Manchester United need a rebuild they may be ill-equipped or unwilling to enact

Manchester United have a lot of work to do and next season starts early. Replacing the manager is easy; rebuilding the club is far harder.

The summer transfer window opens on Friday morning and Manchester United probably need a busy one. There are a lot of malfunctioning parts to offload, and a lot of shiny new ones to bring in and get acclimatised to yet another brave, new Old Trafford world. But this is just the beginning; the European window doesn’t open until July 1, and this lopsided state of affairs can lead to some peculiar situations. We already know, for example, that Paul Pogba, Jesse Lingard and Juan Mata will be leaving the club on June 30, because this marks the expiry date of their contracts. But the new window opens with them still, theoretically, employed by the club.

But what all of this does remind us is that the summer transfer window isn’t really very long. It may stay open until the start of September, but it’s only five weeks from the opening of the European window to the first weekend of the Premier League season, and three points won in August are worth exactly the same as three points won in May. Arsenal’s failure to win any of their first three matches last season – albeit with the qualifier that two of them were against Chelsea and Manchester City – ultimately cost them a place in the Champions League for the season now coming. The margins can be narrow and a place in the Champions League is worth substantially north of £50m.

For Manchester United, the aspiration is always the summit, but a lot of ground has to be made up on Manchester City and Liverpool just to draw level with them, almost certainly too much for one summer to fix. But the 13 points required to claw back fourth place in the