F or a window into the alarming dysfunction at Manchester United that Michael Carrick failed to manage and caused his sacking , consider the case of Eddie Howe, initially a favourite to succeed the 45-year-old before Mauricio Pochettino’s emergence as the chosen one.
The former Newcastle manager had been Jason Wilcox’s choice to take over from Carrick. Howe was also the favoured candidate of Dan Ashworth, Wilcox’s predecessor as United’s director of football, to follow Erik ten Hag after the Dutchman’s sacking in October 2024. Except Wilcox disagreed and Sir Jim Ratcliffe went with Wilcox’s man, Ruben Amorim, and that December Ashworth departed only five months after joining.
At that juncture Wilcox was the technical director. Now he is United’s highest-ranking football executive, the powerbroker. He was able, apparently with a straight face, to recommend to Ratcliffe that Howe, nearly two years after he rejected him, should become United’s eighth permanent No 1 in the 13 and a half years since Sir Alex Ferguson retired.
If following this is difficult, making sense of it is near impossible. Should London’s West End need a new farce then look no further than the wacky world of Ratcliffe and the football department he leads, which is also headed up by Omar Berrada, the chief executive, and is proving a disjointed, illogical operation.
Yet if this meant Carrick was dealt a treacherous hand, it is also true that he should have played it better. This, after all, is the job of a football coach: to somehow make wine from water – even if the water is murky, and may need purifying first.
José Mourinho, one of Carrick’s predecessors, from May 2016 to December 2018, showed how – to a degree. Mourinho stated famously that leading United to second place in 2017-18 (with 81 points, 19 behind Manchester City) was one of his finest achievements. This from a serial winner who broke the United-Arsenal duopoly of the Premier League to take Chelsea to consecutive crowns (2004-05 and 2005-06), and made history in Italy by guiding Inter to the treble in 2009-10.
Mourinho’s billing of that second place was down to having to negotiate a similar shambles, overseen by Ed Woodward, the then executive vice-chair.
The Portuguese’s opening campaign ended with the Carabao Cup and Europa League collected despite, like Carrick, having to deal with a hierarchy convinced that it knew better than the man it hired as the football expert.
Here we arrive at a fundamental quality Carrick lacked: an ability to be streetwise when really required. For an example of Mourinho’s nous, rewind to a pre-season tour of America when this correspondent was offered an off-the-record sounding about a player he wanted out of the club but the executive did not.
The manager wanted his message out – that this was a player non grata . Machiavellian or pragmatic? A guess says Carrick would never dream of employing a similar tactic to achieve the best result for the team. But why not? Mourinho wanted a bad egg gone before the dressing room was stunk out and on-field prospects undermined.
Carrick, in his last month, encountered two of his own malevolents: Lisandro Martínez, a de facto captain who dared to criticise Wilcox’s recruitment after the 2-0 defeat by Atlético Madrid; and Bruno Fernandes, Carrick’s official leader, who betrayed his manager by questioning his tactics after the 4-1 humiliation at Como .
Each crossed a line and were emblematic of a chaotic changing room, a major factor in the dismal run of two wins from 12 games this season, including elimination from the Carabao Cup, and the league return of eight points from 10 matches that has United in the relegation zone.
Fernandes, Martínez and a club run like a banana republic are the next man’s problem, just as Mourinho inherited from Louis van Gaal, who was sacked the day after winning the 2016 FA Cup, the faults at boardroom level embodied by Woodward.
Here we see the recurring problem at United: a new gun is hired and is bequeathed a sorry mess that is impossible to clean up because there is no true will to eradicate it. Why? Because the only real reset of culture would be for Ratcliffe, who owns 29.4%, Wilcox, Berrada and the Glazer family, whose ownership since 2005 has left the club about £1.2bn in debt, to accept they are the problem and depart.
Carrick is a good guy whose adoration of United was returned to him by the support, underlined by the reception he got from the Stretford End after the 3-0 humbling by Bournemouth last month. Yet being a decent man and head coach was not enough.
In elite sport the fine margins are often trumpeted as the difference between triumph and failure. Last season, from mid-January, Carrick worked these his way as Manchester City, Arsenal, Liverpool and Chelsea were defeated and United lost only two of his 17 games as interim head coach.
This season, though, the fall-off was startling – and Carrick was found wanting. Who knows what might have occurred if United were the “best-in-class” organisation Ratcliffe insisted the club would be under him. As with the muddled thinking regarding Howe, “worst-in-class” may be a more apt characterisation.
The agonising, overlong process to decide Carrick should be sacked was the latest illustration. On Monday evening the Guardian broke the news that Wilcox and Berrada would recommend to Ratcliffe that Carrick should be removed. Yet days passed during which Carrick still took training and it emerged the deal for Pochettino was being finalised. A proper functioning organisation would have acted more swiftly and with more style.
This is what the next manager has to grapple with. He may succeed. But the odds are stacked against it owing to the deep structural faults that undermine the modern Manchester United .
