John Murtough is being proven right over his biggest decision at Manchester United

However bad it has got at Manchester United this season, it has always been worse at Chelsea.

The Premier League was lacking a figure of fun when Ed Woodward resigned two years ago and Todd Boehly is a worthy successor. Chelsea spent more than £1billion on players over three transfer windows and are in the bottom half of the table.

For the Fulham game last month, Chelsea arranged for six identically dressed actors to stand behind the home dugout in a shameless publicity stunt to plug the new film Argylle.

“Have you seen any of those viral videos of wildly extravagant Gender Reveals where things go terribly wrong?” wrote the venerable film critic Richard Roeper. “That’s pretty much how I felt watching Argylle.” The critically savaged Argylle was made for $200million, so that is another expensive dud Chelsea have damaged.

Wolves, skint and deprived of their best playing assets last season, vanquished Chelsea 4-2 on Sunday. They were unbeaten in seven games before United outclassed them for 60 minutes at Molineux.

That victory may be the turning point in United’s season, for their enterprising football as much as the dramatic denouement. Wolves have done the double over Chelsea this term and beaten Manchester City and Tottenham on their own patch.

Chelsea are worse than United at almost everything bar their exquisite catering. Moises Caicedo and Enzo Fernandez almost cost a quarter of a billion between them. Caicedo was like Patrick Vieira at Brighton. Now he resembles Eric Djemba-Djemba.

Stamford Bridge is nearly half the size of Old Trafford and more dated and Thiago Silva’s wife is undermining the manager.

And Mauricio Pochettino is perhaps less than the sum of his parts. Chelsea supporters barracked the players after their meek defeat at United nine weeks ago and reaching the League Cup final has not sweetened the sour mood.

Pochettino’s Tottenham history will be used as a stick to beat him with eventually. More relevantly, Pochettino has been in decline for five years.

Tottenham’s fortuitous and flukey run to the Champions League final in 2019 masked dismal domestic form of nine defeats between January and May. Tottenham’s form was so underwhelming Ole Gunnar Solskjaer moved in permanently to the manager’s office at Carrington.

Jose Mourinho replaced Pochettino at Tottenham and plenty of Chelsea supporters would welcome a repeat this week. Mourinho’s name was chanted against Wolves and he still owns a London property that is two-and-a-half miles away from Stamford Bridge.

Of the three jobs Pochettino was destined to walk into after Tottenham, he opted for the most uninspiring in Paris Saint-Germain. United did not have the nerve to follow through with tentative enquiries and Real Madrid had welcomed back Zinedine Zidane.

Pochettino joined PSG after 13 months out of work. Lille pipped PSG to the post to end their Ligue 1 monopoly and though Pochettino eventually completed a clean sweep of the domestic honours, the achievements were comme ci, comme ça.

Senior members of the United dressing room preferred Pochettino to Ten Hag. His alliance with the Anglo contingent in the Southampton and Tottenham dressing rooms was viewed as a plus and he had the Premier League pedigree.

He also assembled a sterling Tottenham team: Lloris, Walker, Alderweireld, Vertonghen, Rose, Dier, Dembele, Alli, Eriksen, Son, Kane. United enquired about signing at least five of them and Sir Alex Ferguson urged Mourinho to buy Alli.

Pochettino pined for the United job. He had Ferguson’s endorsement and there were at least four openings where, had United been more bullish and decisive, Pochettino would have finally walked to the home dugout at Old Trafford.

Yet come March 2022, United’s favoured candidate was Ten Hag. John Murtough was nattering with Ten Hag’s agent Kees Vos in the Old Trafford directors’ box on Sunday and, however much longer he remains at the club, Ten Hag is his legacy. Murtough is proof there are figures at United capable of due diligence.

Pochettino and Ten Hag departed the capitals of France and the Netherlands that summer and their careers have gone in opposite directions.

During another year of waiting for Pochettino, Ten Hag presided over only the second successful season United have enjoyed since Ferguson headed upstairs in 2013. When Chelsea sacked Thomas Tuchel in September 2022, they plumped for Potter, not Pochettino.

Ten Hag has emerged from a chastening five months at United and is not out of the woods but last week was vindication. United demonstrated how clinically and efficiently they can play with their strongest players all available and they have plundered 11 goals in the last three games. They did not break double figures in the previous 10.

Watching Pochettino mutter through uninspiring press conferences, there are shades of Mourinho during his second stint at Chelsea. There were times when he looked beaten in victory on the touchline. The assumption had been if he ever returned to England it would be to United – the job he wanted.

If Pochettino had it his way, he would be sharing a glass of red with Ferguson in the directors’ lounge every fortnight en route to a post-match press conference room. He would probably prefer to be at Tottenham’s Enfield training base rather than Cobham.

Things are better at Tottenham and United are getting better. Chelsea are getting worse.