Manchester United chief executive Omar Berrada and technical director Jason Wilcox are scheduled to sit down with Sir Jim Ratcliffe in Monaco this week.

Head coach Michael Carrick’s future is expected to dominate the agenda at the pre-planned meeting in the principality where Ratcliffe is based. There is every chance a far more unpalatable subject will also be confronted given Man United's start to the 2026/27 season: drafting a contingency plan for relegation.

Ten games into the Premier League campaign, Man United find themselves in the bottom three with just a solitary victory. Minority owners INEOS arrived at Old Trafford boasting elite operating standards and a clear structure but on the pitch, the team has been dragged into a survival scrap for the second year running.

Acknowledging the drop remains something of a taboo for a club of Man United's size and commercial footprint, but a recent warning from north London shows why ignoring it would constitute negligence.

Speaking on The Sports Agents podcast, Tottenham Hotspur chief executive Vinai Venkatesham revealed how the club were planning for the future after Spurs flirted with disaster last season.

“It's really tough, because you form a relationship with people. Obviously, Igor [Tudor] wasn't the coach for long, but Thomas [Frank], we worked together really, really, really closely, went through some really difficult times," Venkatesham explained.

“I want to respect the privacy of that conversation with Thomas. But what I can say is that he was the complete gentleman that you would think he would be.”

Spurs ultimately secured survival on the final day, but Venkatesham admitted the club had quietly mapped out a blueprint for the Championship.

“It was really challenging. A really, really, really challenging period for the club,” he said. “You have to [prepare for relegation]. I mean, you can't not. To not make that plan would have been irresponsible… Sometimes going through something as traumatic as what we went through last season bonds people a little bit and also puts even more fire in everybody's belly to make sure that something like that can never happen again.”

That brush with the drop motivated Spurs to spend £300 million on summer transfer targets, including £100m on Newcastle United's Sandro Tonali and £85m on West Ham United midfielder Matheus Fernandes.

“Everybody was aligned we wanted to strengthen this position, and then everybody was aligned that Matheus [Fernandes] was absolutely the number one target,” Venkatesham said. “If I'm honest, we achieved more than we thought we might do, and that was really because so many of our number one targets we were able to land. Because if we weren't going to get our number one targets, we weren't going to settle.”

Even with morale lifted by recent wins, Venkatesham reflected honestly on their sluggish start: “I wasn't worried [by the start to the 2026/27 season], but I was definitely frustrated… Did we think we were going to make this many changes and everything would gel straight away? Of course we didn't. But did we think we'd be hovering around the position of the league that we were in the international break? Of course we didn't either.”

For Ratcliffe, Berrada, and Wilcox, Venkatesham’s transparency should rid them of any lingering delusions of grandeur. Precedent proves that stature, revenue, and history offer little insulation once a club slips into the bottom three.

Whether Man United decide to back Carrick through the November break or sack him, the decision-making trio at the Monaco summit cannot afford to treat the drop as an unthinkable scenario.

That might mean re-thinking squad wage-reduction clauses or auditing broadcast revenue drop-offs, because after all, responsible governance demands preparing for the worst.

If Man United pretend they are simply too big to go down, that is the quickest way to end up there.