It's happened again. Another season, another Manchester United crisis. No longer does the end of daylight savings time herald the harsh winter ahead. Instead, it is the boos that ring around Old Trafford as the United faithful turn their ire on the same owners, the same executives and the same players, well aware it will be a different coach that pays the price.

Sunday's 3-0 defeat to AFC Bournemouth was remarkable only for the sheer unremarkability of it. In the 74 years after their first meeting in the 1949 FA Cup third round, Bournemouth won three games against Manchester United. In the last two years they have won three games: all at Old Trafford, all 3-0. Freddie Kruger is treading the boards at the Theatre of Dreams.

Although maybe that analogy is not quite apt. After all, the one positive that you could say about a Krugerian nightmare is that it tends to be a one-and-done situation. No such luck if you happen to be a Manchester United supporter. Could any of them now believe that sacking Michael Carrick would fix anything about this club? They've tried the Eddie Howe-esque Premier League mainstay, the relentless winner a la Antonio Conte, the graduate of the Ralf Rangnick pressing academy in the mold of Julian Nagelsmann. Their shortlist only needs an ex-Ajax coach to sweep the quadrants of post-Sir Alex Ferguson ineptitude. Fred Grim to Manchester United? Well, doesn't that sound about right?

This is a club suffering under profound mismanagement, the sort that no one individual can marshal on their own. So there's plenty of blame to spread around. Let's start doing so, in reverse order of course. Gotta keep you on the page as long as we can. Build some suspense. Who might be top, you wonder? Well you probably know. But you know most every AAA movie is going to end with the hero triumphant. The joy is in the journey to the inevitable end point.

5. Michael Carrick

Now look, the soon to be former Manchester United manager is not without his faults, as Bruno Fernandes so robustly articulated after the 4-1 defeat in Como. There have been some very weird technical decisions here this season and a head coach with a scintilla of authority probably could have got this team to stop taking so many shots from outside the box. And yet did anyone at Manchester United genuinely think they'd unearthed the next great coach when they threw him the salvage our season post-Ruben Amorim job?

That Carrick did so much more than that, guiding United to Champions League qualification through a third-placed finish, spoke to his ability to keep things simple. He retained what had worked from his predecessor, tidied up some of the complexities of the formation and rode Bruno Fernandes' player of the season form as far as he could go. It is not his fault that United have not kicked on since. What had the 45 year old achieved in three seasons at Middlesbrough that suggested a coach who would do much more than what most coaches do, get a team to perform at or around its talent level?

Maybe when the stars align, when his team has a game a week and a fully fit squad he could achieve something better than the field but it is no more sensible to project out Carrick's future off the spring hot streak than it is to discount his coaching ability because he has struggled to cope with the first confluence of injuries, unfortunate results and player ill-discipline of his tenure.

Old Trafford seemed to have the right sense of it on Sunday. "It's Carrick you know," reverberated around the ground until the minute he was down the tunnel. Then it was both barrels for everyone else.

4. The unbearable weight of being Manchester United

No one associated with Manchester United should apologize for having exacting standards. A well-run version of this club would make every decision based on improving their title-winning prospects either in the short or medium term. There should be no need to take the long way to the Premier League summit.

Having said all that, goodness it does not take much to send this club into a doom spiral of nostalgia and despair. When Lisandro Martinez served notice on Jason Wilcox and the hierarchy United had performed pretty well in defeat away to Atletico Madrid, a result that few in the Champions League field could credibly bemoan. Their form had wobbled but only a dodgy Erling Haaland goal had taken Manchester City past them and the last two Premier League results had been disappointing but not disastrous draws.

In short things were not going well but the difficulties were explicable. Up to the loss at the Metropolitano at least one of United's major problems was they had scored fewer goals than their expected goals (xG) for and conceded more than the xG value of their opponents shots. Their actual goal difference was minus-one, their expected goal difference was a shade under plus four. There's some heavy lifting being done in there by thrashing Ipswich Town and Sabah but the aggregate of a good team probably does contain a couple of thrashings as well as games where you play even against seemingly inferior teams like Fulham.

In short, just as United weren't as good as last season's rise to third place -- the defense started wobbling quite dramatically into the spring -- they aren't really as bad as 16th in the table, a point clear of the relegation zone might have you believe. A clear-eyed assessment both of the relative talent of United and the rest of the league would say that this is a good team vulnerable to a wobble. Just stay the course, keep calm in the dressing room and block out the noise.

But, of course... this is Manchester United we're talking about.

3. The INEOS sporting hierarchy

Sir Jim Ratcliffe certainly talked a good game when he finally got his hands on the sporting infrastructure at Old Trafford in February 2024, his $1.6 billion investment for around a quarter of the club affording him INEOS Group control of football operations at United. No longer would this be a club in hock to the first team head coach, the Ferguson way of thinking to be replaced by a brain trust that included the sporting director, "probably the recruitment guys" and, for reasons, the chief executive and Ratcliffe himself. "In modern football, you need to decide what's your path and stick to your path," the new minority owner insisted.

