It couldn't happen, could it? The answer to that is probably not but the fact that, after Sunday's 4-4 draw with Aston Villa, Manchester United being relegated to the Championship is a prospect that can be discussed as anything other than rival fan fiction ought to terrify the Glazers and Sir Jim Ratcliffe.

A quarter of the season is gone. The table may not be telling us the whole story but it can no longer be dismissed like it can in August or September. You'll struggle to find many teams who can sincerely argue they've been mistreated by the fixture list and United are certainly not one of them. They are where they are, 18th, a point behind Coventry City and safety, and there is not much to explain that away.

That is why Michael Carrick had to go. On Wednesday morning, the 45-year-old was still taking training at the club's Carrington base but he is expected to be relieved of his duties once the United hierarchy have met in Monaco. There, the club's chief executive Omar Berrada and director of football Jason Wilcox are expected to tell minority owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe that it is time to part ways with Carrick. Meanwhile, talks have already begun for USMNT head coach Mauricio Pochettino to take the helm, returning to the Premier League two and a half years after leaving Chelsea and mere months after signing a new deal with US Soccer. It would appear that unfinished business in England -- and the Old Trafford vacancy to which he has been linked for so long -- has tempted the Argentine away on the eve of the CONCACAF Nations League quarterfinals.

The path Pochettino is now on is one fraught with risk. And yet coaching for survival and nothing else would be the latest in a line of clumsy decisions from the Old Trafford hierarchy. Projection models such as Opta's would probably make the case that this team is dicing with danger but, with a 22% chance of relegation, will probably be fine. Bookmakers too are pretty skeptical that United's 2027-28 will encompass trips to Blackburn and Millwall with eight or so teams priced as more likely to go down than the Red Devils. That will be informed by an analytics profile that really does not suggest United are one of the three worst teams in the Premier League.

Through 10 games, a sample size where expected goals (xG) is more predictive than goals and scorelines when it comes to future results, United have an xG difference of -0.27. If there is an average team in the division, it's Carrick's. Naturally, that is not good enough for a team with their aspirations. Another 28 games putting up those underlying numbers and United will live to fight another day.

Suppose they don't. As anyone that saw Sunday's game can attest, events with a significantly less than 22% probability can happen all the time. A team's xG profile doesn't always capture everything. If it did, Villa would have notably fewer than their 13 points. Things could go worse for United. Let's have a look at how that might happen.

1. Picking the wrong coach

Carrick departs Old Trafford with his reputation among the fanbase still intact. He might also find that future employers look more forgivingly on his time at United. His tally of 47 points from 27 league games was bettered only by Manchester City and Arsenal, a goal difference of plus-10 putting United behind those two, Bournemouth and Brighton.

Equally, momentum had turned. With a full pre-season to establish his ideas (rather than hone Ruben Amorim's), Carrick seems to have crafted a team who are less effective in attack and more porous in defense. The 4-4-2/4-2-4 in which his team line up out of position has been easily manipulated by superior teams and structural issues are not offset by intensity off the ball. United rank 15th for pressures applied and 10th for passes per defensive action, both measures of pressing applied by a team. Meanwhile, the attack has both been creating fewer chances -- the comeback against Villa notwithstanding -- and being more wasteful with them. It is a bad cocktail.

The risk would have been that United reaffirmed the commitment they made to Carrick after the three-goal defeats to Como and Bournemouth, one which always seemed to be conditioned on the imminent international break. Could anyone parachuted in at a moment's notice have done much better than four points against Chelsea, Roma and Aston Villa? The November international break has always functioned as a critical point for English clubs. Fail to pull the trigger now when there is time to get your feet under the desk and familiarize yourself with players -- who, for once, will have a few days back at the training ground after their commitments around the globe -- before the festive fixture list bears its teeth. In that context, sacking a relatively inexperienced coach like Carrick probably lessens the relegation risk somewhat.

