Michael Carrick was doomed from the moment he was officially appointed Manchester United manager in May.

When he is finally put out of his misery the media will gorge on the details of United’s catastrophic 2026/27 as they always do, attention turning quickly from Carrick to analysis of a toxic dressing room, 13 years of failure, and inevitably the ownership.

“Groundhog day” was how Gary Neville described the feelings of despair as he co-commentated on the disaster that was the 3-0 defeat to Bournemouth on Sunday.

But the Carrick era is not business as usual. It is distinct and distinctly interesting in two ways: first, the madness of the decision to hire him, and second, the madness of the speed with which the whole thing fell apart.

Most people not associated with Man Utd knew Carrick should not have been given the job.

The comparison to Ole Gunnar Solskjaer was uncanny; so eerily familiar it was an extremely obvious pitfall to avoid. It isn’t just that United’s good form in 2025/26 was built on vibes, or that managing Middlesbrough to a decent-ish level does not equal qualification for one of the biggest jobs in world football.

It’s that Man Utd simply didn’t have to do it. Carrick held none of the cards. He could have been left dangling until mid-July and given the job only if an appropriate figure could not be found.

Nothing would have been lost by keeping him waiting while they went on an exhaustive search that took in the fallout from the World Cup, which, most likely, would have presented Thomas Tuchel, Mauricio Pochettino, Julian Nagelsmann, and even Unai Emery, who might have felt it was mission accomplished when he lifted the Europa League with Aston Villa 48 hours before the Carrick deal was announced publically.

This mistake alone paints the Man Utd executives in an abysmal light. It was, without resorting unfairly to hindsight, the single-worst managerial decision made by the club since Sir Alex Ferguson’s retirement – until this week, anyway.

The scale of their staggering incompetence is captured even more clearly by their capacity to watch the knives plunge into Caesar and decide the best course of action is to sellotape his lifeless body to the Stamford Bridge dugout.

He won’t survive the trip, of course, and whenever the axe does fall the most startling part of his dazzlingly short tenure (15 games in all comps and 10 in the league as permanent boss, come Saturday) will be how quickly the pressure to sack Carrick became too overwhelming to ignore.

The supporters are backing him right to the end, but Carrick is depicted as a dead man walking by the media to the extent that even Neville, usually keen to avoid being drawn into talking about managerial changes, was openly resigned to the inevitable during the Sky Sports broadcast on Sunday.

This is new. It might tell us something about social media, short attention spans, and the managerial merry-go-round spiralling out of control. Where once pundits and journalists criticised the direction of travel they now accept short-termism not just as inevitable but desirable.

But in this case that isn’t a satisfactory explanation.

More likely it reflects a new irritation in the air; an impatience verging on boredom for a circus that used to entertain all non-United onlookers. The Man Utd machine has failed so spectacularly that even their rivals are beginning to lose interest, succumbing to apathy.

This might apply to the players, too. Not many of the current squad were there for the Solskjaer era but Man Utd is always big news, meaning the vast majority will have a good working knowledge of that period of United’s history and know, before it even started, how the Carrick tenure would end.

Then again, if we want to know what the players are thinking we only have to listen to them. Bruno Fernandes’ comments after the Como defeat were unacceptable – but that does not mean the diagnosis was incorrect.

His conclusion, that United should press rather than sit off, captures how the tactical approach of Carrick (and Solskjaer) - a sit-back-and-counter 4-4-2 that loosely mimics Ferguson’s tactics - is entirely inappropriate for a modern super-club.

For United to return to the top they need elite-level coaching in the art of high-pressing and choreographed possession football, as Fernandes knows all too well. Indeed, despite the never-ending car crash, that might be all they need.

From one angle the history of post-Fergie Man Utd is the Glazers taking money out of the club, executives making bad transfer decisions, and a dressing room full of players with a toxic attitude.

But, Glazers aside, all of that might be a symptom, not a cause, of something far easier to solve.

In their search for meaning Man Utd haven’t tried the most obvious solution, the one that got a labelled-toxic Arsenal and Liverpool executive class out of trouble with Mikel Arteta and Jurgen Klopp respectively: hire a world-class coach in their prime.

Solving United might be that simple.

Michael Carrick struggled to secure results as Manchester United boss

Middlesbrough, Sporting, Ajax, Molde, Chelsea, the Netherlands, Everton. That’s a list of the jobs that were most recently held by the seven permanent Man Utd managers since Ferguson.

Only one of those is in the right category, yet the Chelsea boss was hired straight after a calamitous 2015/16 in which Jose Mourinho won 15 points from 16 Premier League games.

Klopp and Arteta have proven that a world-class manager given the keys can completely change perceptions of a club, correcting to the point of erasure all the wrongs enacted by clueless executives.

After the absurd decision to hire Carrick collapsed within months, it is surely time for Manchester United to at least try the most straightforward route of all, even if that means waiting until next summer for the right person to become available.

United fans, sick of groundhog day but resigned to it, will happily wait.

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