Manchester United sacking Mourinho cost £19.6m, financial figures reveal

Jose Mourinho's sacking cost Manchester United £19.6 million, according to accounts released by the club on Thursday.

Mourinho was dismissed in December and replaced with interim coach Ole Gunnar Solskjaer. The Portuguese coach, who had a contract until 2020, received a pay-off of £15m.

Goalkeeper coach Emilio Alvarez remained at Old Trafford as part of Solskjaer's staff.

On Thursday, United announced record second quarter revenues of £208.6m.

Since Mourinho's departure, Solskjaer has overseen 10 wins from his first 12 games in charge in all competitions and lifted United back into the Champions League places.

The Norwegian is still in the dark about his long-term future as United seek a long-term successor to Mourinho but executive vice-chairman Ed Woodward said he has been "delighted" with the 45-year-old's impact.

"The appointment of Ole and Mike [Phelan] as caretaker manager and assistant manager, working with Kieran [McKenna], Michael [Carrick] and Emilio, has had a positive impact throughout the club," Woodward said.

"We are delighted with the improvement in the team's performances since December and we look forward to a strong finish to the 2018-19 season."

Meanwhile, group managing director Richard Arnold said United will play three games in the International Champions Cup during the summer on top of the two games already scheduled to take place in Perth in July.

On a call with investors, Woodward also suggested he hoped to tie up new contracts for Ander Herrera, Juan Mata and David De Gea before the summer after agreeing deals with Phil Jones, Chris Smalling, Scott McTominay, Anthony Martial, Luke Shaw and Ashley Young this season.

"It's pretty well known the end dates of the players' contracts," Woodward said. "We are a long way through the ones we had planned to do this season but obviously we want to finish off the final few as rapidly as we can.

"Possibly, by the time we get to the summer we will be in a much stronger position with regard to the average tenure of each contract with our key players."

Woodward gave little away when pressed on the search for a new permanent manager successor to Mourinho.

"With regard to the process on the manager, I'm not going to get into that," he said. "We communicated around December time what we were doing - - putting Ole in place as a caretaker.

"The next communication with regard to this will be when we have something to announce regarding the manager."