Welcome, Mauricio, to the meat grinder. Or rather, welcome back. We’ve been expecting you. There is nothing surprising in the news Manchester United may be on the verge of appointing Mauricio Pochettino. United are always on the verge of appointing Pochettino. This is a club that has spent 13 years hiring and firing the same structurally doomed manager – same shell-shocked eyes, same irresolvable macro-problems – and the last eight years almost but not quite doing this to Pochettino.

Well, maybe we’re finally here. Maybe he just needed to be broken enough to make it fit. And who knows, perhaps there is even a kind of accidental synergy here.

By now Pochettino has been thoroughly processed through the soul-extraction machinery of elite club football. He arrives at Old Trafford pre-minced, pre‑haunted, a 54-year-old already bruised by his experiences at Paris Saint-Germain, Chelsea and Levy‑era Spurs. This is a head coach so steeped in the blood of dysfunctional super-clubs that turning back is pretty much the same thing as heading on into its ultimate form in the west end of Manchester.

The problems at Old Trafford are of course unrelated to the appointment of the latest managerial avatar. The constant hiring and firing is a symptom not a cause. This is essentially a distraction, a false flag drawing attention from the avarice and incompetence of the executive tiers.

Still, though, it is necessary on these occasions to set out the reasons why the latest appointment probably won’t work. First up is the obvious sense of diminishing returns.

How do you solve a club that has won two major trophies in 10 years of steady downward progress? Easy. You hire a coach who has also won two major trophies in 13 years of steady downward progress. How do we get back to the dimly remembered recent past? We hire the dimly remembered recent past.

Does this feel like a magic bullet? At this stage hiring Pochettino is like booking the bloke who did Gangnam Style to play the Super Bowl. Yeah, huge fan. Remind me. Weren’t you quite big in 2013?

So much for all that then. It is more interesting to linger on the fact that, as ever with this great belching toxic volcano of a football club, there is always hope, and some kind of logic that says maybe this is the one. We see it every time. Ageing aura-master? Yep, do it. Hot young systems zealot? Get him in. Random ex-player, who will be transformed almost instantly into a damp, doomed figure crumpled on the touchline like a divorced dad at the school railings? We have a vacancy.

This time there are two things in Pochettino’s favour. First, the memory of his best days at Spurs: the charisma, the barking laugh, the way of striding around looking like the world’s most handsome oil rigger. Plus of course the visceral, hard-running style of that early Spurs team, football as life, pain, exhaustion, delirium. There will be moments. Just give us some of these. In the end everyone here just wants to feel something.

Second, and more seductive, is the sense of some kind of shared redemption arc, a union of lost souls. Broken club, meet broken manager. You two are going to get along. This happens in movies, the Leaving Las Vegas dynamic: rock bottom, healing, redemption. Is this convincing? Do we have, of all things, not hope – obviously not that – but doomed hope?

Pochettino does have an incompleteness to his career. This is a manager who never manifested the full promise of those early years, headhunted by Southampton, then poached again by Spurs, where he offered a compelling injection of energy. That Pochettino was a hugely moreish figure. You wanted to hear him speak, clap his dimpled cheeks, to breathe in his Eau de Gaucho scent as he whispered gruff words in your ear about struggle and suffering, and maybe invited you to a barbecue later.

A decade on, Pochettino still has the air of someone looking for a home and a final form. It is an interesting exercise just trying to decide what really broke him. Maybe it was PSG, January 2021 to July 2022, still the source of his only major trophies.

In Paris Pochettino seemed to arrive pre-burnt out, required to make sense from a standing start of a bunch of supernova galácticos. This was High Decadence-era PSG, source of the original despot‑general Kylian Mbappé meme, and a time when Neymar seemed to be more or less continually dancing on crutches in an elite underground disco dressed in a solid gold bowler hat and shoes made from moon rock.

Those who know Pochettino reported a disillusionment with superstar egotism, the swagger of unproven young players, training that became a losing battle for intensity. And yes, there is a pre‑United klaxon here. How’s that going to work out? Does it seem like an obvious cultural fit?

Then again, maybe it was Chelsea that broke him, an ill-fitting season before a mutually agreed departure, shot through with frustration at an unbalanced squad and an incoherent hierarchy. Again, does this sound like a man ideally geared to make sense of a squad assembled under six managers and the interventions of pub-chat Big Sir Jim?

You could even make a case it was Spurs that broke Pochettino, even if for five seasons this was his peak time in club management. The good times died at Tottenham because Pochettino couldn’t convince Daniel Levy of the need to build from a point of strength. That team was destined to eat itself. Pochettino was high on the Marcelo Bielsa school of football as a game of running, victory as a function of physical and emotional exhaustion.

In the end the thing that made Poch-era Spurs work was also the thing that killed it, a high-energy team that became a zombified entity, a squad of degraded parts, Pochettino himself already a little sad and war-weary.

So, welcome to Manchester then. Do any of those elements sound familiar? Maybe there is something interesting here. Maybe it’s a fit. United might be a ghost ship, trapped in a never-ending doldrums. Pochettino may also be the wrong side of his own prime. Hansi Flick won his first trophy at Bayern Munich in 2019, the same age as Pochettino. But long‑serving 54-year-old managers don’t tend to surge into their best years at this level.

Then again, football is often emotion as much as detail, and Manchester United is definitely this right now, an entity that just needs to feel good, to give off heat, to keep rolling along. Pochettino’s arrival would at least be a story, a meeting of last chances and final saloons. Do we have an arc here?

If so, it needs to start with an extended action sequence. United are third from bottom of the Premier League. The squad is a random bin fire of divergent parts. On the plus side there is something astringent and purging about Pochettino’s best style, the high-intensity 4-2-3-1. There are even some players there that might fit.

Kobbie Mainoo has the necessary press-resistant, quick‑passing qualities. Carlos Baleba and Andrey Santos are much better hard‑running midfielders than they’ve looked so far. Which isn’t saying much. They haven’t looked like this at all. Matheus Cunha and Bryan Mbeumo will be asked to hustle, which they can do. Benjamin Sesko hasn’t really got going. But Pochettino likes a big man.

The defence needs speed and a willingness to play a high line, meaning more than ever that Harry Maguire looks like a horse‑drawn train in a world of Ford Model Ts. Has Bruno Fernandes ever really been asked to play with more discipline and less risk? This will now happen.

And yes, we have been here before so many times. There is no magic bullet, no mega‑vaccine, no master plan coming together in appointing Pochettino. Nobody is draining the swamp, flame‑throwing the boardroom, or raging at the managed mediocrity installed at every level.

Pochettino himself is like a walking vision of better times and diminished powers. But there are always other chapters, and in this case a sense of something that might just offer its own sense of shared theatre, private and public; a chance, however remote, to unbreak yourself.