Jose Mourinho being sacked probably won’t change the basics of Louis van Gaal’s time at Manchester United, but it might make choices a lot easier. That’s because having an excellent manager free to take a job is clearly going to make a change seem less drastic, and less of a risk. But it’s also because the only two serious contenders for United’s job until now, Carlo Ancelotti and Pep Guardiola, seem likely to be heading to other directions.

For a year or so, Lionel Messi has been linked with a move to Manchester City.  Rumors have again surfaced that City are planning to spend an awful lot of money on finally becoming an important team. Messi is the shortcut to this, by far the best player in the world with a cachet that is unrivaled after Cristiano Ronaldo’s decline. Whether he arrives or not, another large round of spending an excellent way to lure Guardiola from Bayern Munich.

It seems obvious now that Guardiola will not be staying in Germany. It is also clear that Guardiola has little interest in taking a job where there isn’t already a great deal of promise. United’s squad isn’t as bad as Van Gaal is making them play at the moment, but there is obviously work to be done in every single area except the goalkeeper. Even then, David de Gea is probably going to leave for Real Madrid, anyway.

The same can be said for Manchester City, in some sense. Manuel Pellegrini isn’t getting the squad to play to its potential, but there is a generally higher standard in the squad. Add Messi to that, or whatever City’s billions can also bring, and United would probably lose out on Guardiola. It seems sensible to predict that he would take a job that gives him the greatest resources.

SEE MORE: Now is the perfect time to buy stock in Jose Mourinho.

And as a result, a space that will have to be filled at Bayern. Ancelotti is the name most recently suggested, something that makes a kind of underwhelming sense. Ancelotti, like Guardiola, is another manager who doesn’t look for the hard jobs. At AC Milan, he ultimately underachieved, but he put up with Silvio Berlusconi’s interference with an easy demeanor and lasted for years. At Paris Saint-Germain, he had all the money he needed to win the league and should have won two, but he couldn’t match the mighty Montpellier in his first six months. He took the nonsense of the Real circus, and the players still speak highly of him. If Ancelotti is offered the choice of City, United and Bayern, United are a distant third.

With Jurgen Klopp at Liverpool, that doesn’t leave United with many options. There’s Ryan Giggs, but if his succession was assured, you would imagine the club would be much more bullish about the possibility. There’s Gary Neville, who is learning the job at Valencia, but will have only half a season’s experience come the summer. The other problem with Neville is that any move might have to come along with a Peter Lim/Class of ‘92 takeover. The Glazers might sell for the right price, and some of them might be willing to sell for less than that, but it seems unworkable for now.

That leaves Mourinho as the only viable option. Lots of Chelsea fans claim otherwise, and there may be merit in their arguments, but there are many accounts of Mourinho expecting to take over from Alex Ferguson when he retired and being distraught when it appeared that United really were going to appoint David effing Moyes. When Moyes was sacked in April 2014, Mourinho even threw a strop in a press conference, seemingly goading Roman Abramovich into removing him, though it was obviously a fruitless endeavor.

Until the last couple of weeks, Mourinho’s availability was moot, anyway. The club were protesting that Van Gaal was a genius and would be supplied with bags and bags more money to deliver him a superstar; Ronaldo, probably, but that didn’t stop Ed Woodward chucking the names Neymar, Gareth Bale and Thomas Muller into the direction of anyone willing to write up the story on the back pages. But it seems things have changed. There have been recurrent and increasingly prominent rumors that United were considering a move for Guardiola. Woodward already has a habit of leaking the names of players, especially when the pressure is on, so it is no stretch to believe he is now doing the same with managers.

As the recent to-do over the Red Issue fanzine highlighted, United’s chief executive is susceptible to the fans’ opinion. He is motivated by two things: making lots of money for the Glazers, and being popular with the masses. This could serve as the starting point for a change in manager. Now United have been knocked out of the Champions League, you’d think there was a clause allowing for a cheaper termination of his contract, though perhaps there are other more significant failures which would make it cheaper still. United could quickly establish with Mourinho now how long he is willing to wait via their old friend, Jorge Mendes. The process to change managers could be a smooth one, if they wanted it.

