For Manchester United, the problem is no longer just poor decisions. It is the way those decisions seem to unfold in public, with one part of the club moving on while another is left in the dark. Michael Carrick was still taking training on Tuesday and Wednesday even though media reports said the club had already decided to sack him, a detail that says as much about the organisation as any result on the pitch.
Last month, Carrick was speaking publicly about Manchester United's values after the 4-1 thrashing in Como. By Monday night, reports said the club had decided to sack him. Yet training continued on Tuesday and Wednesday, which meant he was still doing the job without being told it was over. That delay is awkward in any workplace. At Manchester United, it feels like another symptom of a club where basic clarity can go missing at the exact moment it matters most.
Carrick did not arrive as a miracle worker, but he did succeed at first in ways that were easy to see. He relaxed Ruben Amorim's training regime, reintegrated Kobbie Mainoo and helped Bruno Fernandes and Casemiro return to form. Those are not small gains for a team that has spent so much time looking unbalanced. They were signs of a coach trying to restore structure before the broader dysfunction around him pulled the situation apart again.
The scale of that dysfunction is part of the reason this episode lands so heavily. Manchester United's summer decisions included not signing new defenders despite conceding 50 league goals, which makes the entire setup look even more brittle. If the club was willing to leave a coach working through Tuesday and Wednesday after a reported dismissal decision on Monday night, it fits the larger pattern: short-term noise, slow communication and too little planning around the football itself.
A club legend caught in the middle
Carrick has also been forced to live through the contradiction between principle and practice. He has spoken about the values of the club in terms of humility, hard work and pride in those standards. He has also argued that pressing is only one part of football, and that the real question is what it is for and whether it fits the team’s strengths. Those ideas are not radical. In fact, they sound like the sort of grounded thinking Manchester United should want. The fact that they are being discussed in the middle of another managerial mess only sharpens the sense of waste.
This is where the story becomes bigger than one coach. Carrick had recently earned Champions League qualification and a two-year contract, which should have given the job some stability. Instead, he has become another victim of Manchester United's deep dysfunction. The compensation cost may eventually matter in financial terms, but the larger cost is harder to measure: the erosion of trust, the muddle around leadership and the sense that even when the football improves, the club still finds a way to undercut itself.
That is the uncomfortable takeaway. Carrick may not have been able to solve Manchester United's deeper problems, but he had shown enough to justify a more coherent response. Instead, the club left him training while reports of his dismissal circulated around him. For a team already trying to recover from 50 league goals conceded and a 4-1 humiliation in Como, it is another reminder that the issue is not only who is in charge. It is how Manchester United keep managing to make every decision feel more costly than it needs to be.
