The Band-Aid has finally been ripped off at Old Trafford.

The Manchester United board took the very expensive step of firing manager Jose Mourinho on Tuesday after two-plus seasons of occasionally solid, but mostly disappointing and negative football.

The Red Devils currently sit sixth in the table, 11 points back of Chelsea for the final Champions League place and a whopping 19 adrift of leaders Liverpool, who put the nail in Mourinho’s coffin with a comprehensive 3-1 victory over United at Anfield on Sunday.

While United remains alive in the Champions League – a date with French champions Paris-Saint Germain in the knockout round beckons – and have yet to begin their FA Cup campaign, it’s very difficult to not consider the current season a lost one.

The title is out of reach, meaning that the 20-time English champions will have missed out on top spot in the top flight for the sixth consecutive season, their longest drought of the Premier League era. The last time the club won the title was in 2013, the final year of the legendary Sir Alex Ferguson reign over the club. Mourinho is the third manager fired by the club in the six seasons after Fergie’s departure.

Where did it all go wrong for Mourinho? The familiar patterns of the end days of a Mourinho tenure were playing out at Old Trafford, so the fact that he was sacked shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Only the timing of the firing might have raised a couple of eyebrows.

There was the feuding with star players. Like Cristiano Ronaldo at Real Madrid and Eden Hazard at Chelsea, Mourinho was embroiled in a long-simmering row with Paul Pogba at United. Having called the World Cup-winning France international “a virus” earlier this month, Pogba was a spectator at Anfield, an unused substitute in the loss.

There is no denying that United’s record signing has only shown glimpses of the quality that he put on display at Juventus regularly since his return to Old Trafford, but it became clear that Mourinho wasn’t going to be the manager to get the best out of Pogba. The likes of Luke Shaw, Anthony Martial, Antonio Valencia and Eric Bailly have also been targets of Mourinho’s ire over his 30 months in charge.

There was the public finger-pointing at chairman Ed Woodward and the board for denying Mourinho the signings that he wanted.

“A football team is not just about spending the money,” Mourinho said before the Liverpool match. “A football team is like a house, too; a house is not just about buying the furniture. You have to do work in the house and when the house is ready, then you buy the furniture, you spend money on the best possible furniture and then you are ready to live in an amazing house.”

But Mourinho did spend money. In his five transfer windows with United, the team posted a total net expenditure of £307.25 million on players including Pogba, Romelu Lukaku, Alexis Sanchez, Fred and Victor Lindelof. To put that in comparison with Jurgen Klopp at Anfield, Liverpool’s net expenditure for the same period is £121.9 million. While Liverpool spent more money than United did (£411.55 million to £392.55m) on the likes of Alisson, Virgil van Dijk and Naby Keita, the Reds also funded a significant amount of that through sales (£289.65 million), including Philippe Coutinho to Barcelona and Christian Benteke and Mamadou Sakho to Crystal Palace.

Still, Mourinho wanted more. Despite spending a combined £65 million on Bailly and Lindelof, Mourinho was insistent on bringing in another centre-back with the club regularly attached to Tottenham’s Toby Alderweireld and Leicester’s Harry Maguire. Woodward and the board simply wouldn’t back the outlay and left Mourinho to use his incumbent choices. Perhaps the fact that United has conceded 28 goals thus far in 2018-19 – already matching the entire number of goals conceded a year ago – is vindication for Mourinho’s position, but it’s difficult to blame the board when it comes to the paltry return received thus far from his previous buys.

Mourinho’s tenure at Old Trafford will be looked back on as a regrettable one and will throw a great deal of doubt on Mourinho’s ability to get the job done in the modern game. One of world football’s most bombastic personalities couldn’t live up to his self-styled hype on the biggest stage.

He didn’t bring United a league title like he did at Porto, Chelsea, Real and Inter. He didn’t bring the Red Devils a Champions League crown like he did at Porto and Inter. But he won trophies like he always does. United won both the League Cup and the Europa League title in Mourinho’s first year in charge of the team. They are two more trophies than Klopp has won at Liverpool or Mauricio Pochettino at Spurs and they were the first silverware claimed by United in the post-Fergie era. Yet it’s impossible to wonder if Mourinho’s best-before date when it comes to Europe’s biggest clubs has long passed.

So what’s next for United?