A manager of the stature of Mourinho would be his very own superstar – a way to deliver a famous name in the middle of the season, if it can’t be done with a player. Woodward could paint a move not as a mistake to appoint Van Gaal in the first place but a sudden opportunity to upgrade the manager, as well as keep the focus away from his errors.

SEE MORE: What Chelsea would get with the return of Guus Hiddink.

It also helps that Van Gaal recently set the parameters for his exit. When he loses the players, he’ll go. Well, he’s lost the players. Earlier in the season senior players complained over training. After the Wolfsburg game, Juan Mata lost his temper. Ashley Young has been apparently frozen out, as have other players at different times, and there are rumors Wayne Rooney’s absence is not as straightforward as claimed. Ryan Giggs was said in one story to be disillusioned with the manager, a story which wasn’t denied. The fans are regularly booing the side, the side is crap, the players aren’t interested anymore and the assistant manager doesn’t care. By Van Gaal’s own requirements, he should be removed.

Mourinho might not be perfect, but there’s plenty that might offer practical means to improvement. He might often fall out with his players, but he’s also capable of inspiring devotion among many of them. A move from the autocratic Van Gaal to Mourinho might even feel like a relaxing move for the players. He is demanding tactically, but again, not quite as defensive and sideways as Van Gaal. He does at least know you need to score one goal to win a game. He is also the only manager to have properly riled Guardiola in the past, even if it did seem to dent his long-term energy. His relationship with Mendes might secure the players both Woodward and the fans would like to watch, though perhaps Radamel Falcao might also make a return. He may have disagreements with the board, but Van Gaal has hardly shrunk back from past disagreements at United. He certainly made his point by curtailing commercial activities on the last summer tour.

United reacted to the last sacking by hiring his opposite: a strong, belligerent leader who would face up to zesty players taking liberties. Now, they might go back the other way, but only slightly. Not the happy one any longer, but not the impossible one in the job at the moment. They would not be wrong to expect more from this hard-nosed, combative and often inspirational Mourinho, and Van Gaal’s current performance is making it an easy choice.

As most of you know, working at the same job year after year after year can cause burnout. Doing the same thing relentlessly reduces efficiency, and it’s known that varying activities or swapping responsibilities on a rotating basis can keep the mind fresh and body willing. It is not necessarily that you are technically incapable of doing your job; more that it becomes harder with experience and time.

There is no reason that would be different for a footballer. After all, the most exciting thing in football, as in much of life, is the thrill of the new. A new player at your club, or a new manager, can spur on a team to success. Novelty refreshes even the oldest player or fan. Even Alex Ferguson, a man who rarely overhauled his side, made sure that a couple of new faces cropped up in most transfer windows. Only those rare players, hungry to win throughout their career, were retained for most of his career.

However, for athletes, it’s not just the mental strain that builds up. It’s the physical damage, too. The body is generally strengthened by regular activity, but constantly putting yourself through unusually tough rigors will have long-term effects. Gabriel Batistuta, for example, wanted to have his legs amputated, such was the pain he endured after he retired. Even more seriously, there are theories that heading old balls may have given players degenerative brain conditions; similarly, there are links between concussion and NFL and rugby that become ever stronger. It is rare, even, that you don’t see a committed amateur roadrunner who doesn’t nurse some kind of joint problem.

In soccer, the best example of this might well be Wayne Rooney. He made his debut at 16 for Everton, 17 for England, and 18 for Manchester United. The success of United and the presence of England at most major tournaments mean that Rooney has played 568 domestic games and 107 for England. He is only now on the cusp of turning 30. It’s true that Rooney has avoided the most serious injuries, but he has been regularly hampered by metatarsal injuries and various muscle strains, and weighed down by his own occasional Christmas excesses. He features for club and country not because his form warrants it, but because his managers keep waiting for his former self to return.

There is, of course, no perfect solution, because the human body is not perfect. As remarkable as it is, it has an inbuilt expiration date, and some people’s genes are more conducive to being hard-wearing than others. John Terry, for all his faults, seems like the kind of man who could be shot at a wall with a cannon and only need a couple of hours to recover. On the other hand, there are athletes who go through the horror of their early 20s when their knee repeatedly buckles under strain and eventually find themselves out of work, with nowhere else to go.

