It is five years this weekend since Jose Mourinho’s last game with Manchester United and let’s not forget that, at the time, there was a whole heap of evidence to corroborate the club’s belief that the relationship with him was broken.

No other manager in United’s entire existence had created more division behind the scenes. Nobody else went so spectacularly against predecessor Sir Alex Ferguson’s managerial code not to hang players out to dry in public. “You’re not special anymore,” was the song of choice from opposition fans as Mourinho stared back, no longer the manager who inspired in his players something bordering on reverence.

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And yet, for all his faults, let’s not forget either that Mourinho’s years of serial achievement as an elite trophy-collector with Porto, Chelsea, Inter Milan (and, he would say, United too) qualified him to speak with authority on what had gone wrong at Old Trafford and what, in turn, ought to be done about it. And, Mourinho being Mourinho, he often did.

All of which feels particularly relevant in another galling week for the 20-time champions of England, which included their removal from the Champions League and indeed all European football for the rest of this season.

Ferguson’s retirement in the summer of 2013 removed the comfort blanket for the people he routinely championed as “great owners”. Whether he has retained his high opinion of the Glazer family’s regime is not entirely clear as the former manager takes his seat in the directors’ box to watch, year after year, the diminishing of a once-mighty football club.

But we know what Mourinho thinks about United on the Glazers’ watch because he has aired his complaints frequently, both while he still had the job and in a series of interviews afterwards.

Much of what he said was put down to sour grapes. And maybe, knowing what he can be like, that was inevitable. Not all of it, though. A lot of what he said was legitimate, to the point, and worth revisiting in the context of where United stand five years later.

Mourinho argued that it was the people at the top of the club, not himself, who needed to be educated about what was essential to create success in modern-day football. United, he summarised, did not have the know-how or structure in place. He said finishing as Premier League runners-up in the last of his two completed seasons at Old Trafford was “one of the best jobs of his career” given everything he had encountered.

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“People might say, ‘This guy is crazy. He won 25 titles and now he says that second position with United was one of his best achievements in football’,” was an oft-repeated line. “I keep saying this because people don’t know what is going on behind the scenes.”

And, in one sense, he was right: people did think it was crazy. Many suspected it was Mourinho’s way of passing the buck: self-preservation, non-responsibility, call it what you will. And blame yourself for that, Jose. After all the years of politics and positioning, there was always going to be a hefty dollop of cynicism and, ‘Yeah, yeah, everybody else’s fault, right?’.

That, however, does not mean it should automatically be dismissed when, five years on from his dismissal, perhaps the most startling aspect for United is that so much of what he complained about at the time still seems to ring true.

In Mourinho’s time, it was the executive vice-chairman, Ed Woodward, who oversaw the club’s transfer business while, year after year, United used to inform journalists that they were going to appoint a director of football, without ever actually doing it.

Since then, John Murtough has been given the role of football director and, if nothing else, no other manager has been undermined as badly as Mourinho when he decided in his final summer at Old Trafford to move out Anthony Martial.

One problem: Joel Glazer was a Martial fan. Mourinho would joke in private about the striker morphing, in co-chairman Glazer’s eyes, into “the club’s Pele”. And Woodward sided against his boss. Woodward’s view was that Martial was a long-term asset while the same could not necessarily be said for a manager who had never stayed anywhere longer than three years. The result? Mourinho was overruled.

His final game was a trip to Anfield, which also happens to be where Erik ten Hag will be taking his United team this weekend.

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They lost 3-1, leaving them 19 points behind league-leading Liverpool and the memories include a Marouane Fellaini shot that bounced off a steward near the corner flag, a grim-faced Ferguson shaking his head in the stands, and chants of “Don’t sack Mourinho”, loaded with irony, from the home crowd.

All the aura around “The Special One” had been replaced with something entirely different: a churn of joyless games, a worse defensive record at the time than Huddersfield Town (who finished that season bottom of the league), and a group of demotivated players, some of whom were happy to see him go.

He was sacked two days later and, within six weeks, Martial had been awarded a new contract worth £13million ($16.3m at today’s exchange rate) a year. He has scored, on average, seven Premier League goals in each subsequent completed season and this week it emerged United will not be taking up an option at the end of the current deal to extend it by another year.

Can’t you just picture the told-you-so expression on Mourinho’s face, even before taking into account what 2021-22 interim United manager Ralf Rangnick once said (a claim denied by the player) about Martial allegedly refusing to be involved in one game at Aston Villa?

Unfortunately for United, this kind of erratic decision-making has continued since Woodward’s departure in early 2022 and that could count against Murtough once the billionaire Sir Jim Ratcliffe has taken up position, with his 25 per cent stake, to start shaping the football side of the operation.

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Ratcliffe has had colleagues from his INEOS empire looking almost forensically at how United operate behind the scenes. Sir Dave Brailsford, previously the hugely successful performance director for British Cycling, is prominently involved and you dread to think what he and Ratcliffe make of some of the football decisions both before and after Mourinho’s departure.