The club announced on Tuesday that it will appoint an external caretaker manager until the end of the season and that tells us a couple of things. Firstly and most obviously, the job will not go to assistant manager Michael Carrick or to academy director Nicky Butt. While highly regarded club legends, the job would simply be above their nascent managerial abilities.

But it’s not really about Carrick or Butt when it comes to why this decision is interesting. In waiting until the end of the season to name a permanent manager, United is basically indicating that the man they want in charge at Old Trafford currently has a job elsewhere. That would seemingly rule out the likes of Zinedine Zidane, Leonardo Jardim and Antonio Conte, all of whom are without jobs right now and could take the reins tomorrow.

It’s no secret that the club has long admired Pochettino and – like Real before them – will undoubtedly make overtures towards the Argentine at season’s end. But while United is arguably the biggest club in the world, why would Pochettino want to leave Spurs, a club loaded with young talent and (almost) guaranteed Champions League football next season?

On top of that, Spurs chairman Daniel Levy has notoriously played hardball with United over the years when it comes to transfer dealings (the Dimitar Berbatov negotiations were especially contentious), so you can be sure that would be the same case for a manager.

Atletico’s Diego Simeone has been considered among Europe’s best managers for the better part of his seven-year tenure with the club and broke up the Real/Barca duopoly atop La Liga in claiming the league title in 2014. But would the legendary Argentina hardman be a fit at Old Trafford? Unlikely. If fans didn’t care much for Mourinho’s tactics, they wouldn’t like Simeone’s efficient, but oftentimes boring, style.

Could Massimiliano Allegri be tempted to make the jump to the Premier League? Having been attached to vacancies at Chelsea and Arsenal in the past, the Italian has won four Scudetti on the trot with Juve and is on track for a fifth to go along with the title won at Milan in 2011. Still, with the Bianconeri bringing in Ronaldo this past summer to add to their already talented core, it wouldn’t be easy for Allegri to walk away from a perennial Champions League contender, especially when it’s the one trophy to have eluded him thus far.

What about a younger name who could grow into the job? Bournemouth’s Eddie Howe, Everton’s Marco Silva and 31-year-old Hoffenheim wunderkind Julian Nagelsmann certainly fit that bill and it would be surprising if United didn’t have at least an exploratory look in their respective directions. Yet with three managers in the six years since Fergie’s departure, United can ill-afford another misstep here and might shy away from a relatively unproven commodity.

Where the Red Devils will ultimately turn remains to be seen, but what about the immediate future?

The current odds-on favourites to become the caretaker boss are former players in Laurent Blanc and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer.

Blanc, 53, spent the last two years of his playing career at Old Trafford, retiring after a Premier League title win in 2003. As a manager, Blanc has four Ligue 1 titles under his belt (one with Bordeaux and three with PSG) and was in charge of France for Euro 2012. He’s managed players with big egos and has gotten the best out of the likes of Edinson Cavani, Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Javier Pastore, so he certainly wouldn’t be in over his head.

An Old Trafford icon, Solskjaer, 45, spent 11 seasons with United and famously scored the Champions League-winning goal in extra time over Bayern Munich in 1999. His appointment would be welcomed by a wave of nostalgia for the dominant days of the 2000s when Solskjaer starred as a dependable super sub before joining the coaching ranks at the club in 2008 with the reserve team.

Unlike Blanc, “The Baby-faced Assassin” is currently employed with Molde in his native Norway, so it would take a buyout to secure his services (or, perhaps, a creative kind of loan deal since the Norwegian Eliteserien is currently in its offseason until March). But it’s a lack of managerial experience (prior to Molde, his only senior team management was with Cardiff City in 2014 when they were relegated) that takes Solskjaer out of consideration for the permanent role and the temporary nature of the United vacancy might make the former Norway international think twice about the appointment, even with his history.

As for right now, it will be Carrick who leads the team in training in the next few days. The club says it would like to have a manager in place prior to Saturday’s trip to Wales for a date with Cardiff City. The new manager will be forced to hit the ground running with the congested fixture schedule over the Christmas period. United will play five times in the next two weeks. After Cardiff, the Red Devils will take on Huddersfield Town on Boxing Day and Bournemouth on Dec. 30, before heading to Newcastle on Jan. 2. Three days later, their FA Cup campaign kicks off at home against Championship side Reading.

No matter how everything shakes out, interesting days are ahead at the Theatre of Dreams.