Mourinho now knows spending alone cannot cure United

So far — repeat, so far — Jose Mourinho has made no real difference to Manchester United in any of the important areas. Outcomes, team spirit, entertainment value: In all these categories the dominant team of the Premier League era are still baffling their supporters and burning hundreds of millions of pounds in transfer fees and salaries.

Remember the claim that Manchester would be the centre of the football universe, with Mourinho at United and Pep Guardiola in charge of City? This week, City were caned 4-0 at Barcelona and United whacked 4-0 at Chelsea: A humiliation so deep that Mourinho turned on Antonio Conte, the Chelsea manager, for whipping up the Stamford Bridge crowd when the score was already 4-0. Mourinho reportedly thought that was disrespectful.

For United’s latest saviour to be in need of a little mercy from the dugout he once occupied so successfully tells a story in itself. As did the Chelsea fans singing “Jose Mourinho” when their team were 4-0 up. They were putting an arm round their old leader, who came up with a new word in his post-match analysis. “If we could delete the defensive mistakes,” he said, “the globality was good.”

The globality was not good, because United still lack a plan to merge players bought at such huge cost into a coherent whole. Mourinho inherited the spending power but he also took on the mistakes, the imbalances and the sheer lack of conviction in this squad.

Anyone who has watched United regularly since Sir Alex Ferguson stood down will know that the old culture of responsibility-taking has broken down. In United’s glory years, every single player was accountable for everything he did, not only to the manager but to the other players. The flying boot kicked by Ferguson that grazed David Beckham’s eye after he had failed to track back in a game was emblematic of a fierce honesty that no player could hide from.

Fast forward to an age in which Paul Pogba jogs back towards his own goal when N’Golo Kante is advancing on it and declines to challenge Chelsea’s holding midfielder at the point where he is shaping to shoot. The result: Chelsea’s fourth goal, from a player who is not meant to be a threat around opposition penalty boxes.

The first-minute goal that brought David de Gea charging out of his area, Claudio Bravo style, could be dismissed as a lack of concentration, with the starting whistle still reverberating around the ground; the mess United made of an in-swinging corner 20 minutes later could also be written off, at a push, as an accident of glancing headers and ricochets. There is no escaping, though, the knowledge that Chris Smalling stood off Eden Hazard for Chelsea’s third, or that Pogba, Smalling and Daley Blind were all culpable for that rare Kante goal. The performances of Smalling and Blind were shambolic.

Anyone who suspects that football is really chaos dressed up as a kind of whiteboard science will point to the contrast between United’s defensive solidity at Anfield on Monday night and their defensive incontinence here in London. How could a team who executed a perfect shut-down operation against Liverpool concede a goal after 30 seconds, with the brains of two centre-backs and one of the world’s best goalkeepers all freezing as Pedro raced on to a long ball?

The question then jumps out: What is Mourinho’s plan, his target, for a squad who have grown accustomed to outlasting managers they are not enthused by? One thing is clear: There is a culture problem in this squad that another round of spending has not cured, any more than Mourinho’s tactical prowess or his talent for negation.

He shut Liverpool out but Chelsea blew his doors off. And while Conte’s team deserve credit for blending direct play and counter-attacking, Mourinho’s individual decisions on team selection and formation deserve their share of scrutiny.

Shunting Wayne Rooney (not available here) into the sidings was a necessary measure and we can only assume Henrikh Mkhitaryan deserves the ice storm that has come his way since he joined this summer. But Mourinho’s belief that Marouane Fellaini can perform such a pivotal midfield role is contradicted by almost everything we have seen from him since David Moyes brought him from Everton.

Mourinho also appears to be in two minds about several members of this squad. Anthony Martial, Matteo Darmian, Ashley Young, Jesse Lingard, Morgan Schneiderlin, Luke Shaw and Juan Mata bob about on the waves of Mourinho’s thinking. The mitigation is that United’s followers are equally ambivalent about some of those players. Equally Zlatan Ibrahimovic, who was Mourinho’s idea, retains his aura but has stopped threatening defences often enough to compensate for his lack of pace.

United hoped the mistakes of the last three years would be swept away by Mourinho’s tactical nous, his record and his authority. But this is a far more complicated job than anyone realised. His consolidation policy of making United hard to beat while he works out a grander plan was hardly helped by one of the biggest defeats of his career.

Recent experience prompts many to expect some kind of Mourinho meltdown.

It need not be that way. This is still a good chance for him to display his credentials as a builder, a strategist, even if some will suspect that Chelsea is where his career keeps unravelling. THE DAILY TELEGRAPH

About the author:

Paul Hayward is The Daily Telegraph’s chief sports writer.