In the two and a half years since Manchester United's path has led them to: openly canvass the market for a replacement for manager Erik ten Hag, trigger an extension clause in his contract when they couldn't find anyone better, spend over $400 million outfitting the Dutchman with new players, sack him within four months, hire a coach in Ruben Amorim who had talked himself out of better jobs thanks to his insistence on playing a 3-4-3, finish 15th, sack Amorim just as their analytical profile was on an upswing because he had fallen out with his employers, bring in Carrick temporarily and then permanently, spend almost all their budget on midfielders, get dragged in public by Martinez.

That's just the condensed lowlights. It's fair to say that you don't hear much any more about Project 150, the ambitious vision to mark a century and a half of the club with a 21st top flight title. Perhaps by 2028 sporting director Wilcox will have got round to fixing the defense having blown so much of the 2025 summer budget on attack before then spending nearly $200 million on a midfield that needed upgrades but got Youri Tielemans, Andrey Santos and Carlos Baleba while the left back spot was left untouched.

It would say everything about the cataclysmic mismanagement at a senior level if Wilcox -- like so many at the club a man with little top level experience of the role he has been thrust into -- gets the man said to be his preferred choice to succeed Carrick, Eddie Howe.

The same Eddie Howe who spent a hugely successful two years with Dan Ashworth at Newcastle United. The same Dan Ashworth who Manchester United spent £4.1 million on the poaching of and, five months later, firing of. The same Manchester United who in INEOS' period running the show rank ninth in the Premier League for points, 10th for expected goal difference. Still, at least they sacked staff and cut costs. Who ever could have imagined that as a fix for a business' problems?

2. The players

Speaking after Sunday's 3-0 loss to Bournemouth, Harry Maguire pulled no punches. "At the moment it's nowhere near good enough and something needs to change," he said. He's not wrong. And yet the only constants at this club sit second and first in our rankings. Cast your mind back to the 4-0 thrashing at the hands of Brentford in August 2022, Erik ten Hag's second game in charge and oh, what, half a dozen crises ago. The starting back four for Manchester United on that Saturday evening in west London? Diego Dalot, Harry Maguire, Lisandro Martinez, Luke Shaw. The starting back four in draws against Fulham and Everton more than four years later? Dalot, Maguire, Martinez, Shaw.

There are players at this club who have seen off half a dozen permanent managers. Some might not have lasted that long but in their time they have been frozen out or put up for sale. Few have paid the price for inconsistency. Why would you respect the authority of the head coach if you have spent three or four years in the Old Trafford dressing room and seen so many cycle through without any apparent accountability for the playing staff. It seems notable that Cristiano Ronaldo's bombing out by Ten Hag was followed by one of the most impressive runs of results in the last half decade. Players discovered their actions had consequences and started playing like that.

Now, they talk like they are bulletproof. Imagine Martin Odegaard used a post-match interview to mouth off about Mikel Arteta's tactics. Would he ever play for Arsenal again? That's a question Mesut Ozil and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang can answer. When a player did not perform for Pep Guardiola's Manchester City, he was swiftly sold. Meanwhile United's squad is preserved in aspic. Their defense moves like it is.

These are not players who lack for talent. United's first choice attack rivals any bar Manchester City and Liverpool. Their midfield needs careful construction to mitigate for its lack of pace but it has quality. When the mood takes them Maguire, Martinez and Shaw are perfectly solid defenders. As the graphic above suggests, this is a team that can have moments of extreme competence. That is how United got to third a few months ago. Were they helped by the coach's tactics or the hierarchy's recruitment? Not really but that does not make these expensive, well-remunerated players innocent bystanders, unable to arrest the decline. 

1. The Glazers

More than two decades after Malcolm Glazer loaded debt onto Manchester United to fund his purchase of the club, what has been accomplished beyond a steady degradation of this behemoth of English culture. Being owned by the Glazers, who have not put any money into the club since the takeover, is estimated to have cost the club at least $1.5 billion, much of it spent on servicing debt from the initial takeover. It should be noted that 15 major trophies have been won in the time the Glazers have owned the club but 10 of them came in the period where Ferguson's sheer magnetism held the club together.

There is an argument to be made that United's commercial income skyrocketed under current ownership and certainly this was a club that was among the first to realize that every region could have its own bespoke set of sponsors, that there was always another billboard or patch on the jersey to splash with a logo. Those brands were not, however, flocking to United because of anything the Glazers had done. United were the dominant force in English football at just the right moment to benefit from the Premier League moving from national to global obsession.

Far from custodians, the Glazers are the most deleterious of landlords. An extractive force, they provide minimal service and value while taking their management fees, dividends, repayments and then the riches Ratcliffe paid for a slice of the pie. All of their money could have gone into retaining United's preeminence in the English game or at least staving off the impact of their indifference. As if to make the metaphor particularly on the nose, on their watch Old Trafford has decayed such that the cost of renovation, an estimated $1.6 billion, might just make a case for the planned new stadium that no supporter seems to want.

A club that even in fallow years ranks among the top 10 revenue generators in football has found itself on a cost-cutting drive for which Ratcliffe is the face both because the Glazers' debt acts as a competitive drag and because ownership showed no interest nor aptitude in improving the on-field product. If the players represent a culture that is accountability-lite then it is ownership that enables it. When we start this piece by warning that nothing will change post-Carrick it is because we have seen enough to know that nothing changes until those who tolerate this degradation of Manchester United are no longer in a position of power.