Michael Carrick has been set up to fail by Ineos – but it’s not the first time he’s been let down by his bosses. This is the proof he’s the perfect manager for Man United’s threadbare squad

When Michael Carrick’s star was in its ascendancy at Middlesbrough, with first-season performances at places like Sheffield United and Burnley which were described as ‘near perfection’ creating a genuine prospect of promotion to the Premier League, he was being compared by some to Keanu Reeves’ character in The Matrix. A quiet and immensely self-possessed individual using all his mental faculties to navigate a manic universe.

He likes to say that being a former midfielder influences the way he coaches – it’s not all blood and thunder with him – and if one word encapsulates the way he worked on Teesside, then it is ‘calm’. 

But his mentor Sir Alex Ferguson once said that there are times in football management where ‘you have to stand up for yourself – there is no other way’. Carrick’s disinclination to do that struck many at the start of a second season at the Middlesbrough helm, as he struggled to live up to the big reputation he had built in his first.

No fewer than 14 senior players had left in that summer’s transfer window, including forwards Chuba Akpom and Cameron Archer, as Boro ended a heavy dependency on loan signings. 

Carrick, left to assimilate new recruits and build a new team on the hoof for a fanbase expecting another promotion push, was plunged into undoubtedly his toughest period in football. Boro picked up two points from their winless first seven games and after a desultory Tuesday night draw at Sheffield Wednesday – where they trailed at half-time – sat rock bottom.

Those bleak, winless months looked like second season syndrome – a time, if ever there was one, for him to speak up, defend himself and send a veiled message ‘upstairs’. Nothing of the sort was forthcoming, as Carrick, steadfastly disinclined to use the press conference sphere for his own purposes as Ferguson always would, remained a rock-solid company man.

As he prepares Manchester United for the new campaign, Carrick does not have another full-scale rebuild on his hands, but he is once again entitled to feel the sting of indignation about how he is being sent into a second season by his employers. 

The landscape is wholly different to his first United season, with the return of Champions League football likely to mean United will play 15 games more. Yet to date, they have just two significant additions to what was already a thin squad: Youri Tielemans, a 29-year-old with many miles on the clock, and Andrey Santos, a recruit from Chelsea nowhere near the finished article.

Ahead of Saturday’s opening game at Hull, Carrick has the same old dependency on Luke Shaw, who is nowhere near capable of playing the two games per week which European football demands, and the other defensive old-stager Harry Maguire. 

Matthijs de Ligt has not played a game since last November. Lisandro Martinez is recovering from a thigh problem after an injury-ravaged last season. Benjamin Sesko has not kicked a ball in pre-season. There is, as yet, no one new to energise a midfield from which Casemiro has gone and Manuel Ugarte will be missing most of the season. United have a lower summer spend than Ipswich Town and Coventry City.

It feels like Carrick is being set up to fail before a ball is even kicked, with some analysts already inferring that he is not the man to take United on. Jamie Carragher recently suggested that he lacks the ‘stardust’ to win them a Premier League or Champions League title.

Having rescued United from the humiliating position that the club’s owners, Ineos, found themselves in after begging the incapable and tempestuous Ruben Amorim to leave Sporting Lisbon to manage their club, Carrick deserves much better. Yet for all that, the evidence of the pre-season tells us that he is the same safe, dependable guy who didn’t make waves at Middlesbrough.

If you looked hard enough, there were signs of a man trying to send a message that he needed more players, as he sat in a hotel meeting room with national print journalists at Manchester United’s hotel in County Kildare after the recent friendly against Leeds United. ‘We’ve got to keep pushing, really, and push everything in every boundary that we can, to be able to win again,’ he said.

But he’s agreed to Amazon camera crews being around the club for a United documentary series – something no United manager before him would ever have countenanced, least of all Amorim, with his predilection for punching TVs. 

He’s said it’s acceptable that United, whose commercial revenues are the second highest in world football, won’t pursue £100million players, despite the club being the only one of the ‘Big Six’ not to have done so. He hasn’t even brought up the question of the season’s significantly greater workload.

While some afford Carrick the public indignities they would be less willing to submit a foreign manager to, the Manchester United faithful are desperate for him to be the one who brings the club out of the post-Ferguson purgatory. 

Ineos and their United chief executive Omar Berrada have made grand boasts about ‘Project 150’ – winning or challenging for the Premier League by the club’s 150th anniversary in 2028 – which will come back to bite fans if unaccomplished. Ineos, not Carrick, will be on the receiving end of supporters’ opprobrium if this becomes another turbulent season.

For the many who want to see Carrick flourish, there is evidence from that second Middlesbrough season of how his understated and thoughtful approach might just deliver.

