Mauricio Pochettino is just another spin of the same wheel Manchester United have been spinning since 2013.
On November 12, 2026, United sacked Michael Carrick, a club legend as a player, with the team sitting in the Premier League relegation zone and winless in its last eight league games. Carrick had only been handed the permanent job months earlier, after steadying the club as caretaker and guiding them to a third-place finish the previous season. That's the deal at Old Trafford now. You get promoted for surviving, then sacked for not transcending. The plan to replace him, under an agreement in principle reached after a Monaco meeting between CEO Omar Berrada, director of football Jason Wilcox and co-owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe, is Pochettino, who as of this week remains the USMNT head coach and is set to take charge against Haiti on Saturday.
The Pochettino romance keeps skating past something simple: a glowing reputation, and no silverware to his name in England. Five and a half years at Tottenham with a loaded squad, Harry Kane, Son Heung-min, Dele Alli, Christian Eriksen, Mousa Dembele, Toby Alderweireld, Jan Vertonghen, Kyle Walker, and the trophy case stayed empty. A Champions League final lost in 2018-19. A runner-up league finish in 2016-17, his best domestic return. Then one season at Chelsea that ended in a parting after sixth place. His major honours came at PSG, in a league with a fraction of the Premier League's depth. That's the CV United's hierarchy is reportedly willing to buy out of his new USMNT contract for, a fee reported in the $10m range, plus around $2m more to bring his staff. United's hierarchy wants the reputation as a culture-builder; the trophy case is empty. It's a bet on vibes.
There's a version of this that sounds reasonable: almost nobody could drag this squad back to a settled top-four side right now, so steadying United into a serviceable mid-table team would count as a result, and Pochettino is as good a candidate as any to do it. But that just shows the ceiling is the club itself. United keep treating the dugout as the lever to pull while the real problems, a bloated, badly built squad and a sporting structure that gets rebuilt every year under a boardroom that can't hold a philosophy for more than a season, go untouched.
If this goes through, Pochettino becomes United's eighth permanent manager since Ferguson retired 13 years ago, after David Moyes, Louis van Gaal, Jose Mourinho, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, Erik ten Hag, Ruben Amorim and now Carrick, with caretakers stacked on top of that. Every failure traces back to the people above the dugout, no matter who's coaching. Swapping the name on the office again, without changing who makes the calls above it, is just a reflex.
Carrick isn't to blame here. He got a brutal job on a short runway and never got the patience English football usually gives club legends. Pochettino isn't really to blame either; by every account he didn't force this, United came to him, the way they keep coming to him. This lands on Ratcliffe's football operation: Berrada, Wilcox, and an ownership group that keeps treating a recruitment problem like a dugout problem. A new manager might buy a bounce, and United's floor right now is relegation form, so a bounce would be welcome. But unless the people upstairs finally build a stable football department instead of striking another managerial match, this ends the way the last seven ended: a statement thanking a man for his service, and another search starting the next morning. The manager keeps changing. The people who keep getting it wrong never do.
