Manchester United are depressingly bad and it could see Jose Mourinho sacked by Christmas

The description, from two senior figures in the Manchester United dressing room, is that the mood there is “depressingly bad”. And this was in the few days before the dismal defeat to West Ham United. The scene afterwards was naturally even worse, further feeding this cycle of bad results and escalating pressure to win the next game, that comes from this wider cycle in Jose Mourinho’s career.

No one can now doubt this really is one of those seasons. No one can doubt this now feels all in the balance, maybe the end game. Executive vice-chairman Ed Woodward has been resolutely against the idea of dismissing Mourinho, but some players are now saying they expect change at the end of the season anyway, and that one more year would be “tough”.

Results may make all of that irrelevant, and force Woodward’s hand. They are already dismal. The best-paid squad in world football, and one expected to at least challenge for the title, has three defeats and a draw from seven games. That is just 10 points, with a return of 10 goals for and 12 against making such a sorry sight look worse.

Even more conspicuously, it leaves Mourinho with just two points more than Chelsea at this exact same stage in 2015-16.

It is also the exact same number of points that David Moyes had after seven games in 2013-14, making it United’s joint-worst start since 1990 and joint third worst since the introduction of three points for a win.

That should make the alarms grow louder.

All of this is also why the bad atmosphere - and then all of the bad results that follow - go way beyond the Paul Pogba situation, even if that is where Mourinho does deserve some sympathy.

So much of that story, and how a player more valuable for his marketing output rather than his input on the pitch got in trouble for a social media post, are sorry symptoms of the modern Manchester United.

But elements of it, and so much else, are a symptom of Mourinho’s management and his struggles to adapt to the modern game.

The Pogba story merely emphasised how, everywhere the Portuguese turns, there is another problem; and yet another problem that he doesn’t know how to deal with it.

As anyone who has objectively followed the patterns of Mourinho’s career could have easily predicted, he does not seem to have responses to things turning badly, and less so as the game evolves.

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So it was after the League Cup elimination to Derby County on Tuesday, yet another tepid and uninspired performance where United were shown how to play intense and proactive football by a side way beneath them. Mourinho - just as at Chelsea 2015-16 - has been at a loss as to how to jolt his side out of this, so locked himself away with his staff for hours after that penalty shoot-out, trying to come up with something different tactically for West Ham.

The “solution” was this: a bizarre three-at-the-back with Scott McTominay, and a needlessly negative system against a Manuel Pellegrini team whose specific problems have been: a high line, a porousness at the back, a lack of cohesion.

How do you come to the decision to sit back against that? Why not go for them? Little wonder the word “confused” was used.

The approach instead emboldened West Ham, further providing them with the cohesion they have lacked through sheer confidence from the Manchester United teamsheet. A team with so many six-footers, meanwhile, still conceded from a set-piece.

Of course, we know why Mourinho didn’t go for West Ham.

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This is his default, his fundamental nature as a manager: an inherent defensiveness and a caution, in a modern game where attacking is more dominant than ever.

That of course ties into the wider issues as to why all this is happening.

They barely need to be repeated, since we’ve heard them so often in the past, even if many at United - including some key decision-makers - were wilfully deaf and blind to them.

There is that football that is so out of step with the club’s spirit and elite football in 2018, and fed a situation where dressing-room sources say some of the team are almost afraid to play at Old Trafford.

There is then the complete lack of any kind of modern attacking co-ordination, that might at least give them a framework, and build that confidence.

There is most relevantly the complete lack of connection between Mourinho and the squad, his hard-edged management ironically making this team so soft, so easily beatable. This just isn’t a group of players in thrall to him. They don’t all dislike him, but he’s lost a lot of them, and it has meant losing so many games.

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So, we arrive at a Mourinho situation we’ve seen before, from those set of issues we’ve heard before.

It is telling that the dropping of a player as expensive and previously exceptional as Alexis Sanchez can be completely overlooked in all of this, but that just shows how dismally ineffective he’s been, how inefficient United are.

Some Old Trafford sources are now talking about something that others warned them here, too, that a 29-year-old who has played so much football may now be completely burned out; that Arsenal may actually have pulled off a business masterstroke here.

Sanchez never seemed like someone Mourinho specifically needed in the first place, which against stands in contrast to the surgical nature of recruitment at Manchester City and Liverpool, two clubs United are now far behind in all senses.

That points to how there are much bigger issues at Old Trafford than the manager, but he is now the most immediate problem.

Why give him more money if, for a crunch game, he drops his new defensive midfielder in Fred before October?

It may all mean Mourinho could really be gone before Christmas.

This needs to change quickly. It’s just, as with all of the many problems in the team and the club right now, it’s hard to know where Mourinho finds a response.

It is, in short, depressingly bad.