Right around this time every year, you can start to feel it. The air gets a little crisper. The shadows get a little colder. The days get shorter. The tree colors start to pop. You start wearing sweaters. Pumpkins appear in places where they do and do not belong.
Everyone and everything starts to shift, just slightly, in preparation for what's about to happen. The cycles of nature can be fickle and unpredictable, so the date is never exactly the same, and some years come and go without anything at all. But most years, it does.
Our tiny little rituals prime us to anticipate the inevitable, oncoming shift: that moment when Manchester United fire their manager and convince themselves that the new guy is finally going to be the one who fixes everything.
Ruben Amorim lost his job last January. Erik ten Hag was fired two years ago, right before Halloween. Ole Gunnar Solskjaer got the boot just a couple days before Thanksgiving. And Jose Mourinho was relieved of his duties a little over a week before Christmas.
Now that we've once again entered the season of sacking, Michael Carrick seems like he will inevitably become the latest victim.
Man United are clear of the relegation zone on goal differential alone. If history is any indication, their comeback against AS Roma in the Champions League will end up being meaningless. Before Tuesday's win, Carrick appeared to be on the verge of tears at the end of every match.
This is the 14th season since Manchester United last won the Premier League. And whoever replaces Carrick will be the ninth coach to try and do something that no other United manager since has done: just, simply, meet the expectations at one of the richest sports teams on the planet for more than a single season in a row.
But given how many different coaches have now failed since Sir Alex Ferguson left the club, it makes you wonder: Could anyone have been successful at Manchester United?
What is a great manager worth?
Arsenal won the Premier League last season with 85 points.
If we lived in a world where there were no subs and everyone on the field contributed exactly evenly to their team's success, then all 11 Arsenal players would have contributed about 8 points (7.7, to be slightly more exact) of value last season.
Except, the alternative to each player isn't just zero points. If you removed Bukayo Saka from the lineup, you wouldn't have to play a man down. No, you'd get to put another player out there who would also contribute to winning to some degree.
So, let's look at the relegation-level cut-off. West Ham were relegated with 39 points. Using the same framework, we'd say that all of their players were worth a little over 3.5 points across the season. We could then say that the average Arsenal player provided 5 more points of value than a relegation-level player.
This, of course, isn't exactly how it works: some players are better than others, some positions are more valuable than others, and almost nobody plays 100% of the minutes. Goalkeeper David Raya only played 97.3% of the league minutes last season, and Declan Rice led all outfield Gunners with 90.5% of minutes played.
But it all still gives us a nice benchmark. The best players on the best teams in the world are probably worth around 7 points more than your average relegation-level player. The truly generational superstars? You could probably bump that number up to 10 points if you wanted to.
But what about the manager? Rather than litigating the whole "managers don't matter" conversation for the 1,000th time on this website, we're just going to go with the logic put forth by Liverpool's former director of research, Ian Graham, in his book, "How to Win the Premier League": "[About] the same value as a good player brings. This is in line with manager salaries -- the best managers are paid a similar wage to the best players."
Who, then, was the best manager that Manchester United could've hired at any point over the past 14 seasons?
Most soccer-watchers would agree that there are two potential answers: Pep Guardiola or Jurgen Klopp. And most analyses would agree.
A 2025 study from the Sloan Sports Analytics conference looked at team performances from 2017 through 2024 across Europe's Big Five top leagues. The study awarded or penalized the manager for how much a team's performance level exceeded or undershot expectations based on the talent of the roster. Klopp and Guardiola topped the list -- with a significant gap between themselves and the next tier of coaches.
Given the 114 guilty charges against Manchester City under Guardiola, though, I think we have to go with Klopp. While Guardiola's influence on how the sport is played is undeniable, we now have to look on his Man City tenure skeptically. We know how much they outperformed what we were told they spent, but it would be foolish to blindly accept those numbers and attribute the gap purely to the Guardiola effect.
With Klopp, though, we know that he turned two clubs that were not even the richest clubs in their own leagues into two of the best teams in the world. And we know that he maintained those levels -- at both clubs -- for many seasons in a row. On top of that, both Borussia Dortmund and now Liverpool seem to have gotten worse after he left each job.
The job of the manager, simply, is to make his team better than the talent his club can afford to acquire and then to keep that improvement going even as the roster turns over. At the highest level of the sport, Klopp was better at that than any of his peers.
Could the best manager in the world save Manchester United?
What, then, might've happened if Manchester United somehow managed to hire Jurgen Klopp back in 2013 instead of David Moyes?
There are, of course, all kinds of ripple effects we could tease out -- what it would've done to German soccer, where Liverpool would've ended up, how Mohamed Salah's career would've played out, and on and on.
But I just want to focus on what it would've meant for Manchester United. We know that Liverpool benefitted from hiring Jurgen Klopp. But we also know that Jurgen Klopp benefitted from working for a club that did things like convincing him to sign Mohamed Salah instead of Julian Brandt.
Liverpool's cutting-edge front office didn't turn the club into the best team in the world, and neither did Klopp. No, it was the combo of the two that did it.
We could say similarly about Borussia Dortmund. At the time, Dortmund were one of the leaders in both youth development and identifying young stars. This meant that Klopp got the ideal kinds of talent, energetic youngsters to play his high-pressing style: Robert Lewandowski, Mats Hummels, Marco Reus, and Ilkay Gündogan -- just to name a few.
What we know about Manchester United, broadly, is that the club is an abject disaster. In terms of doing things that increase their chances of winning games, they are pretty much as bad as it gets. Since 2013, United have finished at or higher in the table than their relative Premier League revenue ranking once -- and that was last season.
While we could employ some magical thinking and convince ourselves that the only problem here is that the club can't hire the right coach, that's obviously not true. If it were, it would mean that the club that keeps firing its coaches just so happens to be doing all of the other things right.
No, the failure to find a successful long-term coach is a symptom of all of the other issues that plague the club. They've so badly underperformed their resources for over a decade; we can confidently say there is something deeply wrong with the way Manchester United tries to build its soccer teams.
So, if Klopp were the Man United coach, he wouldn't have fixed all of those problems. No, he would've had to work within that dysfunctional environment. He would've, in other words, ended up with Brandt instead of Salah -- many times over.
But let's sketch out the absolute best-case scenario for this hypothetical. Let's say that United have continued to hire "relegation-quality" managers. And let's say that Klopp's value is equivalent not just to the best player on a title team but to a true, once-in-a-generation superstar.
Neither of those things is true -- United aren't constantly hiring genuinely bad coaches, and Klopp himself would tell you that he's not worth the same as Lionel Messi -- but stretching the effect out to the extreme helps make the point.
Plus, by applying a Messi-like effect every year, we're canceling out some of the other problems with this exercise: not addressing the Manchester City situation, not subtracting points from other teams, not accounting for the increased spending power from an increased performance level, and so on.
If Klopp could've added 10 points to every Manchester United season, here's how things would've changed:
On average, United would've ended up with 76 points per season instead of 66, and their average finishing position would've been 3.8 instead of 5.3.
So, of course: things would be better if Manchester United had employed the best manager of the modern era for the last decade-plus. In this scenario, they would've finished in the top four 10 times, rather than six. Perhaps there would've been a deep Champions League run at a club that reached three finals in four seasons from 2008 to 2011 and hasn't been beyond the quarterfinals since.
But even if we granted Manchester United 13 straight seasons of consistent, transformative, incomparable, once-in-a-generation managerial performance, the team would still find itself right where it sits today: with no Premier League titles since Sir Alex Ferguson left the club.