Does anybody still believe in Michael Carrick at real world Man Utd?

It really does feel like it’s happening, doesn’t it? That all the obvious risks Manchester United took when appointing Michael Carrick to an interim role and then a permanent role might be coming home to roost.

Does anyone really still have confidence that Carrick is truly the man to make Manchester United great again? There really is nothing about his managerial career that suggests he is about to do that. His reputation as a manager is still built on the compelling but undeniably sandy foundation of the sort of player he was. The ‘manager on the field’ sort that Fergie so loved.

We’re not going to sit here and say we expected United to finish last season quite so strongly as they did under Carrick. We will say we were not remotely surprised to see them improve dramatically.

That was always both likely and dangerous. Likely because of just how bad and miserable things had got under Ruben Amorim’s increasingly unhinged and immovably rigid, stubborn reign. But also because, as has been said time and again, Carrick had about the easiest time a big-club manager will ever get.

He was appointed to oversee the second half of United’s season at the precise moment it was confirmed that season would consist of the bare minimum 40 games in total on the back of a failure to qualify for Europe and first-hurdle exits from the cups to Grimsby and Brighton.

That is an absurd position for a manager to find themselves in at This Is Manchester United Football Club We’re Talking About. Carrick got to enjoy all the benefits of the softest possible schedule while facing none of the blame or scrutiny for how such a schedule had come to pass.

The gamble when United appointed him to that interim position wasn’t that he would fail miserably; it was that he would flourish as he did in that cheat-code world that bears no relation to the normal run of things at such a club.

By summer they really had no choice but to hand him the keys full time. And that presented a problem. For all his many faults, Amorim did bring a certain charisma and pull to the role. After a disastrous 24/25 season, United made huge transfer strides that summer with the arrivals of Bryan Mbeumo, Matheus Cunha and more.

Carrick has no such pull. There were no marquee signings in the summer of 2026 despite the squad carrying obvious holes and being ill-equipped for the rigours of a full season of all-competition action.

The midfield was renovated from the bargain basement. Signing Youri Tielemans was a shrewd bit of money-saving, but watching Man City’s pair of £100m midfield men march all over him at the weekend was a reminder that United under Carrick are no longer picking up the truly high-end talent. Missing out on Mateus Fernandes doesn’t look like a huge setback right now, but being outmuscled in the transfer market at all by Spurs is a reality check.

Now an underwhelming summer and the knowledge that they’d been backed into a corner that required them to hand a permanent contract to a manager on the basis of half a season’s results that came riddled with caveats have rolled on into a stuttering, unconvincing start to the season.

It’s little wonder that they are reportedly glancing towards hard-nosed Antonio Conte.

The absurd injustice of Man City’s winning goal in the derby at Old Trafford is real and worth noting, but the guileless, passive and ultimately gutless way United approached a game against 10 men was of far greater significance than the latest Stockley Park blunder.

There remains a floor at United that will keep them away from absolute catastrophe. There is no real prospect here of a Spurs-style descent. But nor right now does there feel any reason to believe Carrick can succeed where so many other post-Fergie appointments have failed now he’s forced to operate in the real world.