SEE MORE: Rooney denies documentary claim he asked for a transfer before Ferguson’s retirement.

What is just as interesting, though, is how the average top-level professional soccer player (or other athletes) can extend their career. For sports like NFL, ice hockey, soccer, rugby, basketball and cricket, 30 generally is seen as the turning point of an athlete’s body. However, it is now accepted that with best practice and no little luck, that can be extended for the best part of a decade. Think of AC Milan’s defense, Ryan Giggs, Mark Ramprakash, Michael Jordan and Steve Nash – all more capable of staying close to the top of the game than almost any other player, whatever the age.

There’s a theory now, though, that if you break into professional soccer before you’re 20, like Rooney, your time may come to an end sooner. That’s because there’s a magic figure of 700 games, sometimes lower than that. At 700 games, injuries catch up and become cumulative. For other players, that figure might not come until 33 or 34, or even later, and that perhaps explains the longevity of some. Giggs, for example, might have had a hamstring problem, but over the course of his two decades of professional football, it was rare that he played fewer than 30 games or more than 45. Now it is not unusual to see players like Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi or Frank Lampard play more than 50 or 60 times in a season. Andi Thomas wrote about this for SB Nation recently, and it is worth your time.

SEE MORE: A conversation with the man who discovered Wayne Rooney.

But there appears to be a method, though it is severe, of extending a career. Not only does it appear to reinvigorate the body, but it gives players a rediscovered appreciation of their sport. Essentially, it is a fallow year, or a sustained break from the sport’s greatest demands. Paul Scholes, Lassana Diarra and Steed Malbranque recently took long periods of time off only to come back refreshed.

The circumstances were varied. Scholes had a serious case of double vision, and skipped half a season. He later retired, missed another season, and came back to steer United to another title. Only in the very last stages of his career did he start to become a liability due to the slow movement of his body. Before then, his form had occasionally dipped, but each return marked an uptick in performances. It appears that the breaks did his career no harm at all, and without it being possible to prove, the time off may well have improved it.

SEE MORE: Van Gaal targets derby win to prove United’s title credentials

Steed Malbranque’s circumstances are odder, admittedly. Malbranque spent 2006-2011 at Tottenham Hotspur and Sunderland in an unremarkable five years. He didn’t embarrass himself, and a first-team regular, but there was nothing special about him. In 2011, he left the Premier League to join Saint-Etienne, and in a big ball of confusion, left after a single game. For the 2011-12 season, that was all he managed. He considered retirement, but the following season he joined his first club, Lyon, putting in performances of such quality that there were calls for him to be given caps for the international side.

The most recent example is Lassana Diarra, whose peripatetic career spanned most of Europe’s breadth, but until he joined Marseille in the summer, seemed to be heading for an end caused by contractual limbo. He kept training with former clubs, but he didn’t feature in competitive soccer for more than a year. Yet here he is, back playing at the peak of his powers, a rare bright spark for Marseille, and with a chance to feature for France in Euro 2016. Another year off, another success.

There are similar stories in other sports. Australian cricketer Shane Wayne was given a ban for using diuretics but came back with such vigor that writer Gideon Haigh appraised the ban as a ‘performance enhancing risk.’ Michael Jordan’s baseball folly didn’t prevent him from being the greatest basketball player of all time. But of course the greatest example remains Eric Cantona,. Banned from soccer for eight months for kicking a racist cockney in the head, Cantona came back with an unblemished reputation to give United the title. And, when he knew he wasn’t at the top of the game, he chose the other option – to leave the sport behind and achieve excellence elsewhere (his chosen field of excellence: being the best human in the world).

What this has to do with Rooney, then, is the recommendation that he takes a year off. He is no use to Manchester United team in this state, and he is no use to England country either. He is possibly the worst player in the Premier League at the moment, such is his poor form. It is not just physical, despite his alarming shortcomings, but his mind, too. You don’t lose your first touch because you’re getting on in years. You lose it because your concentration has disappeared.

Of course, it would be difficult, and  it would be commercially costly to him and his sponsors, but there comes a time he must ask himself: in his current state for Manchester United and England, is he really there anymore anyway?