Michael Carrick was doomed long ago; he was a little bit the problem at Manchester United
So farewell, then, Michael Carrick.
Never in the post-Ferguson Banter Era has a Manchester United manager been so overtly not the biggest problem. Never in the post-Ferguson Banter Era has a Manchester United manager been so obviously not a plausible solution.
The deeper question the United brains trust must now attempt to unravel is whether, indeed, such a solution-providing manager even exists.
Or whether, gasp, it might be time to consider their own roles in all this. To ponder for just the briefest moment such questions as ‘Is it really entirely necessary for what is perhaps the second largest football club on the planet, the club of Busby and Ferguson, to hand untrammelled power to erstwhile Blackburn and Leeds winger Jason Wilcox?’
Or ‘Is being someone who used to play football for this enormous club enough to override the absence of pretty much any relevant managerial experience for the scale of this role? Again?’ Or ‘Should we maybe do something about the roof, because if absolutely nothing else as a metaphor it’s just a bit too on the nose?’ Or ‘What even is a Christopher Vivell?’
They won’t waste time on these great imponderables, though. No. They are great and powerful people, far too busy for such trivial musings.
They have sacked Michael Carrick, and it is fair enough. They will not consider long their own parts in the fiasco, and it will not be fair enough. They will appoint a new manager and it will be Mauricio Pochettino, and that might be okay.
We do at least know that Pochettino has proof of concept in continuing to deliver eye-catching results despite being hamstrung by owners who won’t or can’t fund the first team properly while trying to build an outlandish new stadium.
Can Pochettino succeed at United? Who knows. But he’s an upgrade on Michael Carrick and at this stage that is already enough.
Stirring comebacks from two goals down are all well and good but the thing with stirring comebacks from two goals down is that they are largely quite unsustainable as an approach and do also require you to keep going two goals down. “Look, the players are making catastrophic system and individual errors, but at least they haven’t downed tools altogether” is just too low a bar to be acceptable.
Manchester United could be six points better off than they are and still enduring an unacceptable start. This is, as we all know, Manchester United Football Club We’re Talking About.
The brutal reality is that it’s no real surprise that it’s happened again for United. That a decent sort rightly beloved in these parts for their storied playing career has come in as an interim manager, overachieved thanks to a heady brew of good vibes, not being the previous idiot, club DNA and the necessary luck that everyone needs to get on in life, before it all unravels once the commitment is made permanent.
And this time it’s happened so much faster than it did with Ole at the wheel. Which is understandable, really. Carrick is even less experienced, even less qualified, and with even bleaker resources at his disposal.
Carrick isn’t the first underqualified Knows The Club appointment to run into trouble after a honeymoon period carried along by the desperate unifying desire of everyone to make it work because it would be neat.
But he faced a particularly challenging task because as a player he looked kind of perfect for management in some ways, yet also entirely ill-suited in others. He read the game like a coach. He was yer classic ‘manager on the field’, a midfield string-puller who could be entirely relied upon to make all the right calls at all the right times to calmly and unfussily and almost imperceptibly bend games the way United desired.
Yet Carrick the man always seemed too quiet, too unassuming and, yes, maybe even just too bloody nice for big-time management. When Sky Sports News rocks up at Carrington to get some emergency footage from training against the backdrop of whatever disaster or humiliation ritual has just occurred, Carrick often looks like a competition winner. Standing, smiling, watching. Not apparently doing an awful lot of coaching.
Such snapshots means nothing, of course, and nobody wants managers to performatively affect a persona that just isn’t them. But it’s mirrored by just how small and quiet he looks on the touchline as whatever the latest calamity to unfold unfolds.
It’s not true that there is only one specific personality that can make this job work. But it does feel like it needs a particularly big one. Ruben Amorim, for all his many other faults, had that. Erik Ten Hag did not. And Carrick does not.
It would be entirely unfair to completely dismiss what Carrick achieved in those interim months. United really were excellent in those closing months of the season and deservedly finished third in the league. Even now, they sit fifth in the 2026 table. That third-place effort was very much a best-of-the-rest finish, but given the mess he took over, it was no small accomplishment.
And one-game-a-week easy mode isn’t a guarantee of success. Neither Xabi Alonso nor Roberto De Zerbi are currently doing with a similarly light schedule what Carrick pulled off last season. But he was still on easy mode, by the standards of TIMUFCWTA.
It was a penalty kick for Carrick. One game a week for five months. If he failed, nobody would blame him. But if he succeeded…
And succeed he did, before being let down in the summer as United searched out cut-price deals and scoured the proverbial bargain bins.
We had our doubts and fears in the summer, but we can’t honestly say we thought it was going to end with ‘in the relegation zone after winning one Premier League game at the November international break’ but we wouldn’t have been that surprised at the significance of ‘November international break’.
It’s not you, Michael, it’s them. But it is also you, a bit.