What was the logic, they might reasonably ask, of paying £80million to Leicester City for Harry Maguire when they had previously turned down Mourinho’s request to sign the defender because they thought he was overpriced at £75m? What kind of football club decides a player is too expensive and then signs him a year later for another £5m on top?

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And here’s your answer: the same one who allowed a young Paul Pogba to leave on a free transfer in 2012, then brought him back from Juventus for £89million four years later.

The same club who signed Wout Weghorst on loan from then Championship side Burnley, where he had managed two goals in 20 appearances for a team that were eventually relegated (and would score two in 31 for United), but did not have the appetite to pursue England captain Harry Kane because they knew from previous experience how problematic it would be dealing with Daniel Levy, Tottenham Hotspur’s famously obdurate chairman, over a possible transfer.

The same club who explained it wanted to go for younger targets but paid £60million to sign a 30-year-old Casemiro from Real Madrid as well as offering the Brazilian, 17 months older than Kane, a four-year contract worth £350,000 a week.

The same club who failed to see the attraction when United hero Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, then manager of Norwegian club Molde, got in touch in 2018 to say he had a 17-year-old striker by the name of Erling Haaland who was a bit special and available for only £4million.

In the past two weeks, we have seen lots of strategically planted stories about several unnamed players losing faith in Ten Hag and, in some cases, being openly opposed to him. No doubt there will be more leaks of this nature to come because, by now, it is all part of the same wearisome routine. Open mutiny is just the norm for some at Old Trafford.

And this all feels like a recurring theme if you recall Pogba’s “caption this” Instagram post, looking very pleased with himself, soon after the news of Mourinho’s sacking broke.

Louis van Gaal had to endure something similar, albeit not so publicly. David Moyes, too. Then, after Mourinho, it was Rangnick’s turn (Solskjaer less so) and now Ten Hag is discovering how easy it is for the modern-day footballer, many employing their own PR advisers, to shape the media’s coverage with unattributed grievances against the manager.

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Perhaps you heard the comments from Scott McTominay defending Ten Hag earlier this week when he acknowledged it had been “a little bit toxic” at times with previous managers.

Or maybe you saw what Nemanja Matic, who was one of Mourinho’s go-to guys, had to say about the attitudes of some of his former team-mates at United compared to what he experienced as a two-time Premier League champion with Chelsea.

“At Chelsea, players acted professionally, they were punctual and never late for training, but at United, it happened almost every day,” said Matic. “The rest of us who were always on time were angry, so we decided to form a kind of internal disciplinary committee, with me serving as its president. During one season, we collected around £75,000 in fines.”

Mourinho did not talk about players’ lack of punctuality. He did talk, though, about how United had allowed a culture to take hold that went against the club’s ambitions to re-establish themselves at the top of the sport.

“Sir Alex Ferguson used to say the day a player (thinks he) is more important than a club, goodbye,” said Mourinho. “Not anymore. The manager ought to be there to coach the players, not to keep the discipline at any cost. You need a structure to protect the manager and keep everything in place so that the players do not arrive in a situation where they feel more powerful than they used to be.”

As it was, Mourinho met fire with fire and, at times, it could genuinely be shocking to sit in front of him and listen to the way he would eviscerate players in long, withering post-match critiques.

In an interview with the French sports daily L’Equipe five months after his sacking, Mourinho explained it was deliberate to be so hard-faced because anything else would have come across as weak to those players challenging his authority. “When you are almost alone, in that you don’t have the support of the club while certain players go against the coach, who is the nice guy? I don’t want to be the nice guy because the nice guy, after three months, is a puppet and that doesn’t end well.”

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This, it seems, is one of the issues for Ten Hag and though he is never likely to push it to the same extremes as Mourinho, he has to make sure he is strong enough to face down any potential mutinies.

That defeat at Anfield in December 2018 left Mourinho’s team with a goal difference to match Leicester City’s, no more wins than Watford or Bournemouth, and the lowest points total at that stage of a season for any United side in almost 30 years.

Equally, it is worth noting that many United fans sympathised with Mourinho that he, a serial champion, was having to deal with a problematic bunch of players and people at the top of the club who were making bad decision after bad decision. “Jose’s right, the board is s**te” was one song. On his subsequent return to Old Trafford as a television pundit, they chanted his name and he blew them kisses.

And now? The jarring reality is United have lost half their 24 matches this season. New people are coming in, others heading out, but the Glazers are still in charge of an incomplete and unstable structure. And, again, a manager is being undermined from within.

The difference, perhaps, is that Ten Hag described United’s anaemic 1-0 defeat against Bayern Munich on Tuesday as a “very good” performance, whereas an audience with Mourinho in those circumstances would have been box office and he would not have missed the opportunity to manipulate the headlines.

Sour grapes? Of course it was. Anyone but himself? Absolutely. But who could say, on reflection, that Mourinho did not make some valid points?

He achieved one of only two second-placed finishes in the Premier League for United in the post-Ferguson era. He just forgot to mention that, even in what we’d have to count as a good season compared to most of their others since the Scot retired, United ended up 19 points adrift of champions Manchester City and suffering from the same loss of identity that still, looking at the current team, hits you directly between the eyes.

(Top photos: Getty Images)