Louis van Gaal exposed: Manager's arrogance can't mask deep failings at Manchester United

The temptation is to regard the superstar managers as omnipotent, omniscient figures. When one believes his ideas are so significant they can be termed a philosophy, he actively encourages the idea he is a mastermind with a masterplan. Louis van Gaal is comfortable with the billing. The well-sourced reports that Manchester United’s hierarchy consider him a “genius” only seem to echo the Dutchman’s own thoughts.

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Then consider the manner of United’s Champions League exit in Wolfsburg. One of the game’s supposed great theorists ended up with Chris Smalling as an emergency striker and sideways passing abandoned in favour of the long ball. A micro-manager who often shows an acute attention to detail ended up with two full-backs, Cameron Borthwick-Jackson and Guillermo Varela, each making his second appearance for the club and a forgotten, unwanted midfielder, Nick Powell, playing his first game for 16 months.

Two World Cup and Champions League winners, Bastian Schweinsteiger and Juan Mata, were replaced in the most important game of Van Gaal’s reign. Injuries can be cited, but this shambles was a failure of planning on a colossal, costly scale. He left his squad short-staffed in the final third.

If only United could have called upon some of the players Van Gaal has alienated or exiled, performers of the calibre of Angel Di Maria or Javier Hernandez. Instead, when the 64-year-old turned to his bench, his preferred attacking option was Powell, a man whose last first-team goal came 20 months ago in the Championship. Astonishingly, he was sent on for Mata.

It rendered it all the more remarkable that United are apparently contemplating trying to persuade Van Gaal to postpone his retirement and extend his contract. Because, half-way through his three-year stay at Old Trafford, he can count himself fortunate to have such forgiving employers.

Trigger-happy chairmen and chief executives are rightly criticised and loyalty has been a leitmotif at Old Trafford over the years, but there is something strange about such an acceptance of mediocrity. The chorus of dissent from United’s ex-players in the media, some of whom number Van Gaal’s assistant manager Ryan Giggs among their close friends, and the hints of unhappiness from a swathe of supporters should give a truer indication of the job he is doing. To finish third in a substandard Champions League group is damning.

There was long a theory that the time to take helm at Old Trafford was not when Sir Alex Ferguson retired, but as the successor to his replacement. So it has proved, just not quite in the way anticipated. United’s powerbrokers appear to deem the David Moyes era so wretched that they are grateful for Van Gaal’s restorative powers.

Yet Moyes took United considerably further in both the Champions League and the Capital One Cup. His team were deemed dull but averaged more goals per league game than Van Gaal’s. The Dutchman’s feat lay in earning an invitation to the private party of the Champions League, but that has been revoked. It was, in any case, a feat that was exaggerated, one that was facilitated by Liverpool’s swift decline, secured by a brilliant goalkeeper, in David de Gea, and in effect purchased after a £152 million spending spree. His team only procured six more points than Moyes’ men. That scarcely qualifies as achievement.

Assuming Anthony Martial’s add-ons are triggered, Van Gaal’s outlay now stands at £288 million. His team took one point from a possible six against PSV Eindhoven, whose summer spending over the same period is less than the sum they banked from United for Memphis Depay alone.

“Luckily, in football money isn't everything,” said Wolfsburg manager Dieter Hecking on Monday. It certainly isn’t where Van Gaal’s United are concerned. They can spend outlandish sums while looking less than the sum of their parts. They can draw 0-0 five times in 10 games. Depay hints at their problems. Over a season and a half under the 64-year-old, no attacking player has truly flourished. Van Gaal has described Depay as the greatest talent of his generation and benched him for Jesse Lingard, a veteran of four loan spells in the Championship.

Martial, like Di Maria, was at his most productive before lengthy exposure to Van Gaal’s methods. Robin van Persie and Wayne Rooney have seen their goal returns deteriorate. Radamel Falcao declined faster than either. Mata has had his moments, without really being trusted. Adnan Januzaj and James Wilson, rare causes for optimism in 2013-14, have been banished, ostensibly to gain experience. Hernandez, like Nani, Shinji Kagawa and Danny Welbeck, was bombed out.

The common denominator is Van Gaal: for different reasons, none has really delivered for him. Limited players who have followed orders, such as Lingard, Ashley Young and Marouane Fellaini, have come closest to realising their potential in the final third. Yet extracting more than expected from each would be more commendable from a manager of a cash-strapped, mid-table club.

And an attacking dullness is more forgivable if it is aligned with success. Indeed, the possibility still exists that United will bore their way to glory in a title race that only Leicester really seem to want to win. Yet at the moment Van Gaal does not just compare unfavourably with the managerial knights, Sir Matt Busby and Ferguson, who won trophies with such attacking elan that they converted millions to the cause, but to Tommy Docherty and Ron Atkinson, nearly men who at least offered entertainment.

Under Van Gaal, United’s numerous sideways passes provide a metaphor for a team that should be going forward but seems to lack the acceleration, the ambition and the attacking impetus the club’s traditions require. Throughout it all, Van Gaal appears convinced they are heading in the right direction, beliefs his boardroom backers apparently share. Such industrial quantities of confidence may help shore up his position, but they lead to the familiar accusations of arrogance.

For arrogance to be justified, you have to excel - and Van Gaal has done so all too rarely in his time at United.