The horse that ushered in Manchester United’s tragic arc | Jonathan Wilson

There’s plenty of blame to go around at Old Trafford. Like all downfalls it started with a seemingly small, unconnected moment

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And so here we are again, at that point as the nights draw in and Manchester United prepare to sack a manager. Autumn: season of mists, mellow fruitfulness and a crisis at Old Trafford. Sunday’s 3-0 home defeat to Bournemouth, coming on the back of last week’s 4-1 reverse against Como, made clear what many had feared from the moment Michael Carrick was given the job on a permanent basis: that he isn’t up to it.

But then, who could be? When you’ve burned through a long list of managers in 13 years, it’s perhaps worth considering whether the manager is really the problem. Could some blame perhaps go to the director of football, Jason Wilcox, or the chief executive, Omar Berrada, the people making the appointments? Or perhaps to Sir Jim Ratcliffe, the cost-cutting tax exile and minority shareholder with responsibility for sporting operations? Or to the Glazer family, who plunged the club into debt with a leveraged buyout in 2005 and have since made calamitous decision after calamitous decision, reducing the most successful club in English league history to a mid-table laughing stock with a roof that leaks symbolically?

This is an extract from Soccer Desk, a newsletter from the Guardian US. Subscribe for free here.

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