Jose Mourinho has chosen never to lay down roots in Manchester - United now need to decide whether he is the man for them

Doing neither is not an option if the biggest-grossing club in the Premier League is to have some direction going into next season. Entering the final year of the Mourinho’s three-year contract without resolution would be a nightmare for both parties, the man himself sulking catastrophically – undermined, unhappy, unable to stop himself blaming each setback on the issue. The club itself looking rudderless, and assailed at every juncture with questions about the future.

As things stand, he will not be a league title-winner going into his third season, as he was at Real Madrid and Chelsea when a new contract felt more of an obligation. At United a new contract feels like it would only be a gesture of permanence that will not solve the obvious points of incompatibility.

This is the major decision facing United in the coming weeks: are they willing to place their long-term future in the hands of Mourinho? If they are to prepare the ground for change then that will have to start now, with all the difficulty it would entail, because by the summer it may already be too late to get the right replacement.

In second place but 15 points off Manchester City, his season is hard to measure so it comes down to a question of where the club are heading and what vision the manager has for his team. Mourinho was never going to reinvent himself to make United feel better about themselves as a club with a history of attractive football because after 16 years at the top he is bemused by the notion that he should change.

At Chelsea, a club that never had a strong modern tradition of playing a certain way and lacked a defining managerial figure in its history before Mourinho’s arrival in 2004 he was unencumbered by those expectations. At United, where the whole modern commercial machine is based upon selling a certain view of the club’s tradition as thrilling and bold, it presents much greater problems when the man in charge of the current team is yoked unapologetically to a very different way of doing it.

There are details that Mourinho would point to, such as his determination in the summer to sign Ivan Perisic, whom he thought would offer the team a much better attacking dimension and might have had the added benefit of being in keeping with United’s history of wingers. But still it is hard to see how the current situation would be conducive to a new contract other than United knowing that not to agree one will simply create more problems.

Mourinho has done his bit for United in the post-Sir Alex Ferguson era and the two trophies last season were significant for the club. He may even be right when he says that the £300 million spent on players during his time in charge “is not enough” when one considers the kind of money that has been lavished by Paris Saint-Germain on Neymar alone. But those discussions are corrosive when had in public and look like a manager casting around for someone else to blame.   

It goes back to the basic premise of a manager who lives in a hotel, insinuating that United have failed to persuade enough of the best footballers in the world to relocate to the same city in which he has conspicuously failed to lay down any roots. Not every manager lasts long enough in his job to unpack the furniture in a new home but that is a very different proposition to choosing to exist one hasty check-out away from leaving it all behind.

In that way Mourinho seems to have been preparing for his exit from the very start. Yet by the same token a new contract at United will feel to him like his due, the affirmation of his power and influence at his club and the uplift in salary too. After all, that is what he has always chased wherever he has been but this is a decision that will define United’s future, and how their manager behaves and performs in the coming weeks will, by extension, define his too.

Coutinho is one of a kind

The likelihood now seems that it is a case of when, not if, Liverpool sell Philippe Coutinho to Barcelona this month. Of course, accepting the loss of one’s best players to the bigger rival is never an easy one to take but even so, the club has made a virtue of trading well on its best players. Like Luis Suarez, Coutinho was one whom many clubs considered signing but none were prepared to take a risk upon five years ago when he was 20 years old and made available by Inter Milan.

Sometimes those are the hardest calls to make, as was the case with Suarez, a goalscoring phenomenon in the Dutch Eredivisie but another who divided opinion as to his potential when it came to the English game. It is not simply those plucked out of relative obscurity who reflect well on a club’s recruitment but those who could easily fall either side of the line but turn out to be among the best of their generation.