Man United's U.S. tour: Julia Roberts and Torrey Pines golf

SAN DIEGO -- Not even the bright lights of New York and Las Vegas can distract Erik ten Hag from his mission to get Manchester United back to the top. The team are visiting some of the biggest and busiest cities in the world on their U.S. tour but, for the Dutch manager, nothing is allowed to get in the way of the football.

During the first stop, in New York, club sponsor Marriott repurposed a London bus and decked it out as a traditional English pub for fans to watch the game against Arsenal. It visited Times Square -- the perfect place for a photo opportunity -- but with no plans to allow the players into Manhattan, it had to be driven out to the team hotel in rural Basking Ridge, New Jersey, for pictures with Raphael Varane, Diogo Dalot and Aaron Wan-Bissaka.

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Commercial days on tour -- when sponsors are granted time with players for marketing purposes -- have been cut from three to two on Ten Hag's instruction because football has to come first. It's gone down well with the squad, many of whom don't like attending them anyway. Christian Eriksen and Jadon Sancho walked into one event and posed for a quick picture before Sancho -- half joking -- asked: "Are we done now?"

On preseason tours in previous years, the team hotels and training sites have been mobbed with fans, but this visit has been far more sedate. Eriksen, Sancho and the rest of the squad had a police escort to take them to the Delta by Marriott Hotel, and security guards wearing James Bond-style earpieces scanned the lobby before they were allowed to enter, but none of it was needed.

A couple of supporters milled around the car park and managed to get an autograph from Donny van de Beek as he got back on the team bus, which is branded with the slogan "United across America," pictures of the Statue of Liberty and the "Welcome to Las Vegas" sign.

The only other people at the New Jersey training base at Pingry School -- a $50,000-a-year prep school -- were a group of toddlers in a summer camp learning how to blow bubbles. It's just how Ten Hag likes it, and even when his boss is in town, there's only time for football. When club co-owner Avram Glazer and his family turned up at Pingry, his interaction with Ten Hag amounted to a brief handshake on the way to the training pitches. There is no time for anything else.

It's the same in San Diego, the second stop on the tour. The hotel, the $450-a-night Estancia La Jolla Hotel and Spa, is located within walking distance of the training base on the seasonally deserted campus of the University of California San Diego. The team's presence there has, for the most part, been kept under wraps.

When a small number of supporters turned up and asked a campus employee where the team were training, he had no idea what they were talking about. "A soccer team is here?" was his confused response.

The night before Tuesday's game against Wrexham at Snapdragon Stadium, former United goalkeeper Ben Foster was spotted being refused entry to a bar in downtown San Diego, but Ten Hag is keeping his players on a much tighter leash. On Monday evening, Harry Maguire, Scott McTominay, Tom Heaton and Dean Henderson were allowed out of the hotel to walk the famous golf course at Torrey Pines, just four minutes down the road, and a number of players or staff went back to play a round during a day off on Friday.