Michael Carrick
The Red Devil You Know
The Way We Love
“From the moment that I arrived here 20 years ago, I felt the magic of Manchester United. Carrying the responsibility of leading our special football club fills me with immense pride,” echoed Michael Carrick, the new head coach of Manchester United.
That’s the thing about fandom: it isn’t rational. In 1995, Manchester United paid £7 million for a striker from Newcastle, and something in a five-year-old me just clicked. Andy Cole walking out in that red shirt did something for me, seeing a Black man as the main attacking outlet for the biggest club in the world, that sweet spot of success and representation, that was my entry point into this love affair.
One of the best writers of our generation, Hanif Abdurraqib, inspired this piece. He wrote about his beloved Minnesota Timberwolves, and the byline “Rooting for a hapless team for nearly two decades teaches you to find pleasures beyond victory.” That line is where I am now with Manchester United. For 30-plus years, I’ve seen the treble in 1999, the Champions League and Premier League double in 2008, and the slow, painful, almost insulting decline that followed Sir Alex Ferguson’s retirement in 2013. When you go from kings of the world to genuinely scraping, you learn to love differently. You find joy in the margins. You become, as Abdurraqib puts it, calm in a way that alarms the people around you.
Fandom is borderline parasocial when you really sit with it. Fans are dialed into every layer, from transfer rumors to training ground whispers to the way a player looks during warmup. It is dramatic, asinine, and completely foolish, but here we are. Would we have it any other way?
The Long Decline
Manchester United is arguably the biggest football club in the world, and they have been struggling badly. Since Sir Alex left, the club has been rudderless. There have been flickers of life, moments where you squint and think maybe this is it, but then it falls apart again. Over a billion spent on transfers for players who simply were not good enough, over a hundred million spent on firing coaches. Recruitment, neglect, and ownership have all played their part in running this club into the ground.
But something shifted when Sir Jim Ratcliffe and INEOS came in. The skepticism is still there; it would be foolish not to have it, but things feel different. The reckless spending on players past their best, players who could sell a shirt but not win a game, that feels like it is behind us. Last summer’s attacking additions all hit double figures for goals. That is not nothing, it’s a sign of life, just enough to keep on dreaming.
Manchester United are victims of their own success in a lot of ways. The standards are so high, the history so heavy, that anything short of competing for titles feels like failure. The media, the fans, the critics, everyone has an opinion, everyone has a take, and all of it comes from the size of what this club is supposed to be.
The Metronome Returns
Then they hired Michael Carrick, and I felt something I hadn’t felt in a while. Not just optimism, something warmer than that, something personal.
I watched Carrick for years. West Ham, Tottenham, England, and then Manchester United, where he quietly became one of the most important players of that era and yet somehow underappreciated, for the national team, especially, but that is another conversation.
He let his game speak, a metronomic, elegant midfielder whose style wouldn’t have looked out of place in the Xavi, Iniesta, Busquets trinity at Barcelona. In 2013, he said he wanted to stay at United and eventually coach. Thirteen years later, here he is.
The thing about hiring a former player is that it doesn’t always work. United tried it with Ole, with Giggs, with Fletcher, with Ruud. But very few of them get it as Carrick gets it. He was the brain of some of United’s best football. He also lived through the decline and was part of the squad as things started to unravel. He has been relegated, embarrassed in Europe, to Barcelona, and lost a title on points. He went to Middlesbrough in the Championship to coach and eventually got fired there, too. So when he walked back through the doors at Old Trafford as interim head coach in January 2026, after the mess that was Ruben Amorim, nobody was handing him anything.
And then he just quietly got to work. Beat City, beat Arsenal, beat Liverpool. In 16 league matches, he won 11 and drew three, 36 points, an average of 2.25 per game. Over a full season, that is 85 points. More than Arsenal, more than City have managed this season. Only City, Arsenal, and Liverpool have scored more goals than United under Carrick this campaign.
How is that not romantic? How does that not make you believe?
Drunk on Hope
People are still hesitant. I understand it. Fear of the unknown, wanting a sure thing. But sure things are rare, and fandom was never built on certainty. Fandom is built on hope, on belief, on being completely drunk with the idea that this time it might be different.
Names got thrown around: Nagelsmann, Iraola, Emery, Glasner, Xavi. Respectable names, experienced names. But United finished 15th in 2024/2025, under Carrick, they finished third. A former captain, a player who understood what it meant to wear the heavy Man Utd shirt, came back and dragged this club back up the table.
That is what fandom does to you. It makes the story matter as much as the result, makes the who just as important as the what. Carrick isn’t just a coach to United fans; he is one of us, someone who felt the same pull we felt, who loved the club the way we loved the club, and now he is the one trying to restore it. This is a huge summer for Man Utd, back in Europe, meaning more games. Can Carrick handle that? The squad needs more quality, more talent, and the midfield needs major reconstruction. There’s something poetic in the fact that the midfielder Man Utd signed in 2006 to start their midfield rebuild is the one leading the midfield rebuild in 2026.
There are storylines galore for next season, Pep Guardiola is leaving Man City after a decade, Arsenal are champions, the midfielders of the mid 2000s are coaches: Carrick, Xabi Alonso, Frank Lampard, and Mikel Arteta.
While Michael Carrick is the coach, there will be frustrations, bad runs, shaky performances, and moments where you question everything. That’s life, but if INEOS keeps building, adds quality around what Carrick is trying to build, why not dream? Why not believe that Manchester United could be the first team to win a Premier League title under an Englishman?
Congrats to Michael Carrick and his staff, to the red devil you know.
Beautiful.
Even though stats nerds can't help but to compare it negatively to Ole's tenure, I'm cautiously optimistic. The major variable that differentiate the two tenures is that there's an actual football structure in place now, with people who actually know football and who aren't just cronies for the Glazers. Berrada and Wilcox haven't been perfect, but recruitment has been done with better direction.
The stars seem to align for a better future too. We're back in the UCL, we're getting money from sales (we might get 50% of a Mason Greenwood sale this summer) and with Carrick caring about United's on-pitch identity, I think we can get this right and if we get this right, we can at least battle for the Prem. At least based on how the Prem's been this season.
It's worth dreaming indeed.
SUPA MICHAEL CARRICK