It was Ralf Rangnick, Manchester United’s little-lamented stopgap of a manager, who most pithily diagnosed the depth of the club’s ills. “It is not enough to do some little amendments, some minor cosmetic things,” the Austrian argued in 2022, in the midst of his own Old Trafford horrors. “In medicine you would say this is an operation of the open heart.” Four years on, with the vast wisdom of the Ineos politburo pressing down on United like a dead weight, you might safely conclude that you would not want Sir Jim Ratcliffe as your cardiac surgeon.

In his field of petrochemicals, Ratcliffe is regarded as a genius, a man who has not risen from a Failsworth council house to become Britain’s richest man by accident. But in football, hardly his natural realm, he has brought a style of business about as sophisticated as pinning a tail on a donkey. Take the latest theatre of the absurd surrounding Michael Carrick. On Monday, United’s dead man walking still had to turn up at the Carrington training ground and pretend as if life were normal, watching the under-21s play Hull and preparing for a visit to Stamford Bridge this weekend, by which time almost everybody expects him to be gone.

All the while, the board were said to be locked in “crisis talks”, a misnomer if ever you heard it. For this clueless cabal have presided since their arrival in December 2023 over a state of perma-crisis, torching the reputations of everyone they have touched. The longer the latest deliberations lasted, the more you sensed there was zero clarity on what the resolution should be. A change of manager, in all likelihood.

But when Eddie Howe and Julian Nagelsmann look at how quickly the credentials of past incumbents have dissolved into dust, why would they even want the task? Erik ten Hag came with an image as a figure of iron discipline and left a haunted shell. Ruben Amorim went from adulation at Sporting Lisbon, to the extent that he was carried off at his last match on his players’ shoulders, to being the butt of all jokes at United, a thwarted dreamer who preferred to pore over a tactics board than witness his team lose a penalty shoot-out to Grimsby.

Now Carrick is condemned to the same fate, completing a path from club legend to sacrificial lamb. Except United fans have grown too familiar with the pattern to blame him. The Stretford End’s two-part reaction to the capitulation against Bournemouth spoke volumes, with genuine affection for Carrick morphing into molten contempt for his players.

Leaders? No, pitiful liabilities. Bruno Fernandes buried himself in his overcoat on the bench, still smouldering at Carrick dropping him for his indolence against Como. Harry Maguire, filling in for Fernandes as captain, gave a defensive performance not so much ponderous as statuesque. For all that he offered the usual “not good enough” platitudes afterwards, he would be few people’s idea of a stabilising influence – especially after using his family as cyphers for his discontent over his recent World Cup snub.

There is almost uniform consensus today that the dysfunction at United is cultural, that the place is rotting from the head as a consequence of the Glazers’ absenteeism and Ineos’s glaring dearth of expertise. In 2024, even Ratcliffe himself said of the club’s drift since the departures of Ferguson and David Gill: “There have been a whole series of coaches, some of which have been very good. And none of them were successful, or survived for very long. You can’t blame the coaches. The only conclusion you can draw is that the environment in which they were working didn’t work.”

And yet having discerned the key problem, he has somehow contrived to exacerbate it. It is not so much that he has kept backing the wrong horse, but that he somehow presumes that investing a bare minimum of his fortune will work. While Carrick needed half-a-dozen eye-catching summer signings to improve on last season’s third-place finish, he received half that number, and all in the wrong positions. As opposed to being given a left-back, a centre-half and a striker to deputise for the injured Benjamin Sesko, he was landed with three midfielders, none of whom would raise a stir at United’s rivals. Andrey Santos, who somehow commanded a £48m fee after four different loan spells at Chelsea, has looked distinctly pedestrian.

After these meagre returns, it is astonishing that Ratcliffe, a businessman who applies fearsome standards to the rest of his empire, persists with a director of football as flawed as Jason Wilcox. It can only be that his judgment in a sporting context is just wildly off-beam. In the same way he once presumed Sir Dave Brailsford was a polymath in the wake of the marginal gains revolution in cycling, he now ascribes the wisdom of Solomon to Wilcox on the strength of one Premier League title with Blackburn 31 years ago. The one appointment who did bring a formidable contacts book was Dan Ashworth, and he was sacked after five months.

Even Omar Berrada, the chief executive who jumped ship from Manchester City with a stellar CV, is losing his lustre by association with this train wreck. Where once United promised an elevating effect for those who joined, the experience today is simply enervating. This is the reality Ratcliffe must confront before he sends another manager’s career into reverse: the fact that everybody at United is being set up to fail.