Those who viewed him at close quarters still remember that steadfast loyalty to the owners. ‘There was never any sign of him rocking the boat,’ says Dominic Shaw, who covers the club for The Northern Echo. ‘Even through that winless stretch, he went nowhere near suggesting, “I don’t yet have the squad”.’ 

Asked before leaving Hillsborough, on the nadir of a night which kept them bottom, what he had told his players at half-time, Carrick inevitably replied: ‘I kept calm.’ But many of the players who came through the difficult early months to find success and finish eighth in that 2023-24 season speak of how his application to the small details of their technique made them better players, in the eye of that storm.

Morgan Rogers, who’d struggled to convince in a number of loan moves when he arrived at Boro in July 2023, spoke when eventually called up by England of how Carrick had been a ‘massive part’ in his own development. ‘He gave me the confidence to express myself.’ 

Carrick called him to thank him for these words but told him: ‘Don’t play down how much you’ve done yourself.’ For Rogers, management, in the purest sense of the word, had clearly mattered more than that amorphous ‘stardust’ quality which pundits speak of. Humility is a part of it. It’s thought that Carrick did not try to bring his own decorated playing career into his conversations with Rogers.

Rogers would repay Boro with a £15million profit in his move to Aston Villa, having dazzled in the club’s run to the Carabao Cup semi-final. Emmanuel Latte Lath, also signed that summer, turned out to be the Championship’s striker of the season and Rav van den Berg, now playing in the Bundesliga, proved an excellent centre back. Boro eventually profited to the tune of around £50million from that summer’s buys.

A source who knows Lath tells of how Carrick managed to drop the striker to the bench without jolting the confidence which so many forwards feed off. Van den Berg speaks of Carrick’s ‘understanding’ of what it was taking to adjust to the Championship. 

Carrick’s presence on a Zoom call had been instrumental to him signing. Yet there was clearly an uncompromising side to him on Teesside. ‘It was not all sweetness and light. It’s a hard game and his dressing room reflected that,’ says the source close to Lath.

It felt significant in the County Kildare discussion with journalists that Carrick did not take the chance offered to him to say he felt ‘empathy’ for Marcus Rashford. Perhaps this was Carrick code for ‘grow up and sort yourself out’. But all the soundings suggest  he is ready to give the forward the fresh start Amorim would not countenance for the England international.

Carrick’s tone seemed different when it came to Kobbie Mainoo, another cast to the margins by Amorim. He and Mainoo have been in touch on and off throughout his frustrating summer with England. Carrick didn’t discuss Amad Diallo in Ireland but he is another young United player thought to feel reinvigorated. Echoes of that Boro cohort.

Carrick’s most questionable act at Middlesbrough was a decision to replace first-team coach Aaron Danks with his own brother Graeme, previously the Newcastle United Under 18s coach, when Danks left to join Vincent Kompany at Bayern Munich. 

But the appointment of Danks, within two months of his own appointment, did underline Carrick’s ability to assemble a good ‘brains trust’. At United, Steve Holland has become the same problem-solver and shrewd tactician with answers that Gareth Southgate always found him to be with England.

Carrick was aware from day one that the fragility in this United group was borne of the chaotic changes Amorim would make, half an hour before kick-off. Holland is there to make sure everything is clear. Jonathan Woodgate and Jonny Evans, who make up the coaching team, are popular. It is the strongest and most united backroom team for many seasons.

Carrick left Teesside with a reputation for predictability: being bound to an aesthetically pleasing pass-and-move style with ‘only one distinct way of playing’ as Sunderland’s extremely adaptable and dynamic manager Regis Le Bris brutally described the team down the A19 after beating them in 2024. 

‘They were not as streetwise as they needed to be,’ says the Northern Echo’s Shaw. ‘Being unable to see games out was a repeated problem and there was also a sequence of conceding shambolic goals through poor defending.’

There is evidence that Carrick has learned from that experience, too. The pursuit of tough central and defensive midfielder Carlos Baleba from Brighton would, if it comes off, suggest a big shift from his old aesthetic. 

The season ahead will bring United up against some of those players Carrick mentored so well at Middlesbrough. They will face Morgan Rogers at Chelsea, two months from now. Akpom, transformed in Carrick’s first season, is on the fringes of the Ipswich side the team meet a week on Sunday.

Sitting back in that hotel meeting room to discuss the season ahead, the United manager pointedly dodged the question of whether his side can challenge for the title. 

‘What we’ve done gives us the confidence to move forward. How quickly we keep moving forward, that’s the challenge – but as long as we’re stable and we can keep moving in the direction, I think that’s what we can ask,’ he stated. 

He was as calm, unflustered and equable as always, but will need every ounce of skill to tackle the Matrix which lies ahead this time.