What’s next for Manchester United and Jose Mourinho?

Yesterday, Jose Mourinho was manager of Manchester United. Today, he is not. And now that football’s latest high-profile divorce is almost a day old, it’s probably time to take stock of just where everybody involved goes from here.

Manchester United are the biggest club in the world, at least according to Manchester United, and so where other clubs look for one manager, they look for two.

The first is a caretaker to, err, take care of the team for the rest of the season. Michael Carrick doesn’t fancy it, apparently. This caretaker must, apparently, be somebody that is a part of United’s history, somebody who gets it, somebody who can bring back a bit of ambition, good feeling, and on-field elan.

The problem is, none of the ex-United managers knocking around have particularly persuasive records. The favourite is Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, who was excellent in his first spell at Molde, but flopped entirely in his brief time with Cardiff City. He — along with a couple of wiser, older heads — could even be in place before the end of the week, unless the UK press pack have completely lost the run of their sources.

He’s probably the best of the options, given the criteria. Among those who are out of work, there are the likes of Jaap Stam, Roy Keane, Steve Bruce, Mark Hughes, and Mike Phelan ... none of which are names that really scream out for appointment. Carlos Queiroz is about to lead Iran to the Asian Cup. And then there’s Laurent Blanc, who has been hanging around looking for another gig for some time now. It’d be a surprise if he fancies being a stopgap.

While Solskjaer (or whoever) gets the next six months, the club will be scurrying around in the background trying to find somebody for the next six years.

Within the Premier League, the obvious candidate is Mauricio Pochettino, who satisfies every single criteria for becoming United manager. He plays attractive, ambitious, attacking football, he makes young players better, he wins ... well, okay, he hasn’t actually won anything yet. That’s a sticking point.

Another sticking point: Would he want to leave Spurs for United? His current club sit 13 points above United, and while Spurs may not have anywhere near as much money, they certainly spend it a hell of a lot better. He’d be jumping from one of the best-run clubs in the country to one of the strangest.

And he’d miss out on a shiny new stadium, too. Spurs, already far better than when they arrived, might just about be in position to afford him a real crack at things. Would he want to miss that?

And even if he does decide to leave Spurs, would he choose United? We can assume he’d be highly popular, and Florentino Perez is usually looking for a future ex-manager of Real Madrid.

In any case, whether United conceive of their next manager in terms of attributes (Pochettino the favourite here) or look for trophies (Zinedine Zidane, maybe? Antonio Conte?), whether they look to a relative veteran (Max Allegri?) or an up-and-comer (Leonardo Jardim?), there is the broader state of the club to consider. Great managers are rare. Great managers that can succeed without a well-organised club behind them might not exist at all.

Alex Ferguson used to advise his players, on their move into management, to choose a club on the basis of its chairperson. Nowadays, managers might take a broader view, but the principle is the same: make sure the structure is sound. Is there a director of football? What does the scouting department look like? Who is signing off on signings? And so on and so forth.

There is much that is still attractive about the United job — the name, the history, the whopping wage packet — but they don’t look like a well-run club, and they haven’t for a while. According to Sky Sports News, United are moving towards appointing a technical director for the first time, which means that anybody who comes in won’t be entirely dependent on the whims and wishes of Ed Woodward. That ought to help, but the job is still a risk for whoever takes it.

The last time Jose Mourinho was sacked midway through a season, by Chelsea, he was wildly underperforming with a strong squad that he had almost totally alienated, and he looked, frankly, knackered to the point of irrelevance. All very familiar. But then just a few months later, he was offered the Manchester United job.

Something similar seems unlikely this time, and not just because almost every other big club in the world is run by more sensible people than United. Indeed, we can probably say that Mourinho is done as an elite manager in the Premier League: his style has been found out, and his substance has almost entirely gone.

Elsewhere, he perhaps commands more clout. There were stories earlier in the season linking him to a return to Real Madrid, on the basis that Florentino Perez felt Real Madrid’s current squad could do with a little of Mourinho’s tough love. That came to little, but at least one of the UK papers is reporting that the interest remains.

Perhaps there’s a new kind of managerial consultancy role for him. Something that plays to Mourinho’s strengths, with a pitch like:

Have your expensively assembled squad of pampered prima donnas been slacking off? Have they forced you to sack a decent manager? Why not give them a few months of The Mourinho Treatment — wide-ranging misery guaranteed!

Wages are not refundable. You may be liable for severance pay. The performance of your team may go down as well as up. Trophies not guaranteed.

Working on the principle that he probably quite fancies proving the universe wrong, I’d predict another tilt at club management somewhere. Presumably, Mourinho still has friends at Internazionale, and Mourinho vs. Juventus sounds like a fun adventure for all the family in an Alien vs. Predator kind of way.

Alternatively, there’s international football. Rather neatly, the international game solves many of the problems that Late Mourinho has run into. No fights over transfers, no constant agitation on the training ground. A slower, more meditative role. And then the chance to win the World Cup. That truly would show everybody.

But whatever he does, we can all hope that he takes his time, and that he takes a long holiday before any of it. Over the last season and a half, it’s been exhausting to even look at Mourinho. There never has been a man so obviously in need of a break.