By Laith Vesarian
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TL;DR Arsenal may be favourites, but United finished last season as the league’s best-performing side under Carrick. With Mainoo, Tielemans and Baleba on the way, United have momentum, quality and far less pressure. Could that be enough to pull off the impossible?
There are a number of ways to approach the prospect of Manchester United winning the Premier League this season. The first is to behave like a normal, rational adult. The second is to be a United fan, in which case you look at the evidence, ignore all previous evidence, become dangerously excited and start mentally engraving the trophy with our name on it. I have chosen the second option, obviously.
Let’s get the obvious bit out of the way first. Arsenal should be favourites. They probably have the best squad in the league, they certainly have the bench strength and have spent years building a coherent, recognisable style of football. Top work all round really.
From the top brass all the way to Mikel ‘Lego-Man’ Arteta, it’s clear they have a cohesive vision with everyone on the same page, which is an enormous advantage in football and one United supporters haven’t been allowed to enjoy with any consistency since Sir Alex Ferguson retired and the club apparently decided that succession planning was an optional extracurricular activity, reducing it to version of “So Alex, who’s next?”.
And, begrudgingly, I think Arsenal will be better to watch this season too. There, I’ve said it. Somebody check my temperature. They have evolved, the players understand their roles inside out and they should, I say should, benefit from the changes in the interpretation of certain rules. The days of turning every corner into a low-budget WWE production, taking approximately three geological eras to restart the game and generally treating the ball being in play as an unfortunate administrative error should be less prominent. So yes, they should win it. But. But.
United on the charge. The Carrick Supremacy.
Perhaps we should start by acknowledging the thing that has been ridiculously underplayed throughout the summer – Simply put, Manchester United were the best team in the Premier League in the second half of last season. Not potentially the best. Not statistically promising if you squint at a spreadsheet while standing on one leg. They were the best-performing team in terms of points gained.
Under Michael Carrick, United collected 39 points from 51, three more than Arsenal over exactly the same period. They won more games than anyone else and picked up more points than anyone else. They even beat Arsenal 3-2. Yet somehow this has been treated as a footnote.
Apparently it doesn’t count because United only played once a week. This has become one of the great excuses of modern football, which is particularly strange when you consider that footballers generally enjoy playing football. That’s literally their job. Give most of them a choice between playing a Premier League match or spending Tuesday evening watching someone else play a Premier League match on television, or Emmerdale, and I suspect they’ll choose the former.
And if once-a-week football was some sort of performance-enhancing miracle, why did it apparently only work for United? Half the league had fewer games in the second half of the season. Where were their Carrick-inspired revolutions? Where were the great unbeaten runs? Why didn’t everyone else suddenly become prime Barcelona because their players had a spare Wednesday?
Perhaps the explanation is actually much simpler. Carrick made Manchester United better.
One of his most important decisions has also gone bizarrely under the radar: Kobbie Mainoo. Ruben Amorim had essentially stopped using him. Carrick arrived and immediately started playing him, then kept playing him, and Mainoo became one of the best midfielders in the best-performing team in the second half of the season. Funny how that works. Sometimes, instead of buying another £70m player because everyone on Twitter has watched three YouTube compilations, you can actually coach the very good footballer already sitting in your squad.
Now Mainoo has Santos alongside him, and Youri Tielemans has arrived to add another layer of technical quality with Carlos Baleba on the way. I genuinely think Tielemans could be the signing of the season. He isn’t necessarily the transfer that will generate the most YouTube thumbnails featuring flames and the words HERE WE GO!!!, but he is an exceptionally intelligent and technically gifted footballer who can dictate the pace of a match. He can make a game breathe when it needs breathing and accelerate it when the opposition are there to be hurt. After watching United spend years treating midfield like a hostage situation, the idea of having someone who can actually control the tempo of a football match feels almost indecent.
Then there is Lisandro Martínez, a back-to-back World Cup finalist who somehow still catches strays from Paul Scholes. This is football’s equivalent of getting a Michelin-starred chef criticised because he once overcooked a sausage. Martinez is not flawless, but he is an elite defender with outstanding technical ability and mentality, and alongside a settled first-choice XI United have a much stronger side than the general discourse would have you believe.
This is the other thing I think people are missing. You don’t need to convince yourself that Manchester United have a better squad than Arsenal to believe United can win the league. You just need to look at the best XI and admit that it is very, very good. There are still weaknesses, obviously, because this is Manchester United and we are contractually obliged to have at least five things that make supporters nervous at all times, but there is enough quality here to compete.
More importantly, there is evidence that Carrick has solved the biggest problem. The biggest problem wasn’t simply tactics, although he’s no mug in that departments either. It wasn’t even necessarily personnel. It was the atmosphere around the team. United looked miserable, brittle and incapable of responding to adversity. They looked like a group of people who had accidentally been locked inside an escape room together and were waiting for someone to find the crack the code. Carrick changed that.
His calmness, coaching and man-management have been repeatedly dismissed because he doesn’t behave like a man who has swallowed a megaphone and is furious about it. He is measured, understated and emotionally stable. In football discourse, this apparently means he isn’t a proper manager. Give me that over theatrical touchline gesticulation every day of the week.
And maybe that’s exactly what this Manchester United team needs. The last thirteen years have worn everyone down. We’ve seen managers arrive with grand plans, players arrive with grand reputations, executives promising Galacticos and delivering Marouane Fellaini. We’ve watched the club repeatedly find new and inventive ways to make a simple football match feel like an examination of human endurance.
So perhaps the most dangerous Manchester United is the one nobody believes in.
The rest of the country can keep talking about Arsenal, Liverpool, City, Chelsea and whoever else has spent the summer convincing themselves that their new £120m signing is going to solve everything.
I’ll take the evidence. I’ll take Carrick.
I’ll take Mainoo even if Tommy Tuchel doesn’t.
I’ll take Martinez, even if Scholes doesn’t.
I’ll take a very strong first XI, a manager nobody is taking seriously enough and a club that, after thirteen years of misery, has absolutely nothing left to lose by being optimistic.
And if you’re a Manchester United supporter, optimism is basically an untreated psychological condition anyway. So yes, I’m predicting Manchester United to win the Premier League. I realise how ridiculous that sounds. I realise what this club has done to us. I realise I have probably just guaranteed Arsenal a 97-point season. But after thirteen years without the title, I’ve earned the right to be stupid for a few paragraphs.
United are winning the league. And if we’re wrong, we’ll deal with it in May like we always do, traumatised, furious, convinced the club is finished, and somehow already excited for August.
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