Manchester United sacked Michael Carrick on Thursday morning, and by lunchtime the club was calling him a legend. Both things are true. Neither one fixes a single problem at Old Trafford.
The sacking solves nothing. United were 18th in the Premier League when Omar Berrada told Carrick he was done, with one win from their first ten league games and eight points on the board. They'd dropped into the relegation zone after nine games, something that had never happened to this club in the Premier League era. That's a disaster. Carrick didn't build it alone, and anyone pretending otherwise is doing the boardroom a favour.
Go back to the summer: Casemiro left, Manuel Ugarte got injured, and Marcus Rashford was the only returning first-teamer. That's the squad Carrick had to fight on multiple fronts with, and his own players said so out loud. Lisandro Martinez took aim at the board over the signings. The recruitment department, led by director of football Jason Wilcox, reportedly pinched pennies on moves for Andrey Santos, Youri Tielemans and Carlos Baleba rather than sign the players the manager actually needed. You can't send a coach into a relegation fight two players short and then act shocked when he loses it.
Then there's the dressing room. Carrick benched his own captain, Bruno Fernandes, for a game after Fernandes complained about his tactics following a 4-1 defeat to Como. That's been cited as proof Carrick lost the room, but a squad this thin, assembled this badly, was always going to turn on whoever stood in the technical area. The manager is the one person in this building the fans see every weekend, so the manager is the one who pays.
Berrada and Wilcox flew to Monaco on Wednesday to put Carrick's fate in front of Sir Jim Ratcliffe, and the three of them decided the answer was to remove the one man who had nothing to do with signing the players. Ratcliffe has put £300m of his own money into this club and provided transfer funds since taking over football affairs in 2024, and United's start to this season was their worst in four decades. Paul Scholes said he can't name one positive thing Ratcliffe and INEOS have done since they arrived. That's not something Scholes says lightly.
Yes, one win in ten is a sacking offence. Results like that get managers fired at every club on earth, and United are entitled to want better. But firing Carrick only makes sense if you believe he caused the problem. He didn't. He inherited a half-finished squad and a feuding captain, and was gone 173 days after signing his permanent deal.
Mauricio Pochettino, the reported front-runner, is the current USMNT head coach and by every account a good manager. United were finalising a deal for him, though nothing was official and he remains contracted to the United States. He's walking into the same squad Carrick had, picked by the same recruitment operation and signed off by the same owner. The name on the whiteboard changes. The people who decide who plays for this club don't.
United haven't sacked anyone above the manager yet. Next time it'll have Pochettino's name on it.
