Michael Carrick has made the joint-best start to life as a Premier League manager in the competition’s entire 34-year history.
If you want to summarise his tenure so far, from the understandably-strained excitement for what Manchester United supporters know all too well could be a false dawn to the media’s keenness to anoint Carrick as the next saviour, then look no further than this bogus statistic.
Nobody has ever started their Premier League career better than Carrick...if you scoop up the data from his two separate stints, that is, folding in the two Premier League matches he managed four years ago when he took the reins between Ole Gunnar Solskjaer and Ralf Rangnick.
Oh, and if you are specifically looking at brand new managers to the division, which conveniently rules out Solskjaer’s time as caretaker boss at Old Trafford (when he won eight of his first nine) because of his spell at Cardiff City in 2014.
Even scrutinising the statistic on its own terms doesn’t necessarily encourage optimism about Carrick’s future. The record he now spuriously co-holds is with Ange Postecoglou, who went on to win his tenth game as Tottenham manager – and then more or less never again over the following 18 months.
The fact that Carrick’s new record was reported so widely reflects the constant thirst for content these days, as well as a collective willingness to invest emotionally into this next chapter of post-Sir Alex Ferguson Man Utd.
There are many people desperate for him to succeed, of course, but just as many desperate to watch United go up in flames again and there can be no great drama without first a tantalising flirtation with success.
For the death spiral to continue United must occasionally be reborn; for another spectacular collapse to happen they must first go through a period of feverish building.
From that perspective Carrick is the perfect manager for the moment: the Solskjaer regen who can sculpt the club ready for its next cycle of failure, and who, by so perfectly copying the last great interim, can provide United’s enemies with a good laugh at the new owners blindly stumble down an old path.
But what really makes Carrick such an intoxicating figurehead for the club is that he really could be the guy who gets the project back on track.
Of course his very plausibility is what both lures Man Utd in and keeps the whole car-crash process so engaging, yet that doesn’t necessarily mean Sir Jim Ratcliffe would be wrong to appoint Carrick full-time.
Carrick is almost identical to Solskjaer: club legend; rational and quietly dignified presence to settle things down after a disaster; so successful as interim it’s almost impossible to give the job to someone clearly more qualified; and winning matches through a combination of defence-minded counter-attacking football against the big clubs and good old-fashioned luck (or last-minute quality) against the smaller ones.
But, crucially, Man Utd in 2026 is not identical to Man Utd in 2018.
For starters we have left the era of gegenpressing and possession suffocation, the tactical non-negotiables among elite clubs that meant Solskjaer’s conservatism could never work in the long-term.
In an era of cagey midblock and set-pieces, when even the current Liverpool manager can casually tell reporters he finds the Premier League boring, Carrick’s simple round-pegs-in-round-holes approach can genuinely work.
Plus the current Man Utd are starting from a much lower ebb. Champions League qualification this season would be a considerable overachievement and based on the club’s trajectory over the last couple of years Carrick’s medium-term job is to ensure United are consistently in that conversation.
By contrast Solskjaer took charge of a club that had finished as runners-up the previous season with 81 points, and with the likes of peak Marcus Rashford, Paul Pogba, Juan Mata, Romelu Lukaku and Alexis Sanchez at his disposal had a squad of star players capable of moving towards a title challenge.
Nobody rational sees that in the pipeline for Man Utd in the next three to four years.
Instead, Carrick is here to stabilise and build resourcefully. That’s why coaching Benjamin Sesko into form, or finding a system that can fit Matheus Cunha, Bryan Mbeumo and Bruno Fernandes together, or settling down Harry Maguire and Casemiro, is of real value.
Whether Ratcliffe sees that is another question.
The Man Utd board are reportedly hesitant to make a decision until the end of the season because they fear making the Solskjaer error, and while they are right to hold off for now it will be interesting to see whether that position holds into the summer; whether Man Utd see themselves as a Champions League club or as one ready for an immediate title challenge.
In 2018 the error was hiring Solskjaer when the club could and should have aimed higher.
Ironically, eight years later the club is in danger of doing the exact opposite.
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