LONDON — Manchester United are in a Premier League relegation battle, no matter who the manager is.
It probably won’t be Michael Carrick after Chelsea’s 2-0 win made it four defeats in five games. But United are such a dysfunctional mess right now that Carrick might be left to limp on as a lame-duck manager for even longer while his bosses dither and delay the big decision about who can save the team from the ultimate humiliation of a fight for Premier League survival.
That’s what happened last week after a 3-0 home defeat against Bournemouth left Carrick, 45, seemingly on the brink, with United in the middle of their worst start to a season since 1986.
But the United hierarchy, a committee with no obvious leader, decided to ignore the availability of available Premier League-proven managers including Eddie Howe, Antonio Conte and Kieran McKenna, as well as former Germany and Bayern Munich coach Julian Nagelsmann, to keep Carrick in the post, with sources telling ESPN of a “collective view to give them [Carrick and the players] a chance to turn it around.”
One game later, the situation is even worse than a week ago. It’s now nine games without a win in all competitions. If United fail to beat Roma in the Champions League on Tuesday, it will be their joint-worst run of results for 75 years, so these are bleak times indeed for the 20-time English champions.
The joke around Manchester nowadays is whether a 60-point deduction for Manchester City in the event of the club losing their appeal against 114 guilty charges of breaking the Premier League’s financial rules would be enough for them to finish below United this season.
It’s a brutal gag, but United are already 14 points behind their neighbors and we haven’t even played a quarter of the season yet, so it might be a close-run thing.
United, whose only league win this season came against Ipswich Town in August, have collected just seven points from nine games so far, which is an average of 0.77 points-per-game. Over a 38-game season, that would translate as 29.3 points and no team has ever survived in the Premier League with fewer than 30. The lowest survival tally was Nottingham Forest’s 32 in 2023-24, so unless United wake up to the reality of their situation, it really could get a whole lot worse.
The irony of the problems engulfing United are that they should have won at Stamford Bridge.
Amad Diallo alone had three clear chances to score in the first half and took none of them, while Bruno Fernandes also missed a good one. But such is the fragility of the confidence within the United team that when Chelsea took the lead four minutes into the second-half through Morgan Rogers — the England forward was left to run through a huge defensive hole created by defenders Harry Maguire and Lisandro MartÃnez — there was never a sense that Carrick’s team would dig themselves out of the hole.
All of United’s tenacity, creativity and belief from the first-half evaporated. This is a team that has continually struggled to overcome setbacks; only once this season have they fought back from a goal down to win — against newly-promoted Ipswich two months ago — so the end result was never in doubt.
But Martinez, who was bold enough earlier this month, to criticize the club for failing to recruit properly in the summer — a valid point — then added to his calamitous performance by conceding a penalty, scored by Cole Palmer, for a reckless foul on Wesley Fofana, and picked up a second yellow card, leaving United to play with 10 men for the final 28 minutes.
Carrick ignored Martinez as he walked off the pitch, instantly disproving the manager’s claim this week that everyone is “together” at the club.
So while the prospect of United fighting against relegation seems ridiculous due to the size and history of the club, everything else suggests it is absolutely possible.
They are a team with a woeful squad under the charge of an inexperienced manager. United constantly remind us that they don’t have the money to even sign reinforcements at left back and center forward — the first-choices in those positions, Luke Shaw and Benjamin Sesko, are both injured — so they are unlikely to bolster the team in January.
And to compound matters, they have joint owners with contrasting objectives and senior executives learning on the job. Nobody at Old Trafford, on or the pitch, has a track record of success, so why should anyone think they are not in danger of relegation?
United’s next league game is at home to in-form Aston Villa, and when they return to action after the international break they face Liverpool at Anfield.
So there are no silver linings attached to the big grey cloud hanging over the club right now.
A new manager might be the only option available in terms of jolting the players into performances that their reputations suggest they should be capable of. But whether any out-of-work manager really wants to jump back into a job at Old Trafford remains to be seen, because nobody would want relegation with Manchester United on their CV. And it really could happen.
