It’s only a few weeks ago that a highly placed source on the Manchester United board was telling journalists that Louis van Gaal was a “genius manager” who was welcome to stay at Manchester United for as long as he wanted to.

Since then, of course, United have lost a few games, which creates “a new situation”, to borrow a phrase from Van Gaal. It seems no board can be expected to keep faith with a coach who loses four in a row, even if a few days previously they were insisting he was a genius.

That Van Gaal will soon be sacked now seems a question of when rather than if. Such debate as exists now centres on the identity of his successor. This is where things start to get a little confused.

There appear to be only three options on the table. The first is to hire José Mourinho. The second is to hire Ryan Giggs. The third is to hire Giggs as the interim manager until the end of the season, and then appoint Pep Guardiola.

For United supporters, the third option is probably the most desirable, and would also appear to be the preference of Alex Ferguson, who tried to convince Guardiola to succeed him at United on at least one previous occasion. However, it's also the least likely to transpire, as most of the indications in Germany are that Guardiola has already agreed to join Manchester City next summer.

That being so, it seems that José Mourinho is the only other experienced candidate under consideration.

Portfolio

Yesterday's Sunday Times carried a report from a journalist close to Mourinho which appeared to lay out the Special One's position – you could think of the piece as programme notes from a manager without portfolio. The report announced the surprising news that Mourinho was considering an offer from Real Madrid's president Florentino Pérez to take back his old job as Real Madrid manager.

In this account, Mourinho had decided to leave Madrid in 2013 purely on his own initiative, after becoming frustrated with “the multiple political difficulties” of managing the galáctico club. That is a delicate way of putting it. As far as everyone else could remember, Mourinho and Madrid had parted ways after his relationship with most of the key players had broken down.

Mourinho was said to be thinking about Pérez's offer but on balance his preference would be to manage a Premier League club, and "with the expectation of strong backing from the club's executive vice-chairman, Ed Woodward", it seems that he would be content if Manchester United were to be that club.

There is a contradiction here, however. If you were convinced that Pep Guardiola was the ideal manager to take your club forward, then José Mourinho would be the very last manager you would want to appoint. They have completely opposite ideas about the game. A wishlist that has Pep in first place and José second is totally incoherent in football terms. The only way it could possibly make sense is in terms of celebrity: who’s the biggest name we could get to manage our team?

But that, increasingly, is how top clubs think about the job of manager. The sheer quantity of money at the top of the game has promoted a deadening conservatism. Nobody cares about ideas any more, it’s all about big names – and the pool of names that are big enough to be trusted with one of the superclubs is getting smaller.

Right now all of England’s biggest clubs want to sign Guardiola. Madrid apparently are trying to lure Mourinho back after tiring of Rafael Benítez, who like Mourinho has also managed Inter and Chelsea. The former Chelsea manager who replaced Mourinho in Madrid, Carlo Ancelotti, will now replace Guardiola in Munich.

The only reliable way to break into that elite coaching circle, that small group of men who get offered the big club jobs, is to win the Champions League – Ancelotti, Mourinho, Guardiola and Benitez have won eight of the last 13 between them – but since the only way to win the modern Champions League is to manage one of those big clubs, we are beginning to see a stagnation in the pool of names who are considered every time a big job becomes available.

The risk-averse board at a rich club like Manchester United will always be able to attract a superstar manager, but the superstar managers are the ones whose best work is already behind them. It’s much better to find a manager who becomes a superstar for the work he does at your club.

Troubled regimes

That’s the big argument in favour of United appointing Ryan Giggs rather than José Mourinho. There aren’t many other convincing arguments. Where Mourinho can point to two Champions Leagues and a string of league titles in four different countries, Giggs has nothing to recommend him beyond the quality of the coaching work he has done at Manchester United under the troubled regimes of David Moyes and Van Gaal.

Woodward has had ample opportunity to observe Giggs at work and decide whether he’s suitable for the job, but trusting your own judgment and intuition is a nerve-racking business. That’s why, like most football executives these days, he’ll probably feel safer deferring to the power of a big name.