So Michael Carrick will stay on as Manchester United manager. United have lost each of their last two games by three goals, have won just twice this season – against Ipswich and Sabah – and have just seven points from eight games, but it’s not in itself a terrible decision. If this were the board saying, “We believe in this man we appointed full-time in the summer, we’re going to give him time and the players need to stop moaning and get on with it,” if this were an attempt to break the United doom cycle, you could understand it. You might disagree with it, but it would be possible to grasp what they were doing.
But this is United, the worst-run club in the Premier League, so of course that is not what’s actually happened. For 40 hours after Sunday’s defeat to Bournemouth, the club made no public statement. Surely if they actually backed Carrick, they would have come out and said so on Monday morning? Instead, the implication is that they thought about sacking him, couldn’t work out a replacement, dithered, and finally decided to let it drift on a bit longer. Would anybody really be surprised if Carrick went in the international break? Or if he survives that, if he went, as Rúben Amorim did, in January? How is that anyway to run a football club? Or, indeed, anything.
Football has become very used to boards expressing confidence in mangers only to sack them a week later, but there’s a reason why they do that. Football management is, essentially, a confidence trick. As the great Béla Guttmann had it, “A coach is like a lion tamer. He dominates the animals, in whose cage he performs his show, as long as he deals with them with self-confidence and no fear.” Football is hard. To play football at a high level requires extraordinary physical and mental effort. Even the most dedicated players can only endure that for a manager in whom, a cause in which, they believe. It’s not even a case of players downing tools, although some clearly do. If the level drops, even a fraction, across a substantial proportion of the squad, it becomes extremely difficult to win games. The Premier League is an unforgiving, brutal world, in which any vulnerability is seized upon.
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The paradigm is familiar. Perhaps at first it’s just bad luck, or a couple of injuries, but results decline. Then morale declines, form declines, and results gets worse. The defeats begin to mount up. Even the most affable manager becomes beleaguered. He sees enemies everywhere, lashes out at the media or at referees or at fans or at directors or at players, or the fates, some combination of the six. He loses the clarity of thought that made him a successful manager. Players can see he is diminished, and at that point, it is over. It happened to Thomas Frank at Tottenham, Gary O’Neil at Wolves and Ange Postecoglou at Tottenham.
Almost whenever a manager is sacked, there’s a doubt; is modern football too quick to wield the axe? And perhaps it is. But I remember a revealing chat with the owner of a League one team, who said that they made their judgement on when to part with a manager less on results or form than on the look in their eyes: when the light goes out it’s over. It may be that managerial stints are getting shorter not because of a lack of patience, but because modern society, the constant pressure of social media, the reality-show culture of voting people out identified by Alex Ferguson, makes the light go out quicker.
Has the light gone out for Carrick? Perhaps not quite yet. He has retained his dignity and, although United were well-beaten by Bournemouth, he made his point to Bruno Fernandes. But he has been undermined by the directors. It’s not quite as bad as when United spoke to other candidates before reluctantly deciding to stick with Erik ten Hag after winning the FA Cup in 2024, but it’s bad enough.
Does anybody believe Carrick is staying on because the directors really believe in him? The only question is whether he is staying because they have failed to find a replacement, because they are working out how to afford a replacement, or because they’re simply incapable of making a decision. Carrick does not deserve to be left in limbo, having to face the press, to organise training, to pick and inspire a team. Management is hard enough without executives making it obvious they’re just waiting to get rid of you, or are just keeping you on because it would look bad for them to have – again – appointed the wrong manager.
Is there any way back? Once teams start playing as badly as United did against Bournemouth last Sunday, it’s almost impossible for managers to turn it round. Scar tissue accumulates. At United, the obvious example is Alex Ferguson, who seemed to have run out of road in the winter of 1989-90, only to win the FA Cup that season, before going on to win 13 league titles. But he always retained the support of the board. Carrick is isolated.
Chelsea are defensively suspect. Perhaps United can beat them on Saturday. Perhaps morale improves and they put a run together. But so what? The bigger problems at United will not be resolved by a few league wins and perhaps a run in the FA Cup. Sooner or later Carrick will fall and the process can begin again.
This is like the period for Amorim after the defeat at Grimsby. We’re in the endgame. The question is no longer of but when. And that’s no way to run a football club.
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