Ralf Rangnick believes Manchester United lacked passion, emotion and intensity in their listless defeat to Wolves.
United lost their first match under Rangnick at Old Trafford as Wolves' back three forced Rangnick to abandon his favoured 4-2-2-2 formation in the second-half.
The defeat has resulted in a wave of negativity about the mood at United, worsened by players running down contracts and others wanting out. Rangnick has already blocked Dean Henderson from leaving on loan and United have rejected a loan offer from Sevilla for Anthony Martial.
Rangnick was reluctant to blame the 4-2-2-2 formation for United's feeble performance and instead pinpointed David de Gea's reaction to Cristiano Ronaldo's header towards his own goal late in the second-half. Ronaldo almost played in Wolves striker Raul Jimenez and De Gea rollocked United's stand-in captain.
"I can only tell you about the squad," Rangnick said of the atmosphere. "Obviously, I don't know about the atmosphere inside the club, I can only speak about the players, locker room, coaching staff, obviously everybody was very disappointed after the game, about the result and the performance, especially in the first-half.
"And now we have four days of training, yesterday, today tomorrow, day after tomorrow before the Aston Villa game and my job, our job is that we make sure we show a different performance against Aston Villa.
"We have made some progress. The Wolves game was a step back, maybe a relapse to habits that the team has shown in the past and therefore we need to insist and emphasise every time that we have to work together, we have to improve.
"We can only get better in those moments in possession of the ball and when the other team has it and in the transitional moments together. We have to do the same things at the same time. We have to do it simultaneously and, of course, we also need to do it with passion, emotion and intensity.
"That was the problem against Wolves, especially in the first-half. We were only escorting them. If we look at it clearly it was only David de Gea who objected to them going easily to our goal. David was the one who kept us in the game in the first-half.
"In the second-half it was better when we changed formation to a back three but again it's about finding a sustainable balance for the future and that can only be done together."