We know how this ends because we have watched it for ten years.
The performances go flat. The players stop running. The manager starts drowning. Leaks appear. Supporters lose patience. The board briefs that standards have slipped. Then, eventually, Manchester United pull the lever and tell themselves they have solved the problem.
They have not.
They have simply restarted the cycle.
Michael Carrick deserves criticism. He is the manager of Manchester United. If the team looks disorganized, passive or badly prepared, that responsibility belongs partly to him. If he gets the tactics wrong, say so. If his substitutions are late, say so. If United fail to beat teams they should beat, he should be under pressure.
But pretending Carrick is the root problem would be absurd.
The root problem is that Manchester United have spent years asking managers to fix structural failures they did not create.
The club has carried huge debt for decades. Recruitment has lurched from one philosophy to another. Players have survived multiple managers despite repeatedly proving they are not good enough. Executives have changed. Coaches have changed. Systems have changed.
The dysfunction remains.
That is why this latest wobble feels so familiar.
Too many players have learned that the manager is temporary.
Marcus Rashford has played under a parade of coaches. Luke Shaw has seen nearly the entire post-Ferguson era pass in front of him. Diogo Dalot has survived rebuild after rebuild. Around them, United have too many players who know history suggests they can outlast the man in the dugout.
That is poisonous.
And ownership has enabled it.
The Glazers spent more than two decades extracting value while loading the club with debt and presiding over footballing decline. The new structure was supposed to improve standards, but the same basic pattern remains: incomplete squad, obvious holes, unrealistic expectations, manager under pressure.
Then everyone acts shocked when the football looks broken.
United supporters should be furious with the players when effort drops. They should demand more from Carrick. Nobody gets a free pass.
But there is a difference between accountability and scapegoating.
Sacking Carrick now would be the easiest move Manchester United could make.
It would also be the laziest.
Because then the next manager arrives, gets six months of optimism, inherits the same weaknesses, discovers the same personalities, fights the same battles and eventually gets blamed for the same institutional failures.
Again.
Manchester United do not need another reset button.
They need standards.
They need players moved on when they fail repeatedly. They need recruitment that serves a coherent footballing plan. They need owners willing to fund and support that plan properly. They need to stop treating the manager as the disposable part of the operation while everything around him is protected.
Carrick may succeed. He may fail.
But if United sack him without changing the conditions that swallowed the managers before him, then nothing has been learned.
The manager is not the cycle.
Manchester United are.
And until the club finally breaks that cycle, the next crisis is never very far away.
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