He just had to go.

His position had become untenable.

He’d run out of time, out of credit, out of chances.

This time of year, we live in permanent peril of hearing some version of the above proclaimed with unshakable confidence. Some soccer manager has been fired and it is universally agreed that it had to be done, that there was no alternative, that the club’s hands were tied by circumstance.

It’s all a bit weird, this broadly accepted yet totally unscientific formula for when a manager must – MUST – lose his job. It’s a sort of alchemy of vibes, and results, and the absence of other scapegoats, and the alternatives available. It’s like that old definition of hardcore pornography by a US supreme court justice: I know it when I see it.

Shall we talk about Michael Carrick now? Yes, here is where we are obliged to debate the beleaguered Manchester United manager, who has been at the helm during the Red Devils’ first dip into the relegation zone since 1986 yet somehow is also definitely not at fault. There is almost total agreement on the latter point, that United’s issues are structural and systemic and absolve Carrick of blame. Still, he’s gotta go, because what can you do, eh?

By the time you read this, he may be gone, or about to be gone, or still floating around in the liminal vapors of being emotionally, but not yet physically, gone.

He was caretaker manager and did such a good job at that free-hit, can’t-lose gig – five stars! Clean and comfortable ride! – that he was rewarded with the exact same but altogether more difficult job of being the permanent Manchester United manager.

But the discourse has shifted against Carrick. Suddenly, the exact same skillset that helped him rescue United last season, making him a poster child of club DNA and its virtues, is viewed as deficient.

Now they say Carrick is outsmarted by the other managers, overwhelmed by the volume of games. Perhaps. But his tactical mind was up to it last year. With fewer games to worry about, certainly, but also burdened with Ruben Amorim’s debris to clear away first. Amorim, of course, was the predecessor who Simply Had To Go, because he was dogmatic and would need too much time to instill his methods, after he was hired because the club must have quite liked that he was dogmatic, even though he would need considerable time to instill his methods.

Yet hanging on to a manager often works out. There’s the famous case of Sir Alex Ferguson, of course, who was installed during United’s last flirtation with relegation, 40 years ago. The early years of his reign were not always smooth: he had a poor season in 1988-89 and was reportedly a few bad results from being sacked in January 1990. But he wasn’t, and nine years later, he was knighted for his accomplishments in management and, by extension, in not being fired.

It’s true of Mikel Arteta, too, who has teetered several times in charge of Arsenal. When the now-defending champions started the 2021-22 season without winning or scoring in three matches, including a 5-0 humiliation by Manchester City. And in late 2024. And as recently as this spring, when some felt that if Arteta didn’t deliver the title at last, he ought to be replaced. Six months on, that seems unthinkable.

There’s a graphic doing the rounds on social media showing that Carrick has actually done slightly better than Arteta in his first 27 league matches in charge, although this elides the very obviously opposite trajectories they were on. All the same, Arteta got to keep going; Carrick probably won’t. Few managers these days are allowed to grow on the job, or into it. The very things Ferguson once credited for his longevity – the leeway to evolve and develop and learn from his mistakes, to rebuild and retool – are denied to the managers supposed to succeed him. Because of … reasons? The money was different back then, but the pressure wasn’t.

Instead, that predictable thing has happened where Carrick has morphed from the in-fashion manager to the one who is gently mocked. He’s no longer said to look calm and possessed of the desperately needed poise at a tumultuous club. Now, he is described as glum. It seemed an ominous portent that he should add himself to the ultra-niche lore of English managers misusing umbrellas when he promised to hold the umbrella so that he would get wet and keep everyone else at the club dry, possibly owing to an unfamiliarity with the rudiments of the technology.

Carrick isn’t alone in managerial purgatory.

Crystal Palace’s Pierre Sage: sacked but somehow not yet sacked.

Régis Le Bris: safe for now, in spite of taking newly promoted Sunderland to an astounding seventh place last season.

Newcastle’s Matthias Jaissle: medium rare, but not yet cooked.

Manchester City’s Enzo Maresca: definitely no longer the perfect successor to Pep Guardiola he was just a few weeks ago.

Fulham’s Álvaro Arbeloa and Bournemouth’s Marco Rose and Tottenham’s Roberto De Zerbi are fine now, after starting the season very not fine. That may change after any result at all. Because clubs’ decision-making on managers seems to be all just guesses and gambles. A veneer of deep deliberation is projected on to the process, because on the outside we always assume that soccer is more sophisticated than it is, but none of them really know which manager will perform in what situation, and for how long.

That’s amazing, given the advances in analytics and how much really rides on a manager’s ability to win games. Ballooning analytics departments seem to have taken teams to a place where they make far fewer mistakes in the transfer market than they used to.

Yet hiring a new manager, or firing the old one, or giving him another chance, appears to involve only marginally more design than shaking a Magic 8 Ball and seeing whether it endorses your choice.

Keep the manager? It is decidedly so.

Fire the manager? Outlook good.

Make a managerial move just to do something and appear in control? Signs point to yes.