Another dark Manchester morning, another trip through gritted teeth along the Carrington driveway of doom. It was somehow bleakly symbolic, the sight of Michael Carrick arriving in his Land Rover for training-ground duties before the break of dawn and still none the wiser as to whether he would even have an office by teatime. His misfortune was to be the pawn in perhaps the worst game of managerial chess ever played, dangled over the cliff edge by a Monaco-based billionaire and two hapless lieutenants and waiting to be hurled into the void.

As much as the prospect of being sacked will wound his pride, the brutal reality is that he is better off out of Manchester United’s full-system fiasco. Time after time, it has fallen to Carrick to excuse the inexcusable, to pretend to perceive some order amid the chaos, to sit through withering inquisitions while Sir Jim Ratcliffe, chief executive Omar Berrada and director of football Jason Wilcox say nothing. But truly, he is the least of United’s ills. In fact, there have been recent signs, with United hauling themselves back from two-goal deficits twice in a week, of some players being prepared to fight for him. And yet as he hovers on the precipice, we see zero consequence for Wilcox, the man whose inept recruitment lies behind the team’s defensive disintegration.

It is United’s position in the relegation zone that gives Ratcliffe cover to make Carrick the fall guy. But if you survey the full picture, you realise that since Carrick’s initial appointment as interim manager on January 13 this year, only Arsenal and Manchester City have amassed more than United’s 47 points. The trouble is that 83 per cent of them came last season. It was Wilcox’s responsibility over the summer to build on a third-place finish, to bolster the squad with half a dozen eye-catching signings, including a left-back, centre-half and striker. Instead, adopting the bizarre approach of using transfer windows to address only one area of the team at a time, he agreed to shell out £145m on three distinctly ordinary midfielders.

The repercussions are plain to see, with United cast hopelessly adrift after just 10 Premier League games. And it is not just their traditional rivals leaving them in the dust. With all due respect to the brilliance of Tony Bloom and his extraordinary weaponising of data, it is staggering to have entered the November international break with Brighton second and United 18th. It feels such an inversion of English football’s natural order that Wilcox should, by any standard metrics of performance review, be the first person to go. But still he stays on the bridge of the United ghost ship, meandering cluelessly into ever more treacherous waters.

Berrada, having risen through the ranks at City, is cast as executioner while seeming invulnerable to professional execution himself. Of all Ratcliffe’s pronouncements over the past three years, surely the daftest was his pledge to recruit the “best in class”. At his first round of media interviews in early 2024, he said: “We need to populate all the key roles with people who are best in class, 10-out-of-10s.” United fans have turned that boast against him, taunting during the witless 3-0 home defeat by Bournemouth: “Best in class, you’re having a laugh.” It is, by any stretch, a joke to imagine that Wilcox fits the part-owner’s definition. Even the official announcement of his appointment 2½ years ago offered only a cursory description of his credentials: “As a player he won the Premier League with Blackburn Rovers in 1995.”

Seriously, is that it? One league title in a different century: in what universe does that qualify Wilcox to be the brain masterminding United’s elusive revival? His only other stint as a technical director was at Southampton, a world away from the suffocating pressures at Old Trafford. How perverse it is, then, that Wilcox finds himself the figure wielding the axe over Carrick, a precious link to the glories under Sir Alex Ferguson and to a time when standards truly mattered. One school of thought is that Carrick is a naif, a neophyte, out of his depth. But this grossly disrespects a man who helped secure five league triumphs and Champions League glory for United, before engineering wins over Manchester City, Arsenal, Chelsea and Liverpool in his first campaign as permanent manager. When looking for a human sacrifice, this is a club searching in the wrong place yet again.

The true malaise lies further up the food chain, in the incompetence of Wilcox and Berrada, in the delusion of Ratcliffe in assuming he has created a culture of excellence, and in the detachment of the detested Glazers, whose leveraged buyout and belief that success on the pitch is secondary to commercial clout has condemned the club to so much drift and decline. Against that backdrop, who in the name of sanity would want to be Carrick’s successor? All signs point to Mauricio Pochettino, undoubtedly gifted and firmly in the super-coach mould. Sadly, given the way United are heading, you would not bet against him leaving after 18 months with an eight-figure payout. For ultimately, this is a club controlled not by a ministry of all the talents, but by a confederacy of dunces.