final straw. It was the 40th anniversary on Friday of Ferguson’s appointment as United manager, but few could have imagined, after a 2-0 defeat by Oxford United in his opening game, that, in time, he would go on to build an empire.

1989-90

At the start of the season, Ferguson had accused United of becoming a “cup-tie club” rather than one who could do it week in, week out in the league. Seldom did that claim look truer than in the 1989-90 campaign. When United slumped to a dismal 2-1 defeat at home by Crystal Palace on December 9 during a bleak winter of discontent, fan Pete Molyneux held up a banner that read: “3 Years of Excuses and It’s Still Crap ... Ta Ra Fergie.” By early February, United were languishing in 17th and in real trouble.

The FA Cup would provide solace. Martin Edwards, the United chairman at the time, said recently that he had reassured Ferguson he would not be sacked if they lost to Forest in January 1990. But to this day Mark Robins is often credited with being the man who saved Ferguson’s job, his goal in that nervy 1-0 away win marking the start of a Cup run that would culminate in Wembley glory over Palace and open the trophy floodgates.

2024-25

It was after a wretched 2-0 home defeat by Newcastle United on December 30, their fifth loss in six league games, that Ruben Amorim first brought up the dreaded “R” word and said it was “really clear” United were in a relegation battle. A few weeks later, after a 3-1 capitulation against Brighton at Old Trafford that ended with Amorim smashing a television in the dressing room, the Portuguese claimed he was managing arguably the worst United side in history.

It undoubtedly helped United that the three teams who did go down that season – Leicester City, Ipswich Town and Southampton – were so poor. United’s final points tally of 42 was the same total that West Ham had been relegated from the Premier League with in 2002-03.

2026-27

This is the joint-fifth worst start to a season in United’s 148-year history. Their only league win came on August 30, at home to newly promoted Ipswich, and they will be bottom by the end of the weekend if they lose to Villa, and Palace and Sunderland below them follow Forest in winning.

It has left Carrick under huge pressure and the fixtures are unlikely to get much easier after the international break with trips to Liverpool and Newcastle either side of the visit of Brentford.