Manchester United, Chelsea and Liverpool are all suffering from the plague of the faceless sporting director - when will any of these all-powerful hidden figures take responsibility for their failures?

The shockwaves of the announcement were still reverberating when ‘the guidance’, as some like to call it, started to trickle out of Old Trafford.

Ruben Amorim, according to the messaging, was emotionally immature. Other words in what many would regard as a character assassination that popped out, as brightly as flares fired in the death of night, were him being ‘inexperienced’ and ‘inflexible’.