Michael Carrick’s Man Utd tenure ended in the relegation zone, and the sack was fair on results. It would not be fair to put it all on him. The BBC’s Simon Stone, in his account of how the season unravelled, writes that Carrick made mistakes but that recruitment let him down too. Reading his piece alongside the league table, we count four reasons behind the Man Utd Carrick sack, and only one of them looks clearly Carrick’s own. Mauricio Pochettino is walking into the other three.

The back four that never changed

United have conceded 30 goals in all competitions this season, the most of any team in Europe’s top five leagues apart from Lens, by Stone’s count. Nineteen of them have come in ten league games. Stone points out that the back four for the first home game of the season was the same as it was for Erik ten Hag’s first home game in 2022, and that central defence was left as it was. In the three games after the Bournemouth defeat, at Chelsea, against Roma and against Aston Villa, they let in eight, BBC Sport reports.

Left-back made it worse. Luke Shaw started every league game last season, which Stone calls an outlier in an otherwise injury-hit career, and United backed off adding competition because they thought they could sign Lewis Hall from Newcastle next summer. Shaw got injured, and Carrick ended up starting five different players there. Our reading: a head coach can’t coach his way out of that. It was a squad-building call made above him.

No striker, then no Amad

Benjamin Sesko has started two games and scored two goals. He had only two substitute appearances before the window closed, and Carrick said he would be out for a long time, thought to be until at least January. In the 48 hours before the opener at Hull, Amad Diallo also hurt his ankle, which ruled him out for seven weeks. That left Bryan Mbeumo playing on the right of the attack and Carrick turning to Matheus Cunha, whose preference for dropping deep, Stone writes, took him into the spaces Bruno Fernandes likes to occupy.

That is the one failure Stone puts on Carrick: he calls the Hull performance inexplicable and says it set the tone. Two players wanting the same pocket of the pitch is a problem a coach is paid to solve in training, and that part is fair criticism.

A midfield rebuilt too late

Casemiro left and United chased Elliot Anderson and Mateus Fernandes before the £70m deal for Carlos Baleba was completed on 25 August. An ankle problem meant he didn’t make his debut until 10 October, and after five starts he’s out with a hamstring injury. Tielemans cost £35m from Villa and scored his first goal in the 4-4. Andrey Santos has started four league games.

The side effect is the one that hurts. A source close to one player questioned the focus on midfield, Stone writes, because it moved Fernandes away from the central role he excelled in over the second half of last season. Carrick said on 13 August, at the pre-season camp, “We want more, we need more.” Baleba, the biggest of the three signings, was the last to arrive.

A dressing room that talked in public

After the 2-0 loss at Atletico Madrid, Lisandro Martinez criticised the summer recruitment and pointed at technical director Jason Wilcox, who days later flew to Monaco with chief executive Omar Berrada to discuss Carrick’s future with Sir Jim Ratcliffe. After the 4-1 defeat by Como, Fernandes criticised Carrick’s tactics, and the captain was dropped for the Bournemouth game, a 3-0 home defeat in which the players were booed off. Stone also writes that United’s fitness was questioned time and again.

BBC Sport’s Sami Mokbel reports that United’s leadership told Carrick results and performances had to improve over Chelsea, Roma and Aston Villa, and that a defeat, a win and a draw were not enough, with too little progress on team structure.

What Pochettino inherits

Last season United won 12 of 17 games under Carrick and returned to the Champions League, and he signed a two-year deal in May. He lasted under six months of it. The 5-2 win over Ipswich, in the second week of the season, is still United’s last league win. Pochettino faces that run on Sunday 22 November at Anfield (4.30pm UK time) with Pochettino’s first training session due on 18 or 19 November, the BBC reports, and the left-back and centre-back problems are still there. The fixtures after Liverpool are in the next ten league games.