Manchester United Set to Sack Michael Carrick as Pochettino Emerges as Front-Runner to Take Over

Manchester United intend to sack Michael Carrick as head coach, according to The Athletic, bringing the former midfielder’s reign at Old Trafford to the brink of an end barely six months after he was handed the job on a permanent basis. The club continue to insist that no final decision has been reached, but multiple sources have told The Athletic that work on finding a replacement is already under way and that a change is anticipated before United travel to Liverpool on 22 November.

The report, published on Monday night by David Ornstein, Adam Crafton and Laurie Whitwell, landed less than 24 hours after United’s chaotic 4-4 draw with Aston Villa at Old Trafford — a match that summed up everything that has gone wrong this season. United fought back from two goals down twice, scoring twice after the 90th minute, and still left the pitch in the relegation zone. According to The Athletic, the hierarchy met the day after that draw, and the direction of travel since then has been unmistakable.

“The club continue to insist that no decision has been reached but multiple sources, speaking to The Athletic on the condition of anonymity to protect relationships, indicate work has been undertaken on potential replacements and the anticipation is a change will be made before the trip to Anfield to face Liverpool in 13 days’ time,” the report said, according to TNT Sports’ summary of the article.

That framing matters. United have not confirmed anything, and Carrick has not been told he is leaving. But when the most authoritative reporting team in English football reports that a club “intends” to dismiss its manager, and when that reporting is swiftly corroborated by ESPN, the picture is clear enough. The only questions left are when the decision is formalised, who makes it, and who comes next.

Who decides, and when

According to The Guardian, director of football Jason Wilcox is leading the process to decide Carrick’s future, working in consultation with chief executive Omar Berrada, and will then make his recommendation to co-owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe. The Athletic reported that a final call will require approval from Ratcliffe and from the club’s majority owners, the Glazer family.

talkSPORT reported on Monday night that Carrick’s future will be decided by Ratcliffe at a meeting in Monaco on Tuesday. That report has not been confirmed by the club, and it should be treated as reporting rather than fact, but it fits the shape of the week: the international break has opened a two-week window with no match to prepare for, and United’s next fixture is the most difficult away trip in English football.

Carrick, for his part, has said he will not walk away. “I’m pretty clear where we need to go and how we need to get there,” he said after the Villa draw, according to SportsAdda. He also told reporters after that game that he would expect to continue in his role beyond the international break. The club’s stance, as reported by The Athletic, now appears to have moved past him.

There is also a financial dimension that may explain why the decision has taken this shape. According to journalist Ben Jacobs, writing on X on Monday night, Carrick’s contract contains a one-year break clause, making an exit more affordable than the departures of previous United managers. The club have been reluctant to keep paying out managerial contracts: Football Insider reported earlier in the week that sacking Carrick could cost between £5 million and £10 million, and that the board had been wary of that bill. A break clause, if it is as reported, removes one obstacle.

Pochettino leads the race

Mauricio Pochettino has emerged as the front-runner to succeed Carrick, according to ESPN’s Mark Ogden and Rob Dawson. The United States head coach is, according to ESPN, the preferred candidate, and The Athletic reported that he “would be expected to figure highly among the candidates”.

Pochettino’s candidacy is not new. He has previously interviewed to coach Manchester United on three different occasions, according to theScore, and he has been linked with the Old Trafford job at almost every vacancy since he left Tottenham. United made a tentative approach when he was at Paris Saint-Germain, and in 2022 he was edged out in a head-to-head contest with Erik ten Hag for the job, according to The Sun’s reporting summarised by TNT Sports. A year later he was appointed at Chelsea, but he left Stamford Bridge after just one season following disputes with the club’s board.

The complication is his current job. Pochettino has been the United States head coach since September 2024, and in August he signed a new four-year contract with the US Soccer Federation taking him through the 2030 World Cup, after guiding the team to the round of 16 at this year’s World Cup. According to The Sun, Pochettino would entertain the prospect of taking charge of United despite that new deal, and he has never hidden his long-term desire to return to the Premier League. His main home is still in London, and he has long spoken of his admiration for United and for the achievement of Sir Alex Ferguson.

