Manchester United have once again checked all other possibilities, and it’s come down to the manager.

At time of writing, Michael Carrick has not yet been sacked. By time of reading, he might have been, who knows. What’s certain either way is that very soon he will have been sacked. Will that on its own make Man United any good?

Will it f*ck. Conveniently, that would require precisely 10 departures. A topical top 10 departures, if you will.

Michael Carrick
He is still obviously one of them, and the easiest to make happen. Manchester United are a broken club with a broken model that has left them hiring and firing a string of ‘not the problem, but definitely not the solution’ managers of which Carrick might be the most blatant example.

We mock Knows The Club and DNA nonsense quite harshly, but it’s obviously not completely meaningless. It has some power, but it can only ever be part of the deal. United have now more than once made it the ultimate and, let’s face it, only factor in their decision-making.

Would they have looked twice at a man whose biggest claim to managerial fame was in being almost quite good at managing Middlesbrough without the distinguished Manchester United playing career Carrick can boast? Obviously not. Having Club DNA is a nice little bonus, not in and of itself a compelling reason to appoint someone to the most important job at the club.

He’s a good egg and everyone likes him but he’s just not up to it. And has proved that repeatedly this season now he’s having to do the job properly rather than coast along playing one game a week and not being Ruben Amorim – a manager who became so stubbornly wedded to his malfunctioning approach that he did in fact achieve the near impossible of becoming the problem at Man United.

Carrick has at least hit the bare minimum of achieving that Not The Problem status, but there is not one single compelling reason to think he can ever solve this puzzle. The bigger and far more complicated question is what manager even could be the solution while everything else at United remains such a mess?

For what it’s worth, we still believe United’s only compelling short-term option is getting Antonio Conte in to scorch the earth and kick some cosseted arses under strict conditions that he stay for no less than 18 months but no more than two years, at which point United have to hope against hope the inevitable painful but real improvement Conte inevitably brings has brought them to a point where they might possibly be in a position to try and find their Mikel Arteta.

And even then, it wouldn’t be Carrick.

Jason Wilcox
And a big part of why United are so unlikely to get anywhere without multiple additional departures in the wake of Carrick’s now-inevitable exit is that while United’s off-field structure is saddled with too many cooks and nobody taking real responsibility for the continued broth-spoiling. And while none of the key figures seem to agree on who should be the next manager and it’s also not immediately clear who makes the final decision anyway, none of them want Conte and his insistence – despite the idea to the contrary you might get from his hair – on bringing up and addressing uncomfortable home truths on the regular.

Jason Wilcox is the most likely man to find himself a casualty during the current round of blood-letting, and it’s hard to feel too much sympathy. His record as director of football is almost impossible to defend, and it remains just absurd to see him wield such power at a club like United based on a flimsy CV and a brief spell across Manchester in very different circumstances in a far smaller role at the Etihad.

Lisandro Martinez fingered Wilcox specifically in his ‘That’s true, but he shouldn’t say it’ rant about United’s underperformance in the transfer window, while it was Wilcox and Sir Jim Ratcliffe and the players on the receiving end of much of the fans’ anger at the weekend.

Even defence of Wilcox damns him, because it always amounts to ‘Well that’s not his remit’. Transfer budget? Oh, that’s decided higher up. Wider acquisition strategy? Someone’s else’s gig. Wilcox has apparently somehow managed to engineer a situation where his job is so large and so broad and so influential that it doesn’t actually have any specific direct responsibilities, which is nice for him.

When he first arrived he reported to the sporting director Dan Ashworth, but that changed when Ashworth failed to survive the failed transition from Erik Ten Hag to Amorim. Wilcox did survive and continues to be both an enormously visible presence at United but an irritatingly silent one.

Whenever United do manage to make a new signing, there he is for the photographs with the contracts and the holding up of shirts. But do we ever hear him explain why United are only signing midfielders this summer? Or why it was only forwards last summer? And will it definitely be defenders next summer because, all joking aside, it really does need to be defenders next summer?

