Around the M60 motorway from the city turn right and soon left. Then it's the long way to Carrington. Past the new building that has undoubtedly not been sold with a view of the power station according to specification, past the horses that take shelter under the covers when they really need rubber boots and on to the smallest sign and the man in the hut at the barrier. Welcome to Manchester United.
It's always surprising how bleak the Carrington Training Center can feel from the outside. The antithesis of what traditionally lay within. A place of hopes and dreams, of fire and light, but with all the outward charm of a nuclear bunker.
That was of course the way Sir Alex Ferguson meant it. A place designed 25 years ago to keep the world out and secrets in. It worked to an extent, but even Ferguson – United's most recent title-winning manager – couldn't stop time or protect the club he loved from reality and cruelty. and inevitabilities of sport.
So here we were again on this dark, wet, dreary lunchtime in Manchester. Here we did this dance for the sixth time since Ferguson left in the summer of 2013. Another new manager. Looking for answers, looking for solutions and, just maybe, starting that long struggle back towards competitive relevance.
Ferguson was asked for advice by the last Portuguese manager to work at United, Jose Mourinho. “Take an umbrella,” was his response. Well, this was a day where it felt like you might need two. And through the rain and the hanging fog that had quickly taken over a morning of freezing frost, walked Ruben Amorim, 39 years old and with a gait and a presence and a charm and facial expression that seemed to suggest that United might have found someone who knows what he does.
But, as Amorim himself wanted to remind us, United have used the card for the past eleven years and for some reason it hasn't worked. He's just the last to wear the uniform, the last to try.
David Moyes, Louis van Gaal, Mourinho, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, Erik ten Hag. United, in their various modern guises, have tried every trick as they sought to recapture all that was so quickly lost, recruiting based on a bag of principles and ideas so mixed that it wouldn't look out of place at the pastry shop from Woolworths.
One for the long term. The great theorist. The one with a bomb in his briefcase. The house boy. The one with an upward curve. And they all failed. No matter how hard they tried to rewrite their own stories, they all failed. And as they did so, a great football club slipped further and further away from what it should be.
So now we are here. Amorim didn't just walk into a media room on Friday or onto a training field for the first time on Monday. No, he walked into a vacuum, a space stripped of all his power, his faith, his attitude, his confidence.
This is what prolonged failure does in football. It changes people and places and this is what a decade of drift has delivered at Manchester United. This is what Amorim must solve. The Portuguese's job is not to repair holes in the roof. No, if this is to succeed, it will require a renovation from the ground up. United needs to be rebuilt, overhauled and repurposed. Better players, better coaching, better cultures.
And Amorim was impressive on all of that on Friday. He spoke a bit like a man who has already worked it out in a way that Ten Hag never quite did. Some of United's modern shortcomings are nuanced and complex. They need some slow loosening.
Others are very obvious and Amorim was happy to bring a few to the table right away. Would he have let Marcus Rashford and Casemiro go to New York last weekend? Unlikely, he hinted. Common sense, that. And then there was football.
“I think we lose the ball too often,” Amorim said. 'We have to keep the ball. We have to get better at running backs. I think that's clear to everyone.'
On the one hand it was the half-time team talk of the Sunday League. Keep the ball and run more. On the other hand, it will have been greeted by thousands of exasperated United supporters with the hallelujah usually reserved for the parting of the seas.
United have let down a number of their managers over the years. Old Trafford's recruitment model is full of holes. Sir Jim Ratcliffe and his Ineos team may be able to solve that. We'll see. Likewise, managers like Ten Hag and others seemed blind to some of the game's most fundamental principles. This is a big job and it's true that it does things to people. Moyes has visibly shrunk. For Van Gaal, it was the period of his career that cruelly told him that even the best eventually see the magic dust slip through their fingers.
What this club needs most of all now is clarity of thought from the manager's office. It needs authority, consistency and strategy. How does modern United play? It's not a trick question. We don't know anymore.
Amorim likes to go with a back three and he will do so in Ipswich when he begins his journey in red on Sunday. But United's problems are not limited to formations or intricate details.
A lot is changing in the world of modern football. Sky Sports spoke to Amorim for the first time on Friday and sent former United captain Gary Neville for the interview. During Amorim's written press conference, a writer and friend of Ratcliffe hovered in the back.
A book is in the making about Ineos' time at the club. Ratcliffe doesn't like many things, it seems. But he has no problem with attention or profile.
