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As I write these very words, there’s a possibility that the senior management of Manchester United are still engaged in “crisis talks” over the future of head coach Michael Carrick. It is, after all, quite a massive crisis. After Sunday afternoon’s 3-0 home defeat Bournemouth, Manchester United are eight games without a win in the Premier League, and they’ve won just two in all competitions all season. As the “crisis talks” take place, the club are one point above the relegation places.
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Yet in all of this conversations, it seems vanishingly unlikely that anybody will hold up a mirror, and all the more damaging for those managers, everybody knows it. They certainly did at Old Trafford yesterday. Carrick left the pitch apparently close to ears with the song that celebrated him as a player ringing in his ears. But as they headed for the tunnel, the players caught the full ire of the supporters who’d stayed in the ground until the end of what had, to that point, been a miserable afternoon. The message was very clear. This is clearly and obviously a broader problem than the head coach.
It is entirely possible that Carrick will have gone by the time I’ve finished writing these words. It is considerably more than possible that the problems that beset the club will leave with him. It is abundantly clear that Manchester United’s descent into the absolute mess that they’ve become by 2026 is an institutional on which has manifested throughout the corridors of the club like dry rot. Just as fish rots from the head down, so are Manchester United, to the extent that it’s almost impressive. There’s a lot of talk these days about institutions being ‘too big to fail’ but United might be about to prove that wrong.
It’s there in the robber baron owners, who’ve now been bleeding the club for more than two decades. It’s there in the CEO and Sporting Director, who arrived at the club under the pretence that they’d be able to reprise their successes at Manchester City without the systematic cheating upon which they’d been able to build them. And it’s there in the players, whose ‘reaction’ to their midweek thrashing at Como in the Champions League last week was to turn in a performance even worse, and in front of over 70,000 of their own supporters. None of those people will be removing themselves from this particular cash cow any time soon.
It’s easy to throw around phrases like “out of his depth”, but Michael Carrick has been involved in football since he was four-years-old. He was profiled by the BBC kids television showLive & Kickingat thirteen and had trials with five different Premier League and Football League clubs before signing for West Ham United. He made over 700 appearances throughout a playing career which saw him win the Premier League five times, the FA Cup, the League Cup twice, the Champions League, the Europa League and the World Club Cup. He earned 34 caps for England and went to two World Cups. The weird, hermetically-sealed world of elite-level professional football is very much his “depth.”
It is completely reasonable to say that his managerial record at Middlesbrough should have been considered too patchy to assume the position at a club of this heft on a permanent basis. Running a football club on vibes alone has a limited shelf-life. But the entire outside world could already see that, and we also have to consider just how damaged the club had been looking for years before his arrival, as well as just how difficult it can be for one individual to alter the course of such a massive institution, particularly when it’s been listing as badly as Manchester United have since Alex Ferguson retired. Ferguson’s influence had become the entire culture of the club, and there has been no real attempt to build a new one since his departure.
The amount of control that Carrick had over recruitment will have been minimal. Manchester United shifted from appointing managers to appointing head coaches when they hired Ruben Amorim. The Director of Football is responsible for the players that have been hired. What is the point of being a Director of Football if you’re not? And it has felt for years as though this change in the way in which clubs are run - which works perfectly well abroad, where the subtleties and complexities of the structures required to make it work seem better understood - has been primarily introduced in this country as little more than a way to insulate executives from blame when things start going wrong.
Manchester United supporters already know this. That’s why Carrick got the reaction at the end of the Bournemouth game that he did. As a player, he is a genuine, bona fide legend. That list of playing honours speaks for itself. But as a head coach, the worst that can be said about him is that he has been a symptom of a club which has completely lost its direction over the course of more than a decade, which is being bled dry by their majority owners and mismanaged by their minority owners, who keep on repeating the same mistakes with such regularity that it has felt for years as though they’ve been acting from a script. And while that feeling of having failed will undoubtedly sting him, it’s almost certainly the case that he’ll be better off for being elsewhere.
The replacements are already being written up. Antonio Conte waits in the wings, varnishing his whacking stick. Conte would almost certainly bring the drama, but if there’s a football club that needs less drama at the moment, it’s Manchester United. Every hot young coach in the country will be talked of as though it’s somehow an honour to step into this shitshow, although the speed with which Fabian Hurzeler sought to distance himself from the idea of going there was strikingly quick and nobody seriously believes that Unai Emery would walk out on the sweet gig that he’s got at Aston Villa to try and sort this mess out.
Would Eddie Howe be able to turn the ship around? Mmmmaybe, if substantial structural changes come, but the last substantial structural change to occur at Old Trafford put Jim Ratcliffe in charge, and his Midas in reverse effect on sports organisations in which INEOS have become involved has continued unabated. If the club did decide that Berrada and Wilcox had hit reached the end of the road with the club, how many people honestly believe they’d made the right changes to replace them?
Michael Carrick is not the answer, and never was. But as time goes on and the club remains trapped in the same loop, it’s become entirely evident that there are structural issues at Manchester United which need addressing in order to give the club any reasonable chance of getting anywhere close to the pedestal upon which they put themselves under Alex Ferguson. As time goes by, it increasingly feels as though his decades there were lightning in a bottle which can’t be repeated and which they were incredibly lucky to have in the first place. Until those who have rendered the club so unmanageable are swept out, all the “crisis talks” in the world are as likely as ever to make little difference, because the real “crisis” at Manchester United is those who are holding those talks in the first place.
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