Gary Neville and Meulensteen agree on next permanent Man Utd boss who ‘ticks all four boxes’
Former Manchester United coach Rene Meulensteen has tipped Carlo Ancelotti to take over the Red Devils at the end of the season after Gary Neville claimed the former Chelsea and Real Madrid boss “ticks all four boxes” in order to be a success at Old Trafford.
Michael Carrick has taken caretaker charge of the club until the end of the season after Ruben Amorim was given his marching orders, with INEOS currently scouring the market for permanent options to take the reins in the summer.
Luis Enrique and Roberto De Zerbi have been mooted, along with Xabi Alonso, who recently departed Real Madrid, but Meulensteen, who served under Sir Alex Ferguson at Old Trafford from 2007 to 2013, told Casinostugan that he believes Ancelotti would be the perfect appointment.
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Ancelotti is currently focused on leading Brazil at the World Cup, but has no plans beyond the tournament this summer.
Meulensteen said: “Carlo Ancelotti is the guy with the type of pedigree who can handle it because he’s done it, he’s seen it and he knows what a winning culture looks like. I don’t think Ancelotti would listen to anybody else.
“Ancelotti would say this is what I’m doing. I’m managing what I’m here to do.
“They obviously weren’t aligned. He had different ideas about how it should be run than people in the background.”
United legend Gary Neville recently claimed Ancelotti meets all the necessary requirements to be a success at Man Utd.
“With these last 12 years being a period of massive underperformance for Manchester United managers, there are certain boxes the next candidate now needs to tick,” Neville wrote in the Overlap newsletter.
“1. You have to be able to handle the media and the noise which comes with this club. It is what it is, so get over it and deal with it. It’s why you’re getting paid the big bucks.
“2. You have to show that you can have success getting into the top four, that you can cope with Champions League football, and that you can get the best out of a group of players that will include egos and superstars.
“3. You must understand the Premier League and English football culture because it’s different to competing in many of the European leagues.
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“4. You also have to understand the Manchester United way, which means you have to be a glass-half-full kind of manager. Be positive and prepared to take risks and play with pace and excitement. In all likelihood that is going to a variation of 4-4-1-1 / 4-2-3-1.
“You have got to be pretty special to tick all four of those boxes and, as such, the outstanding candidate for me would be Carlo Ancelotti, even if it would mean potentially delaying his arrival until late July if Brazil reached the World Cup final.
“No-one comes as close to fulfilling everything laid out above than he does. Ironically, the club met with Carlo shortly before his [Sir Alex Ferguson’s] retirement in 2013 and we could have short-circuited this entire process, starting with him at the beginning of the cycle.
“But, by that stage, he was close to agreeing to joining Real Madrid for his first spell in charge and so what might have been a perfect appointment never happened.”
