Manchester United are proving Ralf Rangnick was right all along

Ralf Rangnick warned Manchester United needed 'open-heart surgery' if they were to begin to rectify their many issues this summer. They ignored him and were left without a pulse against Brentford at the weekend, the ultimate dream of a title challenge already dead before it had ever begun.

You can't win the Premier League in the first few games of the season, but you can certainly lose it. Defeats to Brighton and Brentford aren't made any easier by the visit of Liverpool a week today. Mind you, any side looks capable of beating this team of misfits right now.

United took umbrage to Rangnick's comments during his interim period in charge. He was the latest figure to go public and question his employers. He was moved on at the end of the season, switching his focus to the Austrian national team rather than an advisory role in which his many suggestions would no doubt have fallen on deaf ears anyway.

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Once again, United's grand plans have fallen apart after a summer of buzzwords and cheap rhetoric. The pieces might have changed, but the puzzle remains the same. For all their talk of new beginnings, the only thing that has changed at Old Trafford is the arrival of new fall-guys, who will pay the price for a shambolic structure put in place under the misguidance of disinterested owners.

“You don’t even need glasses to see and analyse where the problems are,” Rangnick warned. “It’s not enough to do some minor amendments – cosmetic things. In medicine you would say that this is an operation of the open heart. If this happens and everyone has realised that this has to happen and if people want to work together then it makes sense and I believe it doesn’t take