So, in principle, does hiring Pochettino. Here is a coach with over 400 games at the helm of English clubs, whose first job in the country with Southampton has afforded him some experience of the tight margins needed to avoid the drop zone. It was his work at Tottenham that so enamored Sir Alex Ferguson. Over five and a half years he forged Spurs into contenders for (but not winners of) the biggest prizes in the sport. Aggressive, attacking football with a young side imbued with English talent: everything except the silverware screams Manchester United in their pomp.

The price of that success was Pochettino's identity and Tottenham's intermingling. No bad thing when you are as successful as he was at first but it may have given the Argentine an expectation about his role in club football that he has brushed up against in subsequent jobs. At Chelsea he took umbrage at the hierarchy's insistence on affording him young signings rather than the veterans he wanted. The idea that set pieces should sit somewhat outside his jurisdiction and under "specialists" was not popular. At Tottenham, Pochettino had become accustomed to working cheek to jowl with executive chairman and part-owner Daniel Levy. Chelsea, like most Premier League clubs, have established numerous layers between the man in the dugout and the owners. He may not lose his rag in the manner of Antonio Conte but Pochettino is a deeply political operator. Any man who is not afraid to say what he sees could create a great deal of friction when he sees what has been going on at United these last few years.

When he left Stamford Bridge the sense was that Pochettino was yesterday's man in the rapidly evolving world of the Premier League, even though in retrospect it appears he left strong foundations for Enzo Maresca to build on. That view was clearly not one that senior figures at United entirely discounted. After all, at the time they were seriously considering sacking Erik ten Hag after finishing eighth in the Premier League. Pochettino was among the names they considered before doubling down on the soon-to-be-deposed Dutchman.

That was not the only time United could have got Pochettino. Indeed, when he left Paris Saint-Germain in the summer of 2022, he was interviewed before Ten Hag got the job. That was the most formal approach but there was also the restaurant summit with Ferguson at a Mayfair restaurant when Louis van Gaal was on the brink. And of course there was the chance to hire the 54-year-old in that window earlier this year when Carrick's interim spell was coming to an end and Pochettino had not yet recommitted to the USMNT.

Going for a coach they have consistently decided is not the best option for them will now cost them $10 million for his compensation plus the cost of his sizeable staff. The evidence of PSG, Chelsea and the USMNT is he can deliver to (realistic) expectations. In all likelihood things stabilize under Pochettino, the specter of relegation cast off. The scenario where he takes them down? It probably reflects yesterday's man taking a job at a club still enamored with an outdated vision of management. Pochettino is probably the most Ferguson-coded manager United have employed since the great man's anointed successor. His intense style of play will need willing participants and even if he finds them, it will also take time. That much was as apparent at the clubs where it clicked -- one win in his first seven league games with Southampton, three in nine at Spurs -- as it was elsewhere. Time is not a commodity a side in 18th place can really trade in.

2. Yet more player trouble

Though Phil Neville was quite scathing in his assessment of Noussair Mazraoui, Ayden Heaven, Leny Yoro and Diogo Dalot on Sunday -- "that back four gets you relegated" -- in pure talent terms United should be absolutely fine. You can question how many players in the squad make up the core of the title-contending outfit they aspire to be but there has been plenty of decent business done buying decent players from decent Premier League teams. Bryan Mbeumo, Matheus Cunha, (in theory right now if not in practice) Youri Tielemans.

Getting another left back and another forward in January would solve a few issues created by more injury-addled players. Then again so would the players on the roster executing better. United rank fourth in the league for non-penalty xG but 11th for goals. Maybe that is because of their wayward finishing. Opta's shooting goals added metric, which assesses the likelihood of a goal being scored pre- and post-shot, ranks this team 17th in the league on -3.57. You wouldn't expect that to hold all season long, particularly when some of the worst offenders are Bruno Fernandes and Cunha. Of course, if it did, then yes, United would be in real trouble.