Wilcox is not the only enormously powerful off-field figure who never has to explain himself at a major football club – the English way is always that the manager is the first and last line of defence and the first and more often than not only casualty when things go tits skyward. But there surely isn’t one who has more explaining to do than him.

Whatever his actual responsibilities are ‘across all technical areas of the club’ it seems vanishingly unlikely he can be hitting his goals given United’s bungled player and manager decisions during his time.

He’s also, according to reports, among the more vocal Eddie Howe supporters inside United, and that’s enough to want him gone because we are frankly already bored of Eddie Howe’s Man United reign and it hasn’t even happened yet.

Omar Berrada
Let’s not even start on the moral implications for United in continuing to employ a man who held very senior roles at Manchester City from 2011 onwards, eventually becoming chief operating officer in 2016.

While that alone could be seen as reason enough to make his position untenable, Berrada’s conspicuous failure as United CEO stands on its own. What progress have United made in any measurable way that means anything to supporters since Berrada’s arrival in 2024?

How many times can the same people sit around and decide on what is now at best an annual basis who the next manager is going to be as they realise with heavy hearts that yet again they’re going to have to bin the last guy they sat around and decided to appoint?

Christopher Vivell
We’re pretty sure Vivell holds a less high-profile but similarly definable role in all this as Carrick. Very much a ‘not the problem but not the solution’ character. Even his job title – director of recruitment – has become a philosophical question.

Amid mounting reports that he feels he is being marginalised in this season’s drain-circling doom spiral, one has to ask what exactly a director of recruitment’s purpose is if he doesn’t have a clear and specific direct say in the recruitment of the most important football figure at a football club?

One of the main problems at United is the sheer lack of clarity about who makes the final call on these matters of such grave importance. All the whispers and rumours indicate two factions within the United boardroom: those who back Eddie Howe, and those who want Julian Nagelsmann.

While the righteous call is clearly Conte, at least Nagelsmann might be interesting.

Vivell is, by all accounts and unsurprisingly, a key figure in the Nagelsmann camp. The latest indications are that he will not emerge on the winning side of this internecine conflifct. If the next managerial recruitment by Manchester United is not the man backed by the director of recruitment, then how tenable is that director of recruitment?

Sir Jim Ratcliffe
The relief from Man United fans when Sir Jim Ratcliffe came along as part-owner to challenge the Glazers and become the public face of Man United ownership was profound and understandable.

Surely it had to be better to have a British billionaire in that role rather than the Qataris, who would make United fans face uncomfortable questions about their entire identity and previously strongly-held views on such ownership of football clubs in Manchester? Surely it can’t be worse to have Ratcliffe running the football club than the Glazers.

Well that’s all gone a bit MickMcCarthy.gif hasn’t it?

Ratcliffe has made a series of mean-spirited, penny-pinching decisions out of what really does look from the outside as nothing but ugly spite while overseeing the continued and deepening decline of a once-proud football club towards something approaching joke status and spouting sub-Reform drivel. It’s an ugly look.

Ratcliffe clearly wants the new stadium to be his legacy at United, and one of the many things fans made clear at the weekend is the biologically impossible location they would now like that stadium to be located.

It’s not going to get shoved up there no matter how much United fans sing about it under the leaking roof of the current increasingly ramshackle stadium, but it does become increasingly unpleasant to think about just what kind of football team might be left to play in the new one by the time it arrives. Even if it isn’t located inside a billionaire’s arse and anus.

And while the plans for the new ground are spectacular and ambitious, absolutely nothing we’ve seen of Ratcliffe’s United tenure to date should give anyone any reason to suspect that’s what will eventually be delivered.

The only real explanation for what Ratcliffe has done, said and, ahem, achieved at United is that it’s all been an elaborate piece of performance satire designed to really hammer home the point to the populace at large that there really is no such thing as The Good Billionaire.

If that has been the goal all along? Listen, fair play.