At the same time, much of our sport remains exactly the same and is unaffected by the noise and frippery that can sometimes feel a little more important than it actually is. Ten Hag's United, for example, fell apart due to a simple inability to appreciate fundamental football principles.
“As a coach you have to choose to play one way or another,” Amorim said. 'I always choose 100 percent my way. I choose to take a little risk.
'I believe so much in the way I play. The players will believe it too. There is no second way.
'Maybe you see the starting XI on Sunday and you don't feel much change, but you will see it in the match.
'I think we need to improve the understanding of the game. I know it's a different way of playing, but we have to improve the physical aspect of the team.
'I'm a bit of a dreamer and I believe in myself and in the club. We have the same idea, the same mentality, so that can help.
'But I also really believe in the players. I know you don't believe much in these players. But I believe a lot.
'There is room for improvement. You think it's not possible, I think it's possible. We'll see eventually.'
The best managers and coaches are intuitive. Amorim has a good reputation for managing people, albeit in a three-team league. On Friday he claimed he can judge a player's mood just by watching him walk out for a warm-up.
However, his CV contains nothing about water and wine. If he thinks this United side has enough talent for the top four, he may be right. If he's more ambitious than that, he might as well try bottling smoke.
He has put together his own staff. Throwing Ruud van Nistelrooy overboard was smart. And Amorim and his group of coaches will know what they see. Their discussions over tea in their current Lowry Hotel base and during their so far unfettered walks through the city center (which won't last long) will no doubt have included some annoyance at how a wealthy Premier League club can spend so much money so poorly . .
There is talk of a move for Sporting Lisbon striker Viktor Gyokeres. Other printed stories speak of a limited budget. Who knows? But what would a move from another goalscorer say about the two – Rasmus Hojlund and Joshua Zirkzee – bought for a total of £106 million over the past two summers?
These are just some of the threads that need to be untangled at Old Trafford. They say that Ten Hag was too involved in all this and got his way too often. Much of the evidence of that can be found at the ends of United's first-team pool. On Friday, Amorim indicated that he also wants to be at the center of the recruitment conversations, and that there was little to criticize in his logic.
“Everyone has to work together and for that we have to improve the recruitment process,” he said. 'But I have to have a strong position in that, because I am the coach.
'I know how to play, so I think it's all good, but the final word has to be up to the manager. Not only because it is your right, but also your responsibility. Because in the end the result is for me.
'I have to understand the league – that's important – and when everything is aligned, we can buy and sell players.
'I'm saying here that this is not the last word (I should have), but I have a great responsibility in choosing players because this is something that has to be done this way.
'I'm the manager, the head coach, so I have to choose the players.'
Having already received a good luck text message from Mourinho, Amorim was asked to briefly look back on the time he came to visit his country's great football icon at United eight years ago. He played along, while recognizing that both he and the club are different now.
And that is one of the great mysteries and truths of United's continued decline. It's hard to say exactly what they are. Certainly a very big club. One with enormous pulling power and power. But diminished so immeasurably by shortcomings associated with the actual football.
This is what we mean when we say Amorim is a solution that needs to start at the ground floor. It wasn't that long ago that former boss Ed Woodward told people that United's time would come again once the dynasties of Jurgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola at Liverpool and Manchester City were over.
Well, Arne Slot's Liverpool are top of the Premier League and Guardiola has just extended his contract with Etihad. Whether you view City's timing of that announcement as coincidental probably depends on how you view life, but what is clear is that if United want to be successful again, they won't do it by waiting for others to fall. They have to stand up.
When Mourinho first addressed the media at United, he used the word 'I' 91 times. Van Gaal warned of conflicting commercial and sporting interests. Ten Hag said he hoped to overthrow the Liverpool/City duopoly. Solskjaer said he had asked Ferguson for advice.
As for Moyes – the very first to try this – he sat behind a press conference table in June 2013 and said the word success might as well be tattooed on the United crest. Not for long. That conversation took place at Old Trafford. In a larger room. In the presence of more people. United did things with their chests out at the time.
Now the club's grand stadium stands as a metaphor for their troubles, overtaken and surpassed by others who have thought smarter, acted faster and spent more wisely.
The plan to rebuild that fading monument is still in the grass. Implementation will take several years.
Amorim's repurposing of a football team needs to happen at a much faster pace.
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