Man Utd to appoint Bruno after Conte and Howe; next six managers predicted

With Michael Carrick floundering, we’ve predicted not just the next Manchester United manager, but the next six managers.

We thought Carrick had eight games to save his job. He might not last that long if United maintain the levels they showed against Spurs.

So who’s next? And who comes after him? We’ve taken a best guess at the line of the next six poor souls to manage the Red Devils.

First up…

Antonio Conte
After reluctantly mutually-consenting Carrick, against all their conservative instincts, Jason Wilcox and Sir Jim Ratcliffe – Omar Berrada is keeping a low profile – hire Conte to be the 12th manager to have a crack at following Fergie.

Things go well at first. The United players are scared straight by Conte’s arrival, daring not to make a peep when the ketchup and mayo goes from the Carrington canteen. The removal of all condiments prompts some players to get beyond level three on the bleep test.

Suddenly running and playing for a manager able to coach something other than counter-attacking football, United start to win. And they keep winning, coming second to Manchester City in the 2026/27 Premier League table before the whole competition is declared null and void because City have taken their appeal, entirely unironically, to the Court of Human Rights. Who dock Everton 12 points.

But Conte’s success cannot be sustained and it all comes crashing down when Diogo Dalot nods off during a Victor Moses video marathon. Conte can keep a lid on his temper no longer, hoisting Dalot up against the wall by his collar, and the struggling wing-back meets an unfortunate, untimely demise eerily similar to Karl Fletcher’s in Dream Team.

Conte’s contract is hurriedly cancelled by mutual consent before the manager makes for the hills, never to be seen again.

MORE: Man Utd should dance with the devil in Conte after Carrick cosiness

Eddie Howe
With Interpol on Conte’s case, Ratcliffe and Wilcox feel vindicated enough to hire the manager they wanted all along: Edward John Frank Howe.

The placid dullness of Howe in contrast to Conte’s villainy sees United players relax into their game and they start the 2027/28 European Super League in fine form.

But, inevitably at United, the players start to take the piss. Howe loses the dressing room and Jason Tindall is too busy with his Strictly commitments to help out.

Things really come to head – Howe and Wilcox quietly ghost one another – when Howe attempts to appoint three members of his own family as recruitment directors.

Kieran McKenna
Having seen off the Howes, incumbent recruitment chief Christopher Vivell – everyone just assumes it’s him since no one actually knows what he looks or sounds like – tries to appoint whoever is managing RB Leipzig at the time because that’s the only number saved in his phone. But Ratcliffe pulls rank under intense pressure at this point in the United doom cycle to name a manager Who Knows The Club.

McKenna just gets United. And he’s been waiting patiently for this opportunity, refusing any interest since leaving Ipswich knowing that one day, United would reach the necessary level of desperation, with enough time now passed that everyone has forgotten that while he coached at Old Trafford under Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, he ‘looked out of his depth, lacked charisma and acted like a schoolteacher’.

It goes exactly as you would expect for a manager whose only success has come in the Championship. Eventually, McKenna is forced out after an ultimatum issued by JJ Gabriel’s dad, who demands he be given the manager’s job, but Joe O’Cearuill eventually settles for a statue next to Busby. And Fergie’s parking spot.

Fabian Hurzeler
It’s an outsider’s turn in the United cycle, and having taken the necessary step between Brighton and Old Trafford, Hurzeler finally feels ready to take on the Red Devils job after winning the 2028 Champions League with Borussia Dortmund.

But it all goes wrong from the start when United inadvertently announce the appointment of  ‘Herr Hurzerler’.

The dressing room is gone before he goes in. Harry Maguire – having recently signed his fifth one-year extension while still playing in the same defence beaten at Brentford in 2022 – refuses to take orders from ‘Wiggy Herzalea’ when the new manager is only a week older and still a yard faster than himself.

Hurzeler, rightly, decides he’s above all this and takes the Bayern Munich job instead.

Jose Mourinho
With United’s dressing room again in need of a firm hand, Mourinho returns to yet another of his former clubs.

The Portuguese manager hopes this reunion goes better than it did at Real Madrid, where he had to resign in embarrassment after only nine games having run 60 yards of the Bernabeu to celebrate a goal that was VARed as the scorer was sent off for pulling someone’s hair.

Mourinho is astonished to find Luke Shaw still hanging around the place but views the left-back’s longevity as vindication of his methods, so the manager tries some of his tough love on Kobbie Mainoo, who is by now around a decade into his search for a midfield partner to make him look good.

Mainoo’s brother does not take it well.  For his latest and self-flagellating protest to date, he douses himself in pure INEOS on the Old Trafford forecourt, egged on by Mark Goldbridge, now the exclusive rights holder to all United games. But unbeknown to the market, Sir Jim, down to his last billion, has been watering down his petro chemicals with the rain streaming off the roof, so the bloody stuff won’t light, sending their stock tumbling.

With Ratcliffe preoccupied in Monaco, the Glazers forgetting they own a football club, and the long-term absent Wilcox still hiding on the assumption they can’t sack what they can’t find, Mourinho finally decides he’s seen it all and retires to the Algarve.

Bruno Fernandes
With no money to hire a new manager, it falls on Mourinho’s assistant Bruno Fernandes to step up and bail out United yet again.

Somehow, despite the circus around him, Fernandes quickly becomes one of United’s best coaches in the modern era. Frankly, he is too good for them. But he remains loyal and inspires a previously-unseen level of creativity, despite having to work with idiots and imbeciles.

Such working conditions inevitably wear Fernandes down occasionally, prompting the odd moan on the touchline and some occasional arm throwing. Which boils an ungodly amount of piss and distracts the weirder pundits and punters from his genuine genius.

Intent on not making the same mistake again, Fernandes leaves United for Real, Barca or Bayern to win the trophies his talent deserves.

United opt against hiring a new manager, following the lead of Forest Green Rovers, who recently qualified for the Champions League by using ChatGPT to pick an entirely vegan team.