Manchester United have agreed to make Mauricio Pochettino their head coach from 18 November, and the people who hired him have already set the appointment up to fail.
This is a club that had Pochettino in the room in 2024, interviewed by INEOS, available, interested, and decided he wasn't the answer. They went another way. That way led to Ruben Amorim, then to Michael Carrick, who was sacked on Thursday after the worst start to a league campaign the club has had in 40 years. Through those ten games, United sat 18th in the 20-team table on eight points. That record is Carrick's, frozen on the day he was let go, and it's the pit Pochettino has agreed to climb into.
So United have come back, cap in hand, to the man they rejected. He's two years older now, walking into a mid-season job with no preseason and no time to shape the squad, and United paid the U.S. Soccer Federation £7m to prise him out of the job he already had. He'll finish two Nations League games against Haiti, fly to Manchester on Wednesday, and officially start on 18 November. His first assignment is a trip to Anfield to face Liverpool on 22 November.
Nobody designed this sequence to work. There's a whole international break sitting right there, the one window a new manager would kill for to run his ideas into tired legs on a training pitch. Pochettino will spend most of it on the other side of the Atlantic coaching someone else's team. By the time he takes a United session, Anfield is days away.
There's a grim symmetry to the fixture, too. Pochettino's last Premier League match, with Chelsea, was a win over Andoni Iraola's Bournemouth. His first with United is away to Iraola's Liverpool. Iraola links the two games, closing out the last chapter and opening the next.
Pochettino's quality as a coach isn't in question. He overachieved at Southampton and Tottenham, reaching a Champions League final with Spurs, then won the Ligue 1 title at PSG in 2021-22. He drags standards up by force. Ask Rickie Lambert, who once complained about doing twelve brutal horseshoe runs in training and was made to do twenty-four at the next session. That's exactly the kind of iron a soft, confused United squad needs.
He was also the best realistic name on the board. A proven top-level manager willing to walk into this is not a long list, and United got one. The merit in the appointment itself is real.
The optimism dies the second you look up from the touchline to the directory above it. This is the fourth coaching change of United's current spiral: Ten Hag, Amorim, Carrick, Pochettino. Four names on the door, the same people turning the handle every time. Jim Ratcliffe has spent a fortune and changed everything except the thing that keeps failing. Sacking a manager every few months just advertises that United don't know what the problem is.
United are betting that a manager they didn't rate in 2024 will succeed in 2026 under worse conditions: less time, less control over the squad, and a brutal opening fixture, all run by the same board that's gotten every call wrong. If Pochettino goes the way of the last three, nobody should point at the dugout. The men who built the trap are sitting upstairs.
