Michael Carrick is to blame for the shape and the freeze that produced Manchester United's 4-1 battering in Como on October 21. The real reason sits higher up at the club. He picked a pressing plan that invited a confident Como side to run at a team missing nine players, and his own captain shredded it on live television before the coach had even cooled down. That's on Carrick. But if you think sacking him fixes any of this, you haven't been watching.
The match itself was a hammering with no asterisk big enough to cover it. Nico Paz scored twice and set up another, Douvikas and Jacobo Ramón piled on, and United's only reply came late through Zirkzee after an Amad chip. Carrick called the performance "not acceptable" and said he was "really angry but you've got to move on and deal with what's next." He finished the night with his hands up toward the fans who'd stuck around. It was United's seventh game without a win in all competitions, and the second straight Champions League night where they were punished early and never recovered.
Nine players were missing, and that's a real excuse. It's also a trap: Como were short on bodies too and still played the braver, sharper game. A manager doesn't get credit for a thin squad when the opponent has the same problem and still plays like the bigger club.
This goes beyond one touchline call. Speaking to TNT Sports, Bruno Fernandes went after the coaching staff's pressing scheme, calling it a decision "to not press man-to-man and sometimes leave a little bit of space." Asked straight whether Carrick got it wrong, he said: "That's on the manager and on the staff to see it, it's not on me." A captain just publicly peeled the players away from the coach's decisions, and it echoes what happened weeks earlier at Atletico Madrid, where United lost 2-0 and Lisandro Martinez took aim at technical director Jason Wilcox for failing to reinforce the squad. It took a meeting between Carrick, Martinez and Wilcox to patch things up. The complaint never went away. It just walked onto the pitch in Como.
The pattern is plain enough. Carrick replaced Ruben Amorim, sacked in January, and got the permanent job in May with a deal through 2028. That's three different men in the Old Trafford dugout inside roughly a year. United are living through their worst start to a season in about four decades. They blew a 2-0 home lead and went out of the Carabao Cup to Brighton. Three days before Como, they drew 1-1 at Leeds, where Mbeumo's goal was cancelled out by Calvert-Lewin, at the same ground where Amorim's reign ended in January. That's a problem with the club itself.
Keeping Carrick has one real defense, and it doubles as an indictment of everyone above him: change the manager again and the same overpaid, underperforming defense is still on the field next week, picked by the same structure that built it. Swap the coach and nothing else changes.
The betting markets have swung hard and fast on Carrick in the weeks since Atletico Madrid, turning him into favorite to be the next Premier League manager sacked, and if United keep losing like this, he'll go. Results are results, and he doesn't get a pass on the first twenty minutes twice in a row. But Wilcox and the INEOS structure that sent a nine-man-short squad to a Champions League away game, and now watches its own captain torch the coaching staff on TNT, keep their jobs while the man they under-equipped takes the bullet. Fire Carrick and hire whoever you like. Until the people who built this wreck answer for it, the next face will be back in Como soon enough.
