United stick with under-fire head coach for Chelsea trip

Carrick still at the wheel 

28 Oct 2026 - The Guardian

Jamie Jackson. John Brewin

Michael Carrick has been given the chance to save his job by turning Manchester United’s results around, with the head coach remaining in place for Saturday’s visit to Chelsea.

The decision by Jason Wilcox, the director of football, and Omar Berrada, the chief executive, can be viewed as a surprise given United’s dire form.

Sunday’s abject 3-0 league home defeat by Bournemouth followed last Wednesday’s equally poor 4-1 reverse at Como in the Champions League.

Carrick’s side have won twice in 12 games and were eliminated from the Carabao Cup by Brighton. United are 16th in the Premier League, a point above the relegation zone.

Carrick has also seemingly fallen out with his captain, Bruno Fernandes, who was dropped to the bench for the Bournemouth debacle after criticising the head coach’s tactics. The unease in the dressing room was also on show when Lisandro Martínez took aim at Wilcox’s transfer business after another sobering defeat, at Atlético Madrid, earlier in the month.

Yet Wilcox, who has driven the retaining of Carrick, wants to give the 45-year-old a chance to change form and morale. Whether Carrick could survive another poor performance and result at Stamford Bridge is in the balance.

United host Roma in the Champions League three days later, then Aston Villa in the league the following Sunday before a two-week international window, which would offer a longer period for the board to assess the situation.

Carrick’s reprieve may be a move to allow time for Wilcox to secure a replacement should the decision be taken to sack him.

United will have to pay Newcastle about £3m in compensation if they want Eddie Howe. He is Wilcox’s prime candidate if a change is made and the 48-year-old wants the job at Old Trafford.

When he left Newcastle at the end of July a deal was struck on the remaining terms of his contract which means the club would be due compensation. United would also have to pay Newcastle a minor sum for Howe’s staff, headed by his assistant, Jason Tindall.

Manchester United’s director of recruitment, Christopher Vivell, has been pushing the case of Julian Nagelsmann, the 39-year-old former Germany and Bayern Munich head coach. The pair worked together at RB Leipzig.

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MIRRORPIX/ GETTY IMAGES

Alex Ferguson in Moscow in 2008 with the 

Champions League trophy, after United beat Chelsea

Carrick is latest to endure the grim creep of United’s fading grandeur

Complacency, nepotism and sentimentality have prospered at Old Trafford more than any of Busby’s and Ferguson’s long list of struggling successors

Michael Carrick has spoken of chats with his former boss ... a Ferguson facsimile is a fool’s errand

28 Oct 2026 - The Guardian

John Brewin

Should any football club fit the Great Man theory of history it is Manchester United. In the past 100 years, only Matt Busby and Alex Ferguson have knocked the club into shape. A pair of 20th-century Scotsmen, born 15 miles apart in Bellshill and Govan respectively, found the key. Otherwise, United has been a managerial dustbin, Michael Carrick the latest likely lobbed on the pile.

Busby and Ferguson built the club around themselves, possessing the charisma to convince others that theirs was the path to follow. Carrick, an insider, a club man, is falling victim to the same isolation as his predecessors in failure. Bruno Fernandes and Lisandro Martínez going off-piste in TV interviews to depth charge Carrick were actually following club tradition. With glamour comes decadence, the faded grandeur that has so often chased a United manager out the door.

Beyond Busby and Ferguson, each United manager who also served felt the lash of desperation of a falling giant. Each of their defenestrations has featured an infighting that would not have been out of place in ancient Rome. Favouritism, nepotism, selfinterest, entitlement, complacency and sentimentality have been the betrayal of a legend, to use the title of Michael Crick’s and David Smith’s “j’accuse” book from 1989. Living with the legend and influence of those two managers leads the list of difficulties.

United fans know such history too well. “You lousy bastards, you let him down,” Brian Kidd told teammates when the bullet came for Wilf McGuinness, Busby’s immediate successor, in December 1970. Busby himself had done the deed. A December 1972 meeting at Selhurst Park with Tommy Docherty as Crystal Palace beat United 5-0 hastened the end for Frank O’Farrell.

