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Sport
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Thursday 15 October 2026
Lisandro Martinez was ready. Any attempt to suppress an anticipatory grin failed entirely. He looked great, hair falling just so, fixing Gabriel Clarke with his best Zoolander impression. His moment was here. The Thing – the one everyone not directly employed by Manchester United has been saying for years – he was going to get to say The Thing. He’d clearly practiced, prepped, run it through with his agents and, if reports are to be believed, teammates. Ripping strips off United has long been a national industry, like delaying trains and putting sex offenders on TV. But players getting involved is a fascinating fresh development in one of sport’s great corporate and psychological parables.
Of course, what Martinez said was entirely uncontroversial, although both diagnosing a crisis of confidence while also telling an undefined number of your teammates you consider them incompetent is at the very least unhelpful. In the summer Manchester United could reasonably have improved almost every position. Instead they spent their entire budget on three central midfielders, one of whom has since forgotten how to run and another who it isn’t entirely clear knew how to run in the first place. They decided to trust Luke Shaw as their only senior left-back, despite him missing 313 matches of his senior career through injury. They did the same with Benjamin Šeško, who just looks eminently breakable, like someone built Erling Haaland out of spaghetti.
“I expect more from our technical director” was the killer line, basically telling Jason Wilcox to meet him outside the gates at home time, but then what does anyone actually expect from a technical director? Their responsibilities include, as per an online course providing about the only coherent definition I can find on the internet, “sporting strategy, playing philosophy and overarching infrastructure”: basically grand wizard of vibes. Dan Ashworth once described his role at Brighton as “looking after the interests of the club in the medium-to-long term”, which seems a helpful way of avoiding scrutiny, always responsible for tomorrow, never today.
Although what proof exists that Wilcox can fill any of those vague roles? In March 2025, Sir Jim “colonised-by-immigrants” Ratcliffe told the Times “when I listen to Jason speak, I get what he’s saying”. This should have been taken as somewhere between irrelevant and deeply concerning. Given his non-playing experience was almost entirely running Manchester City’s academy, appointing him to run United’s football operations was the equivalent of handing a well-respected headmaster control of Apple. It is increasingly clear that finishing third last season, particularly under Carrick, was the worst thing that could have happened to United, because it allowed everyone involved to believe the grand lie they tell themselves that, actually, their genius can solve the unsolvable, that people actually want this solving.
Part of the issue was always going to be the overwhelming lack of evidence that Carrick possesses the requisite capabilities to dig United out of this. No-one seems entirely sure what his capabilities actually are, or has any tangible reason to trust him. The most Martinez could say in his defence – during a speech supposedly designed to protect Carrick – was that “he does his best”, one of the great back-handed compliments. No, he’s not doing the best, but this – nine games, two wins – this is his best.
The most common mistake in attempting to understand United in 2026 is assuming they are incomparable to any other club, when really this is just Tottenham by a different name. Sign whichever players you want, hire whichever manager, even pick whichever faceless suit. But all are fundamentally screwed before they start, entering rotten institutions addicted to chaos and dysfunction and decay, fettered by a toxic relationship to the past, a misshapen identity. Anything occasionally going well is only teeing up a greater fall when everything reverts to its natural state. The only player who seems to have tangibly improved since joining United in the past five years is the goalkeeper, Senne Lammens, who might be protected by having a separate coaching staff to work with. As with Tottenham, this is partially influenced by constant churn and change, by veering in and out of European football, by how little time anyone has to focus on anything but the next match. But more than anything it is about an inescapable cycle of brief renaissance and crushing busts, underpinned by internal and external pressures which either incinerate players’ brains on arrival or contaminates them over time.
Martinez is right that sacking Carrick is unlikely to have any meaningful impact. But then sacking Wilcox is unlikely to really matter either. To quote This Country, you can’t save a damsel if she loves her distress. And the only thing the Martinez affair really proves is how much everyone inside and out of Manchester United loves its distress, how many livelihoods now depend on it, how commenting on it never seems to get boring, seemingly even for players.
Shortly after his first, Martinez did a second interview, this time with Peter Schmeichel. He talked about the lack of “energy”, issues with “body language”, and abstract “disconnect”. His parting words were “if we don’t say the truth, nothing will change”. But as anyone that has watched United in the past five years will tell you, if you do say the truth, nothing will change either.
Photograph by Ash Donelon/Manchester United via Getty Images