The Glazers
Still there, aren’t they? Can’t believe their luck, can they? While the Glazers still feel it from United fans when it becomes necessary to stage another righteous but forlorn protest, you never really hear much now from the outside about the primary villains of United’s descent into madness, do you?

Ratcliffe and INEOS have become the public-facing football-deciding owners of United and, sure, they’ve f*cked it really badly. But while Ratcliffe has been an ineffective, petty and spiteful frontman for the United ownership, he is still not the one responsible for saddling the club with vast debt it never had before and which continues to hamstring everyone else on this sorry list while the Glazers continue to leach money from the club.

The sale of 25% of the club to Ratcliffe and INEOS has been a huge success for the Glazers. They still make out like bandits, but no longer have to take any real heat for the ensuing shambles on the pitch. The only losers in the deal? Manchester United and their fans. But that doesn’t really matter.

And the failure of Ratcliffe to make meaningful change to United’s sporting success and the Glazers’ continued ability to make vast money from the club means things are now, if anything, worse than ever for United in terms of one day being rid of them altogether.

The Glazers have ended up with the best of all possible outcomes from it all. They’ve made and continue to make huge amounts of money, and don’t even have to take any responsibility for the now annual tradition of losing 3-0 at home to Bournemouth.

Why would they go anywhere? That’s become perhaps the most pertinent and depressing question of all for United now.

Lisandro Martinez
Let us move now at last to the mess that is the United playing squad. There are wholesale changes required to it, and the defence is the most obvious and necessary starting point.

Martinez put his head above the parapet with his direct criticisms, absolutely all of which were entirely fair and shared by the vast majority of United fans. The only real rebuttal available was that Martinez himself was speaking from a position of weakness and would himself be very vulnerable had United recruited as he wanted them to.

Sure, such arguments don’t address the validity of his core points. But they’re not wrong, either. Martinez’s on-field attainment means his complaints are far more likely to result in his own departure than anyone higher up the food chain.

Say what you like about your Wilcoxes, your Berradas or the Sir Jim Ratcliffes of this world, but at least they haven’t been bullied by Dominic Solanke in the last minute while 1-0 up against 10-man Spurs.

His current contract expires next summer. It seems unlikely anyone is particularly keen on signing a new one.

Harry Maguire
It’s time. It’s been said before and it will be said again: the fact Manchester United are still so often to be found fielding the exact same back four now in big 2026 as they did during Ten Hag’s infamous 4-0 drubbing at Brentford back in August 2022 is absolutely damning of absolutely everyone involved.

Like Martinez, he’s also out of contract in the summer. Two new centre-backs are going to be among the first orders of business for whoever the manager is next summer and whoever of the names above on this list who’ve survived the Great Unpleasantness of the Manchester United 26/27 Season.

Should be noted that Maguire’s United career has looked done on more than one occasion during what is now more than seven years at Old Trafford and he’s defied criticism and logic before to bounce back. But he’s 33 now. His on-field usefulness will surely continue to wane, and an extension to his contract beyond the summer would represent an acceptance of United’s reduced status and an admission of failure.

But that doesn’t mean Maguire has no United future at all. Don’t pretend it isn’t unbelievably easy to picture him becoming another Knows The Club interim appointment in about four managers’ time somewhere around December 2031 after catching the eye by steering Sheffield United to a brave but ultimately unsuccessful Championship play-off campaign.

Tom Heaton
Mainly his fault. United had just finished second in the league when he arrived at the club in 2021. Now look at them. These are facts.

Jonny Evans
For his own good, frankly. He’s the other United DNA Man on Carrick’s current staff and the fear you’d have for him is that Eddie Howe performatively keeps him on the payroll to be mogged by Jason Tindall as a token nod to the importance of having someone there who understands Just What This Great Football Club Is All About.

From there, Evans finds himself in the parlous position of being perhaps as little as 14 months away from getting the interim job himself if he isn’t careful. Get out, Jonny! Run! It’s a trap!