Any move would cost money. ESPN reported that Pochettino’s contract includes a release clause worth 10 million US dollars, approximately £7.4 million, which United would have to pay to secure his services. Other reports have put the figure differently: talkSPORT reported a £10 million clause, a figure that was said to have taken sources close to Old Trafford by surprise. The precise number is not settled in public reporting, but every version of the story agrees on the substance — there is a clause, and it is not prohibitive for a club of United’s size.

There is also a timing problem. According to The Athletic’s Laurie Whitwell, speaking on the Talk of the Devils podcast, Pochettino is unlikely to leave the United States before both legs of the country’s CONCACAF quarter-final against Haiti, the second leg of which is on 18 November, just four days before the Liverpool game. “Speaking to people, they’d be surprised if Pochettino left the USA right now, before the two games,” Whitwell said. “I believe there is a clause that would allow it, but there’s money involved and United have been suggesting money is tight, but can they find the money for this scenario?”

That leaves United with an awkward sequence if they move quickly: sack Carrick this week, and the preferred replacement may not be available until the eve of the Liverpool match. An interim appointment, or a delay until after the Haiti tie, are both possible. The Independent reported that moves were already afoot on Monday to try to get Pochettino in as United manager, and that as recently as September he told reporters the option of leaving the United States before his contract expired would be a possibility.

The other names on the list

Pochettino is not the only candidate. According to The Athletic, former Newcastle United head coach Eddie Howe and Julian Nagelsmann, most recently in charge of Germany, have admirers at the club. ESPN’s reporting added former Ipswich Town boss Kieran McKenna to the list of candidates being considered by United officials.

Howe’s case is the most intriguing. He resigned as Newcastle manager in July, saying he wanted to take a break from football to recharge his batteries, and he has been out of work since. According to The Sun, Howe has been studying United and “making notes” with Carrick’s future still in doubt, and he is one of the leading contenders to take over at Old Trafford should Ratcliffe decide he has seen enough. The Sun also reported that Howe has turned down the opportunity to manage Crystal Palace, who are expected to sack Pierre Sage imminently — a decision that only makes sense if Howe believes a bigger job is coming.

There is a further consideration in Howe’s favour. According to The Sun, Ratcliffe has always preferred the idea of having an English manager in charge, believing England’s biggest club should be represented by a homegrown boss. Howe made his name at Bournemouth, guiding them from the depths of League Two to the Premier League, before winning the Carabao Cup as Newcastle boss. He is the only English candidate of real stature on the list, and that may count for more with Ratcliffe than it would with another owner.

Nagelsmann, meanwhile, is available after leaving the Germany job, and his admirers at United are longstanding. He was one of the most sought-after young coaches in Europe at Bayern Munich, and his tactical reputation is formidable. McKenna, who built his reputation at Ipswich, is the outsider of the group — a younger, less proven name, but one who has been linked with United before.

The betting markets have already made their judgement: Pochettino was as short as 6/4 favourite to be the next United manager by Monday afternoon, according to bookmakers quoted in reporting on the story. Markets are not evidence, but they are a measure of where informed money believes this is heading.

The season that broke it

The numbers behind the decision are stark. United are 18th in the Premier League after ten games, in the relegation zone, with one win, five draws and four defeats. Their eight points leave them a point behind Nottingham Forest. The only league win came against Ipswich Town in August. According to theScore, United have conceded 15 goals in their last five matches, and the 4-4 draw with Villa once again exposed the defensive frailties that have defined the season. SportsAdda reported that United have conceded 19 league goals in ten games, and the club have conceded 30 goals in all competitions this season — more than any other side in Europe’s top five leagues, according to figures reported before the Villa game.

The run of results tells the story in sequence. After a 4-1 humbling at Como in the Champions League, United lost 3-0 at home to Bournemouth, a defeat that left them 16th and prompted serious consideration of sacking Carrick even then. According to SportsAdda, Wilcox and Berrada seriously considered dismissing him at that point, but gave him more time. Since then United have lost 2-0 at Chelsea, come from 2-0 down to beat Roma 3-2 in the Champions League, and needed Patrick Dorgu’s header in the 96th minute on Sunday to save a point against Villa after trailing 2-0 inside four minutes.

