Forget Eddie Howe: Man United's next manager decision could be utterly pointless

Give Michael Carrick this much credit: He clearly knows how to hang on to a job. Perhaps not to a lead or to the loyalty of his dressing room, but he seems grimly determined to cling onto his role as Manchester United manager, no matter how dire the situation becomes.

Sunday’s 3-0 defeat to Bournemouth at Old Trafford, a result which left United winless in eight consecutive matches, represented a nadir which would cost almost any coach their career at almost any club. Not Carrick, however. Not for another week, at least.

The Athletic were the first to report it, but several outlets have now seemingly confirmed the fact that the club’s senior leadership have decided to give Carrick the chance to turn their abysmal form around following talks on Monday. That unexpected stay of execution came as a surprise given that BBC Sport had only just reported that United were already considering potential replacements, including Eddie Howe and Julian Nagelsmann.

Given that United’s leadership already seem to be sounding out alternatives, one wonders how much grace will be extended to Carrick. Would it survive a defeat to Chelsea at Stamford Bridge on Saturday? Another critical outburst from a senior player? More importantly, however – if Manchester United fire Carrick and appoint somebody else, would it really make any difference?

Manchester United will sack Michael Carrick eventually – and it probably won’t achieve anything

Carrick cut a particularly dejected figure when he trudged from the field at Old Trafford after the thrashing they took at the hands of Bournemouth. His body language was easily interpreted as that of a man saying goodbye.

It wasn’t just the defeat which made Carrick look like a dead man walking, but the fact that his attempt to re-establish his authority over a seemingly rebellious squad by dropping Bruno Fernandes following the Portuguese’s midfielders critical comments had backfired. Sunday’s farrago cost United three points and Carrick any real chance to put himself back in a position of strength.

Fernandes probably thought that his outburst had achieved its desired effect – most observers certainly did after the weekend – but instead he returned to training on Tuesday to find that Carrick was still in charge and that his attempted revolution had been rather French in flavour, having failed to remove anybody from power despite all the sound, fury and headlines it generated.

And much like rioting in France, such dressing room revolts seem to be extremely common in Manchester. Fernandes isn’t the first to get fed up with a coach, or with the owners, or with the weather. He joins a long and storied list of players ranging from Cristiano Ronaldo to Lisandro Martínez.

If Carrick’s coaching was the fundamental problem at Manchester United, then Fernandes’ miniature mutiny would have felt like an isolated incident. Instead, it forms part of a rich tapestry of frustration which stretches back to the end of Sir Alex Ferguson’s tenure. How many players have lost their temper or downed tools or become a supposed ‘problem’ over the last decade or more? And what does that say about the atmosphere at the club and its senior management?

Fernandes is fed up with Carrick. Martínez appeared to be more upset by director of football Jason Wilcox. Past players have taken umbrage with Ruben Amorim, Erik ten Hag, José Mourinho, and indeed almost anybody who has found themselves in some position of authority or another.

Managers and directors and executives have been hired and fired, but the results have been largely the same, and the only conclusion can be that the problem is the people who hire them – the owners who have systematically leeched the club for as much money as possible while laying off low-paid staff and refusing to fix the roof.

Most Manchester United supporters know this, of course, which is why many of them applauded a dejected Carrick from the pitch on Sunday despite recent results. He is simply the latest head coach to run head first into the brick wall of a football club at which the buck stops with people who don’t know how to run a football club properly.

Neither the Glazers nor Sir Jim Ratcliffe are likely to sack themselves, however, so it’s people like Carrick (and probably Wilcox one day) who pay the price – and while Carrick will get at least one more chance to try and scrape a win with a team who have lost all faith in him and appear to be in a state of psychological collapse, his days still look numbered.

Sooner or later, United are likely to turn to Howe, or Nagelsmann, or any other coach who is either sufficiently foolish or sufficiently unemployed to risk their reputation on a club which chews coaching careers up and spits them back out. Perhaps, eventually, one such appointment might even work out.

Carrick deserves some of the blame – but nobody can succeed under such circumstances

While the bulk of the criticism probably deserves to be aimed at the board rather than at Carrick, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a share of the blame that should land at his door. His failure to find any kind of Plan B amid a rapidly unravelling season hasn’t exactly helped matters.

To those who watched Carrick at Middlesbrough, his lack of ingenuity under pressure won’t necessarily have come as a shock. A constant in his work at the Riverside was that although he put together a solid and broadly successful team, he was rarely able to turn the tide during games when things weren’t working out. He is a likeable and presumably capable coach, but not a natural tactician or an improviser.

Which perhaps explains why he hasn’t made any noticeable adjustments to the system amid a run of eight games without a win. Manchester United have been dreadful, time and time again, and yet Carrick has put his persisted in ploughing ahead in the wrong direction.

Carrick simply doesn’t seem to be a coach who can diagnose the tactical issues with his teams and find appropriate remedies, either within a given match or on a wider scale. He has many plausible excuses for recent failures, but he hasn’t offered any meaningful solutions either.

Similarly, Ten Hag’s system was full of faults – he seemed to be unclear on how a midfield was meant to function – while Amorim dogmatically insisted on sticking with a three-at-the-back formation which didn’t remotely suit the side he had at his disposal. The managers have been at fault as well as those who appointed them and shaped their squads.

Would Eddie Howe be a viable replacement? He’s more tactically savvy than Carrick, even if he too has very clear systemic preferences which would have to be catered to. Nagelsmann, likewise, needs a team that suits his own high-intensity vision for the game.

Both would probably have a firmer grasp on the kind of tactical ins and outs which can win games when vibes and motivation alone will fall short. Both are likely better head coaches than Carrick, and perhaps better than Ten Hag, Amorim and Ole Gunnar Solskjær before him. Both might get the dressing room on side in the short-term and oversee an uptick in results, as Carrick himself did at first. But sooner or later, both would run into the same barriers those who came before them faced.

Every time a coach has come in with a shopping list of needs, they have been provided with the wrong players, often signed at great expense. Wilcox’s much-vaunted refurbishment of the midfield resulted in the arrival of a mish-mash of players with different styles and traits, including a £50m transfer for a Chelsea player with limited first-team experience and a £70m investment in a youngster who had just endured a rather awful year at Brighton.

Simultaneously, he failed to find a full-back when at least one was an obvious requirement, and neglected to add any fresh faces to a rather thin front line. Manchester United’s summer transfer window looked bad at the time and looks far worse now.

But Wilcox isn’t the first man in his position – or a similar one with a slightly different title – to find it tough to get the right players in. Either the club’s recruitment teams aren’t being given the resources they require, or the owners are persistently appointing the wrong people to run them.

One way or another, it all comes back to the ownership. Carrick and Wilcox probably deserve a share of the blame, but their culpability for the current mess pales into insignificance compared to that which belongs to the Glazers and Ineos. The problem is that they don’t seem to be going anywhere.

Would Howe, Nagelsmann, or some other proven head coach be a better appointment than Carrick? Very likely. It’s also very likely, however, that it wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference in the long run.