Manchester United's next transfer window relies on priority shift they can make this week

Some Manchester United fans travelling to Bucharest via Frankfurt on Wednesday morning were surprised to find they were sharing the second leg of the journey with Germany's national rugby team.

The unheralded part-timers are in action in Bucharest on Friday, taking on Romania at the Rugby Europe Championship. The Six Nations kicks off this weekend and dominates the rugby landscape. The second-tier tournament isn't just shadowed by weekend action in Paris, Edinburgh and Dublin. It is almost invisible by contrast.

The United squad that landed at the city's Henri Coanda International Airport around eight hours later don't have much in common with the German rugby team, apart from a spot in their sport's B-grade European competition. German rugby is punching at its weight, but United know they should really have been part of the fun in the Champions League last night.

The Europa League isn't as out of sight as the Rugby Europe Championship. It's still a big(ish) deal. The prize for winning it also includes promotion and for Ruben Amorim and his squad, that has to be the target for the rest of this season.

Sunday's scrappy Premier League win at Fulham all but made sure United won't be dragged into a relegation battle, a sentence nobody expected to be writing at the start of the season. But they are 12th in the league, and even with the bonus of fifth place looking set fair for the Champions League, it is a pipe dream given they are a dozen points adrift of Newcastle in that position.

Any kind of European football next season looks out of reach in the league. That's what happens when you get to the end of January without stringing together two successive Premier League victories. So if United fans are to need those passports