The same at the other end. Yoro met a free kick with a fine header at Old Trafford on Sunday, drawing a springy save from a goalkeeper who could not stop the ball being turned in on the rebound. The slight issue is the goalkeeper was Senne Lammens and that was the fourth error leading to a goal that United have made this season. Low-volume statistics like these can occasionally betray you but in this case it speaks to a truth clear for all to see; the United defense is too slap-dashy. Young and old, players at Old Trafford have learned that basic errors rarely lead to lasting consequences. If this clumsiness continues -- and it should not be treated as a given that it does -- then the crisis could deepen.

3. Other teams improve

It's worth saying from the off that if you're rooting for chaos you'd want to see Manchester United's numbers trend down quite dramatically for there to be much in the analytics that says 18th or worse. The "best" relegated sides of recent years are probably Leicester City in 2022-23, sent down to the Championship on 34 points and -0.39 non-penalty xG difference (npxGD) per game, and West Ham three years later. They slipped through the trap door on 39 points and -0.26 npxGD, just a shade worse than Tottenham. Manchester United have sunk to levels below that in past seasons but not this.

Right now there is a long way to go to catch up with the worst teams in the league so far. Ipswich Town have accrued points and look to be a hard out but they are averaging -0.67 npxG difference per game. They are the worst of the newly promoted sides but both Hull City (-0.5) and Coventry City (-0.48) are delivering worrying analytics. The former have the advantage of those points they accrued early in the season and Hull deserve credit for how sparky and organized they are given the talent deficit Sergej Jakirovic is working with. Apply some of those principles with United's talent and competence is no longer the limit.

It isn't just the promoted sides that look bad. Sunderland have a case of difficult second-season syndrome. The best that can be said for Newcastle is that, like Hull, they've banked some fortuitous points. We can maybe ignore Aston Villa given how rarely their xG reflects the results Unai Emery gets.

Then there is Crystal Palace and, well, yikes. In the six seasons before this one only seven teams have had a worse npxGD per game than Palace's -0.86, which is a true marker of inadequacy. These levels Pierre Sage has plummeted the Conference League winners to aren't much better than Norwich City in 2021-22, Luton Town in 2023-24 or the carnival of ineptitude that was Leicester and Southampton two years ago. Palace are bad. So, so bad.

At least they are in results terms. The talent doesn't seem that bad even if the drip-drip of departures over the last year -- Oliver Glasner, Maxence Lacroix, Marc Guehi, Eberechi Eze -- has lowered their ceiling. With a Thomas Frank in charge you could see them move back on the right path quickly. Maybe the northeast triumvirate swing upwards too. Suddenly then there might be a space opening up for a team that is both bad and unlucky. That is, of course, assuming that there are three spots opened up for relegated teams this season.

4. Manchester City find a way through the season

Of course Manchester City might yet have a spot in next season's Championship with their name on it. City were found to have breached 114 of the Premier League's rules by an independent commission, a verdict they are in the midst of appealing. 

Separate to the process of establishing whether the commission erred in its duties is the matter of sanctioning City. That will be decided by the same three-person panel though it is not yet clear when the hearing will take place nor what the Premier League will expect. Given the abrasive language used by the league about one of its member clubs, it is hard to see them settling for a proposal that does not end with City out of the top flight at the end of the season.

The Premier League wants this process wrapped up comprehensively but swiftly. Much of the football world expects City to get hit hard, hence why bookmakers have Enzo Maresca's side among the three most likely teams to be relegated. A sweeping points deduction at the Etihad Stadium would be greeted with delight around Old Trafford for many reasons. The fact that it might insulate United from their own mismanagement is certainly one of them.

There are, however, no guarantees that this process will reach its conclusion before the end of the season. City could endure, dragging out a process they have made plain they believe to be compromised at its most basic principles. Can they keep the wheels spinning for another seven-plus months? Or argue their way to the sort of punishment that does not send them off the edge of the Premier League map? It may be hard to do but it is the sort of unlikely event that, for the time being, might be required to send United to the Championship.