Before the Roma comeback, United were on a nine-match winless run across all competitions, according to theScore. The two late rallies — against Roma and against Villa — showed character, but they were not enough to save Carrick’s job, as theScore put it. A team that needs stoppage-time miracles to draw at home against mid-table opposition is a team in deep trouble, whatever the spirit of the comebacks.

The Villa match itself was extraordinary, and it is worth recording in detail because it is the match that appears to have sealed Carrick’s fate. Alysson scored after 59 seconds, through goalkeeper Senne Lammens’ legs, and Nicolas Jackson made it 2-0 inside four minutes — the earliest United have ever been two goals down in a Premier League game. Bruno Fernandes pulled one back from the penalty spot, Youri Tielemans equalised on the stroke of half-time, and then Villa scored twice within seven minutes of the restart through John McGinn, from the penalty spot, and Leon Goretzka. United were 4-2 down with most of the second half still to play. Joshua Zirkzee scored in the 92nd minute and Dorgu headed in from a Fernandes corner in the 96th. It was the first time in Premier League history that a team had come from two goals behind to draw level twice in the same game, according to Opta. It was also the first time Villa had scored four goals against United since November 1963.

Carrick’s own assessment after the game was blunt. “We kind of beat ourselves a little bit… totally avoidable goals,” he said, according to Sky Sports. “We need to tighten up… win football matches.” He was right about the goals. What he could not explain was why a team he had taken to third place six months earlier was conceding them in such numbers.

A dressing room coming apart

The results have been accompanied by public fractures between the manager and his players, and those fractures have been visible to everyone. After the 4-1 defeat at Como in October, captain Bruno Fernandes openly questioned United’s passive tactics out of possession. Carrick responded by omitting the Portuguese playmaker from the starting line-up for the next match, against Bournemouth, calling it a “pure football” decision. It was the first time Carrick had named a Premier League starting line-up that did not include Fernandes, according to Opta.

Fernandes returned for the Chelsea match but made little impact in another disappointing defeat. Carrick’s response to the criticism was defiant: “Whatever system you play, whatever tactics you play, if you don’t run and you don’t run forward, and you don’t run back, you ain’t going to win,” he said, according to theScore.

Lisandro Martinez, another player who has publicly criticised the club’s recruitment policy and leadership during the slump, was sent off after receiving two yellow cards — and conceding a penalty — against Chelsea. He was removed from the starting line-up for the meeting with Roma. The pattern is familiar from every failing United regime of the last thirteen years: the manager loses the argument with his senior players in public, and from that point the results follow the mood rather than the tactics.

Former United full-back Gary Neville, speaking after the reports emerged, warned that sacking Carrick will only “paper over the cracks” at Old Trafford, according to Football365. It is a warning that has been issued at every one of United’s managerial changes since 2013, and it has been right every time. The cracks have never been papered over for long.

From third to the bottom three

The fall is sharp because the rise was so recent. Carrick took over as interim head coach in January, after Ruben Amorim was sacked, with United seventh in the table. He guided them to a third-place finish and back into the Champions League, and on 22 May he signed a two-year contract to June 2028, becoming the permanent head coach. Six months later he is, according to The Athletic, about to be sacked with the club in the relegation zone.

That arc — interim success, permanent appointment, rapid collapse — is now the defining pattern of the post-Ferguson era at Old Trafford. Solskjaer did it. Ten Hag, in a different key, did it. Carrick has done it faster than any of them. The question the club has never answered is whether the pattern says more about the managers or about the club that keeps hiring them.

Carrick’s case has its own particular poignancy. He is a United man in the fullest sense: a midfielder who won five Premier League titles and the Champions League as a player at the club, a coach who stepped in twice before — a three-game caretaker spell in 2021 after Solskjaer’s sacking — and a manager whose interim spell last season was genuinely impressive. The fans in the Stretford End showed their support for him during the defeat to Bournemouth, directing their anger toward the Glazer family and Sir Jim Ratcliffe with a series of anti-ownership chants, according to theScore. They staged similar protests on Tuesday, even throwing objects onto the pitch. The supporters, in other words, do not blame Carrick alone. The club’s hierarchy, if The Athletic’s reporting is accurate, has decided otherwise.