Docherty’s turn came. His sacking in 1977 after an affair with the physio’s wife was announced by the club secretary, Les Olive, from behind the oak door of the chairman Louis Edwards’ Cheshire mansion. Dave Sexton was sacked in 1981 despite winning his last seven matches. Falling attendances at “Cold Trafford” did for “Whispering Dave”. Ron Atkinson turned his November 1986 sacking into a party in the office that also housed the club sunbed. Big Ron’s parting gift was the hangovers on Ferguson’s first day in charge.

Ferguson’s predecessors had been intimidated by the fog of pipe smoke wafting down Old Trafford’s corridors. O’Farrell had needed to ask Busby if the former manager could vacate the manager’s office. “A fantasy world” is how O’Farrell described Busby’s coterie of gossipy former players who teed off with “the old man” at Davyhulme golf course. “There was no reality in the myth,” the Corkman dubbed “O’Failure” said in 1991.

Busby’s indulgence of George Best, careering towards oblivion, created problems O’Farrell found unsolvable. Docherty showed the political wiles to jettison Best in January 1974 but also shelling Bobby Charlton, Denis Law and Paddy Crerand created enemies. Falling in love with Mary Brown, with whom Docherty remained for the rest of his life, was enough for a boardroom moral majority to rid themselves of their turbulent manager.

Ferguson’s successors must deal with his continued presence, the face in the crowd photographers and TV directors seek. His patronage of Malcolm Glazer’s 2005 takeover is a dubious legacy dragging down those who have followed him. Ferguson mostly keeps his own counsel, a wellremunerated club ambassador until Sir Jim Ratcliffe cancelled a £2m annual stipend in 2024. There have been slips. “You should always start with your best players,” Ferguson told the mixed martial arts fighter Khabib Nurmagomedov in 2021 when Ole Gunnar Solskjaer had dropped Cristiano Ronaldo, loose talk escaping to social media.

Ferguson’s part in Ronaldo’s disastrous return to Old Trafford evidenced continuing backchannel influence, echoing Busby and Best. Carrick, during his press conference last Friday, mentioned his chats with his former boss. The omission of Fernandes for the Bournemouth game, left to sulk on the bench in club tracksuit, was classic Fergie politics.

A Ferguson facsimile is a fool’s errand. Carrick might have learned the lessons dished out to Solskjaer, to whom he was assistant. After refusing to use Ferguson’s parking space and misty-eyed chat of “the boss”, nobody was buying the affable, gentle Norwegian cosplaying as a Glaswegian hard man.

Not that an injection of the alpha male has been much more use. Time has been kinder to the Louis van Gaal and José Mourinho regimes as subsequent failures pile up, but both failed to embrace the expectations of attacking football.

Not that other club traditions were avoided. The subterfuge that brought in Mourinho was as dastardly as any of the postBusby knifings. “People know him as a larger-than-life character,” the executive vice-chairman Ed Woodward said on Van Gaal’s 2014 appointment. “My wife had to find out when she was in the lift with Woodward’s family,” Van Gaal said of finding, in the haze of celebrating the 2016 FA Cup final victory, that he was being replaced. His former Barcelona assistant had successfully lobbied Woodward. Attempts have been made by the Glazers’ operatives and, since December 2023, Ratcliffe’s Ineos, to corporatise and professionalise but United’s innate excess and anarchy keeps overtaking rationale.

Using the means of a Netflix special, Mourinho has retrofitted his part in the story, he and Ferguson revealing together the fact he turned United down in 2013. The inference is that if Mourinho had arrived then all would have been roses.

It is an unconvincing attempt at airbrushing both men’s reputations. Where does that leave David Moyes, the immediate successor painted as afterthought? In July 2013, Ferguson was celebrated as kingmaker, Moyes the rightful heir.

Moyes’s reputation is another enhanced by failures that followed, including Mourinho’s grumpy, fractious tenure. When emerging reluctantly from his Lowry Hotel bolthole, the Portuguese reduced himself to mocking club history with “football heritage” rants. Such a scorched-earth policy was echoed by Ruben Amorim, while Erik ten Hag’s retention by Ineos in summer 2024 was as confusing to Ten Hag as to everyone else.

An unmanageable club? Busby and Ferguson showed it can be done, though the chance of another empire recedes the longer the vanity, plotting and self-interest that personify United continues. And for that, Busby and Ferguson deserve a share of the blame.