Jose Mourinho is an obvious escape route - if United were brave they’d make Ryan Giggs manager

According to newspaper reports, Jose Mourinho has told friends he is going to be appointed Manchester United manager in the summer. Of course we can dismiss this as entirely speculative. Friends, after all, is generally newspaper code for the cabbie who brought the bloke doing shifts on the news desk into the office. But in this instance, it figures. This is a job we know Mourinho has long coveted, one which would give him the opportunity to re-establish a reputation temporarily damaged by recent events at Chelsea. And it would suit United’s beleaguered executive vice chairman Ed Woodward to sign up a proper counterweight to Pep Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp as they are installed in the dug outs of his club’s two biggest rivals.

Though any questions put to the current incumbent Louis Van Gaal on the subject are greeted with a curled lip and a snarl, the club have not denied that contact has been opened up. Mourinho’s agent Jorge Mendes – a close confidant of Woodward and a regular visitor to the Old Trafford directors’ box – is well placed to act as kingmaker. The truth is, of all the rumours swooshing around football this is the one which has most substance. Everything about this makes sense.

The question United fans should ask themselves is this: if it is a matter of "when" not "if", what will Mourinho do for them? Of this there can be no denial: there is no-one around better placed to produce immediate success than him. His record is second to none. He knows how to win. Plus he will be hugely motivated, both to prove Chelsea this season was but a blip on his CV and more pressingly by the close proximity of his long-time enemy Guardiola, the creature of the Barcelona establishment he loathes. After the turgid reverse gear of the Van Gaal era, he offers if not a return to unfettered attack, then at least the promise of silverware. And there is nothing that alters the perspective like a few trophies in the cabinet.

And yet hiring Mourinho would do nothing to address this significant issue about the club: what is United about? Under Sir Alex Ferguson there was no escaping its identity. This was a club founded on the promotion of its own youth products, encouraged to play in a vibrant, exciting, progressive manner. It didn’t always work. Not even the rosy hue of nostalgia can suggest every United game under Ferguson was a paragon of attacking virtue. At times his United were dire. But even when they failed to hit the heights, you knew what they stood for. In the United mythology, Ferguson’s time was elided into that of Matt Busby, as if Wilf McGuinness, Frank O’Farrell, Dave Sexton, Tommy Doc and Ron Atkinson had never really happened. Ferguson was the embodiment of everything Busby tried to create. That was the United way: to provide entertainment for the working folk of Manchester.

However much the priorities in the boardroom may have departed from that central principle, under Ferguson it remained paramount. And, whatever his failure to produce vibrancy on the pitch, there is no doubt that Van Gaal – like David Moyes before him – has maintained the tradition of promotion from within. On Sunday at Stamford Bridge, he started with two academy graduates and had two more on the bench. Thus the record of naming at least one youth product in every first-team squad since October 1937 remains intact.

There is no way Mourinho will adhere to such a policy. He is a manager who believes solely in the here and now. Someone who could not find room in his team for a player as good as Ruben Loftus Cheek – who might, had he been playing under Mauricio Pochettino for instance, even now be as advanced in his playing development as Eric Dier and Dele Alli – is not going to trust Cameron Borthwick Jackson, never mind James Wilson.

Now there are some who say that record is the most minor of considerations, that what is important is winning trophies. And Mourinho will do that. There is a strength in that argument. Except this is Manchester United. What is the club about if it is not the pursuit of the values that set it apart? The brilliance in the appointments of Klopp and Guardiola is that they both absolutely tally with the traditions of their new employers. Both fit a plan as to where the club sees itself heading over the next decade. If Woodward believes hiring Mourinho will trump those pieces of recruitment he is wrong.

It is said that the Portuguese has made it clear he would be prepared to change if he were to land the Old Trafford job. That he would be less provocative, less belligerent, less inclined to pick fights, more of an ambassador. That he would bend to the United way. But that sounds like canny PR. He is too certain of his own methods, rightly too convinced in their legitimacy, to start to alter them simply to keep up with tradition. He is a man who finds personal motivation not from revering the past but from belittling it, in creating the sense when he walks into a club that before him all was chaos. He is not someone to conform to anyone else’s way of doing things.

Unless he suffers from chronic myopia, Woodward surely has reached the conclusion of many of his club’s supporters that Van Gaal is a manager way past his sell-by date, presiding over a dispiritingly ineffective playing regime. Surely change will come about in the summer – maybe even earlier if United fail to qualify for the Champions League. But if Woodward is brave he will not go down the obvious escape plan of hiring Mourinho. He will appoint someone absolutely steeped in the United way, someone who ended his brief stint as caretaker manager with a magnificent public endorsement of the necessity of promoting the traditions of the place. He will promote Ryan Giggs.

Sure there is no guarantee Giggs will be a success – though personally I am convinced he has the mix of steely inner strength and tactical nous required. Sure he might not offer the certainty that Mourinho would. But this is Manchester United. And at United, ultimately winning isn’t enough on its own. It is how you win that matters.

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