The Ferguson shadow

Since Sir Alex Ferguson retired in 2013 after winning 28 major trophies in 27 and a half years at United, the club has hired seven permanent managers and none has come close to winning a Premier League or Champions League title, according to ESPN. The list reads like an exhaustive trial of footballing philosophies: David Moyes, Louis van Gaal, Jose Mourinho, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, Erik ten Hag, Ruben Amorim, and now Michael Carrick. Between them came interim spells for Ryan Giggs, Ralf Rangnick, Ruud van Nistelrooy and Darren Fletcher.

Mourinho, who delivered two major trophies, a Premier League runners-up finish and a 58 per cent win rate, has been the most successful of the seven, according to ESPN. Van Gaal won the FA Cup. Ten Hag won the EFL Cup and the FA Cup. Solskjaer reached a Europa League final. Amorim won nothing. Carrick, if he is sacked this week, will leave with nothing either — and with the worst league start of any of them.

ESPN’s Mark Ogden, writing last week before the latest reports, noted that Friday’s anniversary of Ferguson’s arrival at Old Trafford in November 1986 might coincide with the club’s latest roll of the managerial dice. He was right about the timing, if not quite about the date. Forty years after the club made the best managerial appointment in its history, it is about to make its eighth attempt in thirteen years to find a successor who can last.

The deeper story, as ESPN’s reporting has documented, is that each of the seven hires has been flawed by the decision-making process at Old Trafford. When United hired Moyes to succeed Ferguson, it was claimed he was handpicked by the man he was replacing. The reality, according to sources who spoke to ESPN, is that the Everton manager was the seventh choice, and that the club had approached Jurgen Klopp, Mourinho, Carlo Ancelotti, Pep Guardiola, Diego Simeone and Laurent Blanc before turning to him. When Ten Hag was hired in 2022, he and Pochettino were the final two candidates. Pochettino has been the runner-up, the nearly-man, at United for a decade. If he finally gets the job now, it will be in the most difficult circumstances of any of those vacancies: a team in the relegation zone, a squad short of confidence, and a fanbase that has watched seven managers fail.

Analysis: Why It Matters

The international break is the execution window

The timing of this decision is not an accident. The international break is the only clean window United have: after Anfield on 22 November, the club have no free midweek until mid-December, according to SportsAdda. Sacking a manager in the middle of a congested fixture list means the replacement inherits a team with no time to train; sacking one during the break means two weeks on the training ground before the hardest away fixture in the country. The Athletic’s reporting that a change is anticipated before the Liverpool trip is, in that sense, the least surprising part of the story. The surprise is that it took until November — and until the club were in the relegation zone — for the hierarchy to act, when the warning signs were visible in October after the Bournemouth defeat. The delay may prove costly: if the new manager’s first game is at Anfield, the margin for error is zero.

Why Pochettino, and why now

Pochettino’s appeal to United is obvious, and it has been obvious for a decade. He transformed Southampton, turned Tottenham into genuine title challengers and Champions League finalists, and managed in the Premier League with Chelsea. He is a coach who builds teams, improves players, and plays the kind of front-foot football that United’s supporters have been demanding since Ferguson retired. He is also, crucially, a manager who has been available in spirit, if not in contract, at almost every United vacancy. The club have chosen other men three times. Each of those choices ended in failure. There is a case, and it is a strong one, that United have been circling Pochettino for so long that hiring him now feels less like a decision than a surrender to the obvious. The risk is that the obvious choice arrives at the worst possible moment, with the team in the bottom three and the season already damaged. Pochettino’s reputation would not survive a relegation battle; United’s would not survive another failed appointment. Both sides have more at stake in this hire than in any of the previous seven.

