Analysis by Ahmad Ali, Sports Editor
Nico Paz scored after 118 seconds at the Stadio Giuseppe Sinigaglia on Wednesday night, and by the time he added his second just before the hour Manchester United had stopped resembling a football team at all. Como, in their first Champions League campaign, won 4-1 through Paz’s double, Anastasios Douvikas and Jacobo Ramon. Joshua Zirkzee’s stoppage-time header consoled nobody.
It was United’s seventh game without a win in all competitions, their worst run since an eight-match sequence in November and December 2015. They are 13th in the Premier League with seven points from seven matches, have yet to keep a clean sheet, and have been out-run by their opponents in six of those seven league games. Their last victory of any kind was a 4-0 defeat of FK Sabah on 10 September. They are also, per Opta, the first English club to concede inside the opening two minutes of back-to-back major European fixtures — 47 seconds against Atletico Madrid, 118 against Como.
Michael Carrick is the seventh permanent manager since Sir Alex Ferguson left in 2013, and the seventh to arrive at the same question: can this club be managed at all?
Seven managers, one ending
The names run together now. David Moyes, Louis van Gaal, Jose Mourinho, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, Erik ten Hag, Ruben Amorim, Michael Carrick. Between them they have won four trophies in 13 years — an FA Cup under Van Gaal, a League Cup and Europa League under Mourinho, an FA Cup under Ten Hag. Ferguson won 38 in 26 years.
What is striking is not the failure but the uniformity of it. Elite continental coaches, club legends, pragmatists and idealists have all produced roughly the same shape of season: a promising start, a collapse, a public row, a payoff. Ten Hag left with a payoff of more than £10m. Amorim lasted 14 months before his dismissal in January and departed with pointed criticism of the hierarchy.
Carrick was supposed to break the pattern. He won 11 of 16 as interim, dragging United back into the Champions League with a 3-2 win over Nottingham Forest, and earned a contract until 2028. He is now apologising to travelling supporters and being asked whether he intends to resign.
The vacancy at the top
The more honest explanation sits above the dugout. The Glazer family, majority owners since the leveraged takeover of 2005, live in the United States. Sir Jim Ratcliffe, who bought in promising sporting rigour, lives in Monaco and is permitted only 90 days a year in the United Kingdom. The two groups who control Manchester United are, for most of the calendar, somewhere else.
Into that gap goes the executive layer: Omar Berrada as chief executive, Jason Wilcox as director of football. Dan Ashworth, hired as sporting director in July 2024 with enormous fanfare, was sacked after five months — roughly the time he had spent on gardening leave before starting. That statistic explains more about United’s decision-making than any transfer window.
The finances tell a parallel story. United posted record revenue of £678m and a £23m operating profit, a real improvement on the £113m loss of 2023-24, yet carry debt of close to £1bn and have committed £64m to land for a 100,000-capacity stadium projected to cost more than £2bn. The cost-cutting that funded the turnaround hollowed out institutional knowledge and left a fanbase convinced the club is run as an asset rather than a team.
A dressing room that has stopped waiting
Players now say out loud what used to leak slowly. Eight days before Como, Lisandro Martinez publicly criticised Wilcox over summer recruitment. After Como, Bruno Fernandes criticised his manager: “It’s a decision from the staff to not press man-to-man. That’s on the manager and on the staff to see it, it’s not on me.” He added: “We focus too much at looking at what the club did in the past. We’re not that anymore.”
Carrick’s reply was flat and furious — “I’m really angry. For us to play in that way is not acceptable” — and pointedly tactical: “Whatever tactics you play, if you don’t run back, you ain’t going to win.”
Wayne Rooney’s intervention was the harshest. “These players, they’re selfish,” he said. “They care about themselves, they don’t care about their team-mates, don’t care about the manager, about the staff or the fans.” Jamie Carragher called Fernandes’ criticism “a disgrace”. United took no disciplinary action and confirmed Fernandes keeps the armband — a response that reads less like leadership than damage limitation.
What Sunday actually settles
Carrick faces the media at 13:30 BST on Friday and will be in the dugout at Bournemouth on Sunday, a fixture now rated a coin toss. He retains boardroom backing, though sources concede it will not survive many more afternoons like Como.
Here is the uncomfortable part. Sacking him would change the manager and nothing else: not the absentee ownership, not the debt, not the executive churn, not a squad that has learned criticising upwards costs nothing. The next appointment would inherit the identical structure and, on 13 years of evidence, produce the identical outcome.
Manchester United are not unmanageable because the right coach has not been found. They are unmanageable because the club has spent two decades building a structure in which no coach can succeed, and has yet to show any serious interest in dismantling it.
Sports journalist and editor at SportsPortal.net. Covers cricket, football, Formula 1, tennis, and basketball with a focus on how global sports connect with Pakistani audiences. Follows the PSL, Pakistan national cricket team, Premier League, and major international tournaments. Has reported on sports for digital audiences since 2021.
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