Man Utd are a monster of mediocrity whose culture is rotten, writes OLIVER HOLT

I hate to break it to Sir Jim Ratcliffe and Sir Dave Brailsford but buying a different kind of pillow for Casemiro isn’t going to fix this. Getting Antony to don a pair of electrically heated shorts isn’t going to fix it, either. Manchester United is the sick man of European football and it is going to take an awful lot more than a few marginal gains to put it on the road to resurrection.

Sure, they can tell a few office staff at Old Trafford that they can’t have two seats together for the FA Cup final at Wembley later this month and Ratcliffe can garner all the easy headlines he wants with emails about how the IT department needs a decent tidy but United are a club that needs major surgery, not a few Band Aids to help with public relations.

I’ve been watching United home and away for more than 40 years. I was in the Platt Lane End at Maine Road in September 1989 when they were humiliated 5-1 by Manchester City, I was at Old Trafford in October 2011 when they lost 6-1 to City and I was at Anfield when they lost 7-0 to Liverpool in March last year.

Those performances were embarrassing but I have never seen a United side look more like a rabble, a disorganised band of disconnected, demotivated, disinterested divas than they appeared on the television pictures from Selhurst Park on Monday evening. There is embarrassing and then there are the depths United plumbed in south London.

The defeat meant United had lost 13 league games in a season for the first time in more than 30 years. It was a mismatch from the start. Palace are a lower mid-table side but they were so superior they looked like they were playing it for laughs.

Eberechi Eze and Michael Olise were so far above anything United had to offer that they started