For the past 13 years, whenever Manchester United hit a rough patch, there has been one common theme: blame the manager.
From David Moyes to Louis van Gaal, José Mourinho, Ole Gunnar Solskjær, Erik ten Hag, Ruben Amorim and now Michael Carrick, the manager is always the one placed under the microscope. The tactics aren’t right. The players aren’t performing. The manager has lost the dressing room. Eventually, the manager gets the sack and everyone moves on to the next one.
But perhaps after 13 years, Manchester United should start looking a little higher up the food chain.
Because Carrick’s poor start is real. United have taken just five points from their opening five Premier League games, crashed out of the Carabao Cup to Brighton after blowing a 2–0 lead and have already lost to newly promoted Hull City and 10-man Manchester City.
The latter is particularly embarrassing for a club of United’s size. Hull had only just come up. City had ten men for the final stages of the derby. These aren’t exactly the sort of results that make a manager’s job security look particularly comfortable.
But Carrick also took this same club to third place last season and Champions League qualification after winning 11 of his first 16 matches in charge. The same manager who looked like he might have finally found something at Old Trafford is now being questioned five games into the new season.
This is Manchester United’s problem in a nutshell.
The manager changes. The problems don’t.
The Glazers deserve plenty of the blame for the state United find themselves in. Since their 2005 takeover, around £1.2 billion has left the club through debt interest, repayments, dividends and fees, according to BBC Verify.
So when Sir Jim Ratcliffe and INEOS arrived as minority shareholders in 2024, there was understandable optimism. Perhaps finally United would be run like a serious football club. Football people would make football decisions. The days of Ed Woodward and corporate executives running the football operation were supposed to be over.
Yet two years into the INEOS era, the same old questions remain.
The club’s decision-making has often looked slow and confused. United hesitated over Erik ten Hag’s future, eventually extended his contract and then sacked him a few months later. They replaced him with Amorim, a manager whose preferred 3-4-3 system represented a significant departure from United’s traditional use of wingers and wide attacking play. Amorim lasted 14 months before being dismissed.
Then Carrick came in and somehow became the unlikely solution.
And to his credit, it worked — for a while.
Last season’s attacking recruitment was probably the clearest sign of what United can achieve when they move decisively. Matheus Cunha, Bryan Mbeumo and Benjamin Šeško scored 32 Premier League goals between them.
So surely this summer was going to be the big one.
The midfield had finally become an obvious weakness and United went about fixing it. But even here, there was a sense that United were playing catch-up. Their first-choice target, Mateus Fernandes, ended up at Tottenham after Spurs were prepared to pay £85 million. United weren’t willing to match it.
They eventually brought in Andrey Santos for around £50 million, activated Youri Tielemans’ £35 million release clause and then spent another £65 million-plus on Carlos Baleba. On paper, that’s a serious amount of money. In reality, it was around £148 million on three midfielders — while Manchester City and Tottenham were spending roughly twice as much across their entire windows.
And there is a reasonable argument that Baleba only became an immediate priority after Mason Mount’s injury exposed the lack of depth in midfield. United had wanted him before, but the timing of the deal certainly raised questions about whether the club was still reacting to problems rather than getting ahead of them.
Santos might turn out to be excellent. The jury is still out. Tielemans looks like a solid professional and arrived for a relatively straightforward fee. Baleba is perhaps the more intriguing one. His 2024–25 season at Brighton was excellent, but last season was a significant step backwards. So there is still a question over which version of Carlos Baleba Manchester United are actually getting.
But that’s the problem.
Manchester United are not supposed to be shopping for adequate solutions to problems they’ve known about for years.
And this is where I keep coming back to that one word.
Slow.
United don’t seem to make decisions so much as eventually arrive at them.
They see the hole in the squad, stare at it for two or three transfer windows, debate it, analyse it, restructure the department responsible for fixing it and then, eventually, spend a truckload of money trying to fill it.
By then, the hole has usually got bigger.
Football doesn’t wait for Manchester United. The rest of the Premier League certainly doesn’t. While United are still deciding what kind of rebuild they want, everyone else is already halfway through theirs.
And nowhere is this more obvious than in defence.
Harry Maguire should have been given the football equivalent of the gold watch by now. Thanks for your service, Harry, but surely it was time for the next chapter a couple of years ago.
Luke Shaw is another. He’s an experienced player who has had some very good periods at United, but it is extraordinary that he remains the club’s only recognised senior left-back.
Then there’s Diogo Dalot.
After more than 250 appearances for Manchester United, we’re still having the conversation about whether he’s good enough to be the club’s long-term right-back. Personally, I think United should have made that decision after about 40 games.
Lisandro Martínez has been excellent at times, but injuries and his ability to stay fit have become an ongoing issue. Matthijs de Ligt is a player I like, but keeping him fit has also been a problem.
Leny Yoro and Ayden Heaven are young and still learning their trade. That’s fine. Young players need time.
But that’s precisely why United needed to move some of the older pieces on and replace them with established quality.
Instead, the club keeps carrying pieces of the previous rebuild into the next rebuild.
It’s like renovating the same house every few years without ever throwing out the furniture.
And that’s where Carrick finds himself.
He isn’t blameless. Of course he isn’t. Managers at Manchester United don’t get a free pass because the club has problems above them.
But Carrick didn’t create those problems.
He inherited them.
Omar Berrada has said United can win the Premier League by 2028. It’s an admirable ambition, and every football club should have ambition. But if the objective is to close the gap at the top of English football, there is little evidence that United have made much progress. Manchester City and Arsenal have both strengthened again this summer, while United have spent another season trying to repair problems that have existed for years. Rather than closing the gap, United risk falling further behind.
And that is what should worry Manchester United supporters. The results across the wider INEOS football operation are hardly screaming progress. Nice are struggling in France, Lausanne-Sport are sitting at the bottom of the Swiss league and United’s women’s side have started their WSL campaign without a win. Everyone associated with the INEOS football project appears to be trending in the wrong direction.
Perhaps none of those results will matter by the end of the season. But collectively, they don’t exactly inspire confidence in an ownership group that arrived promising to bring a new level of football expertise and professionalism to Manchester United.
And that brings us back to Michael Carrick.
Maybe Carrick won’t be the long-term answer. Maybe he will. But after 13 years of changing managers, changing players, changing tactics and changing sporting structures, Manchester United supporters should be looking beyond the man standing on the touchline. The manager isn’t the constant. The ownership is.
Carrick can be criticised for the football on the pitch. He should be. But if Manchester United sack another manager and start another rebuild, only for the same problems to emerge again two years later, what exactly has been achieved?
At some point, you have to stop sacking the employees and start questioning the people running the company.
Manchester United can’t afford to go cheap again next summer. There can’t be another £150 million transfer budget that is dependent on player sales, while the club watches its rivals spend heavily to improve their squads. Whoever is in the dugout next season needs to be backed properly. No excuses, no waiting for sales, no trying to plug five holes with three players. Because if Manchester United go into next season with Harry Maguire and Diogo Dalot still starting in defence, there will be more than protests outside Old Trafford before games. The city and its supporters might actually riot.
The time for half-measures is over. It’s time for the owners to finally act like they mean business.