The English question

Eddie Howe’s presence on the shortlist raises a question that goes beyond tactics. Ratcliffe’s reported preference for an English manager is a statement about identity as much as about football: the belief that England’s biggest club should be represented by a homegrown boss. Howe is the only candidate who fits that description, and his record — taking Bournemouth from League Two to the Premier League, winning the Carabao Cup at Newcastle — is genuinely impressive. But Howe resigned from Newcastle in July to take a break, and he has turned down Crystal Palace. A man who left his last job because he needed rest may not be the man to take on the most exhausting job in English football four months later. The English question is real, but it should not override the football question. United have tried the homegrown hero before, in Carrick himself, and it has ended in the relegation zone.

The numbers made the decision

Strip away the personalities and the reporting, and this decision was made by arithmetic. One win in ten league games. Nineteen league goals conceded in ten matches. Fifteen goals conceded in five matches. Thirty goals conceded in all competitions. No clean sheet in the first ten league games for the first time since 1986-87. A nine-match winless run across all competitions. These are not the numbers of a team going through a bad patch; they are the numbers of a team that cannot defend, cannot control games, and cannot win. Carrick’s defenders will point to the two late comebacks, to the injuries, to the squad he inherited. All of that is fair. None of it changes the table. Football clubs sack managers for results, and United’s results this season are the worst of any permanent manager since Ferguson retired. The Athletic’s reporting is the messenger, not the cause.

A club that keeps changing the manager, not the model

Gary Neville’s warning — that sacking Carrick will only “paper over the cracks” — deserves to be taken seriously, because it has been true seven times now. Each of United’s post-Ferguson managers has been presented as the long-term fix, and each has ended in a sacking. The structure above the manager has changed repeatedly: executive vice-chairmen, chief executives, directors of football, sporting directors, co-owners. The recruitment has been erratic, the strategy incoherent, the debt enormous. A new manager will inherit the same squad, the same structure, and the same expectations. Pochettino, Howe or Nagelsmann may be better than Carrick — the evidence suggests all three probably are — but none of them can fix in a season what thirteen years of mismanagement have created. The real test of this decision is not whether the next manager wins his first three games. It is whether the club finally learns the lesson of the last seven appointments: that changing the man in the dugout, without changing the way the club is run, is a ritual, not a remedy.

What to Watch Next

1. The formal announcement: Whether United confirm Carrick’s departure on Tuesday, as talkSPORT reported Ratcliffe’s Monaco meeting would decide, and whether the club’s statement thanks him or simply confirms the change.
2. The interim question: If Pochettino cannot leave the United States before the Haiti second leg on 18 November, who takes charge for the Liverpool match — an interim coach, or Carrick himself for one last game?
3. The release clause: Whether United pay the reported $10 million clause for Pochettino, and whether the conflicting £10 million figure reported elsewhere is clarified by either side.
4. Howe’s next move: Whether the former Newcastle boss, having turned down Crystal Palace, waits for United or takes another job — and whether Ratcliffe’s preference for an English manager carries the day.
5. Carrick’s own future: Whether the former midfielder, who has said he will not walk away, takes another management job quickly, or returns to the coaching path that took him through Middlesbrough before United.
6. The Liverpool match: United travel to Anfield on Sunday 22 November, in the relegation zone, against the side that has made the fixture a formality in recent years. The result will define the new manager’s first week — or Carrick’s last.
7. The January window: Whether the new manager is given money to spend in January, and whether the club’s reported reluctance to spend — cited as a reason for delaying Carrick’s dismissal — extends to the transfer market.

Sources

• theScore — “Report: Man Utd plan to sack Carrick, favor Pochettino as replacement”
• TNT Sports — “Manchester United set to sack Michael Carrick with Mauricio Pochettino open to replacing him as head coach”
• SportsAdda — “Manchester United have one league win in ten, and they intend to sack Michael Carrick before the trip to Anfield”
• Football365 — “Man Utd: Ornstein reveals Carrick sack imminent as Pochettino on three-man shortlist”
• ESPN — “Why Man United are so bad at hiring managers post-Ferguson”
• LiveScore / The Independent — “Mauricio Pochettino becomes major candidate to replace Michael Carrick as Man United manager”