Here Manchester United go again, taking the Two Ronnies route to hiring a new boss | Jonathan Wilson

Manchester United have appointed Mauricio Pochettino as their new manager, continuing a pattern of hiring former stars who are past their peak.

The club has repeatedly chosen managers who succeeded years ago rather than those currently thriving, a strategy that has failed to deliver sustained success since Sir Alex Ferguson retired.

This latest appointment follows a series of high-profile hires, including José Mourinho, Louis van Gaal, and Erik ten Hag, all of whom struggled to maintain the club's high standards.

The Guardian has noted that the club seems continually to be answering not the question of who would be the best available manager now, but who might have been the best available manager a few years ago.

The pattern of hiring fading legends

The problem with football is that it never sits still. What was true once isn’t necessarily true now. What is true now won’t necessarily be true in a season or two’s time.

The key to good recruitment is identifying to what extent somebody’s past success was contingent on their environment, and how they may behave in a different circumstances.

Only four managers have won the English league title with more than one club, highlighting the difficulty of replicating past glories.

The possibility of José Mourinho becoming manager of United was first raised as Sir Alex Ferguson retired in 2013.

By the time Mourinho finally took the United job in 2016, events in his final few months at Stamford Bridge had undermined him. He seemed weary and fractious, the tactical doubts raised in his final year at Madrid had proliferated and there was a growing sense his methods did not quite work with elite modern players.

There was a lot of talk about him as a guaranteed winner, but there’s no such thing in football. Very few managers last more than a decade at the very top.

It’s easy to see why a board would have looked at his list of honours and been impressed, but United were appointing a manager on the way down.

Louis van Gaal was 62 when he took the reins at United, enjoying a second coming after winning the Dutch title with AZ Alkmaar and an impressive 2014 World Cup campaign with the Netherlands.

Perhaps the comparison isn’t fair in that he arrived as an elder statesman; nobody, other than perhaps Van Gaal, thought he would be a long-term appointment.

But the idea he would bring calm after a period of turbulence was to ignore everything he had previously done. Van Gaal is many things but he is not a calming presence.

But again, the timing felt wrong. It could never have worked given he was preparing a side for the World Cup, but had he come in to replace Ferguson in 2013, as a hugely respected figure with a robust self-belief that was never going to care about breaking Fergusonian taboos, he might have been the man to see United through the awkward transition.

The failed search for rising stars

Erik ten Hag and Ruben Amorim were supposed to be the coming men, managers identified on the way up. Both seemed to make sense.

Ten Hag’s Ajax had played astonishing football, had beaten Juventus and Real Madrid thrillingly in the Champions League, had come within Lucas Moura’s implausible hat-trick of a Champions League final.

Amorim had ended Sporting’s 19-year title drought.

But it turned out they weren’t right. Ten Hag, skilfully as he managed Cristiano Ronaldo’s exit, seemed overawed by the job; Amorim’s insistence on playing 3-4-2-1 with a squad ill-equipped to play that way was one of the reasons Dan Ashworth expressed reservations, leading to his departure as sporting director.

It is possible, of course, maybe by this point even likely, that there is no right answer, that the mess United are in is insoluble, Old Trafford a meat grinder that will keep chewing up managerial reputations in perpetuity.

But United’s board’s attempts to identify the rising star have been no more successful than their habit of appointing fading legends.

The latest appointment and its implications

Which brings us to Mauricio Pochettino. He has done remarkable things: he may not yet have won trophies in England but he effected such an extraordinary transformation at Tottenham that it seemed not unreasonable they should be part of the Super League project.

He found things difficult at Paris Saint-Germain and Chelsea, but most people do. A last-16 exit at a home World Cup with the USA was about par.

The question, now he is 54, is whether the sense of drift about his career is an unfortunate and temporary state, or evidence that he is not quite what he was.

Perhaps the United job will revitalise him and he will revitalise them. But this feels like another appointment that would have been better made a few years ago; that United, once again, are answering the previous question.