Modern football is, more than ever, a manager's game. Tactical identity, squad value, commercial reach and even global brand perception are increasingly tethered to the individual in the dugout.
And yet, for all that power, the supply of genuinely elite managers has thinned alarmingly.
There is one undisputed standard-bearer in Pep Guardiola, a coach who continues to bend elite competition to his will. Beyond that, the picture becomes hazy very quickly.
Jurgen Klopp is currently out of work. Carlo Ancelotti and Jose Mourinho are edging into the autumn of their careers, still capable operators but no longer obvious long-term architects for clubs demanding instant and sustained dominance.
The next generation has not arrived in sufficient numbers, and the gap is being filled by familiarity, compromise and nostalgia.
Billions spent on the sack race
The Premier League, with all its wealth and supposed ruthlessness, has become a case study in this stagnation.
Over the past five years, clubs in England's top flight have been widely reported to have spent well over half a billion pounds on compensation packages alone, paying managers and their staff to go away.
That figure does not include the cost of replacing them, rebuilding squads to align with new philosophies, or repairing the damage to coherence and confidence.
Chelsea remain the most garish example. This is a club that dismissed Enzo Maresca despite delivering a sequence of tangible successes, trophies that traditionally buy time and trust.
The subsequent appointment of Liam Rosenior, whose work at Hull City was respectable rather than revelatory and whose spell at Strasbourg barely rippled beyond eastern France, speaks volumes about the current marketplace. Ambition remains sky high. The options do not.
At Old Trafford, the decision to remove Amorim felt particularly jarring, especially given its timing.
United were, by recent standards, in their healthiest competitive position for years, showing structure, clarity and a direction of travel.
Yet patience has become an endangered species in boardrooms stocked with investors for whom football is a line on a portfolio rather than a lifelong education. Results wobble, agents murmur, social media roars, and the axe falls.
Long-term goals, short-term realities
Sir Alex Ferguson once articulated the essence of elite management with characteristic clarity: "When you run any organisation, you have to look as far down the road as you can," he wrote in his book Leading. It is a line that feels increasingly out of step with modern football, where clubs plan in three-year spreadsheets but act in three-week cycles.
Ferguson was allowed to think in seasons rather than fixtures, to absorb short-term turbulence in service of long-term dominance. Today, the same club lurches from idea to idea, appointment to appointment, rarely looking beyond the next international break.
Carrick's interim appointment is not a vision for the future, but a holding pattern born of institutional impatience. The road is still there. United simply no longer appear willing, or merely able, to follow it.
Carrick's return, then, is not really about Carrick at all. His managerial work at Middlesbrough was solid without ever threatening to redefine expectations. He looked competent, thoughtful, but ultimately limited, and he was unable to take a competitive Boro squad back to the top flight.
That profile would once have ruled him out of even interim consideration at a club of United's stature. Today, it places him firmly in the conversation, alongside Ole Gunnar Solskjær - another former player who the Red Devils have already sacked once before.
The uncomfortable truth - at least for fans of the club - is that Manchester United's pull has eroded. This is not news to anyone.
The name still carries weight, but elite managers now survey the landscape and see churn, interference, and contracts that promise riches but little protection.
When every downturn risks dismissal, the job becomes less a career pinnacle and more a highly paid game of managerial roulette, which raises a more fundamental question about how the role itself is judged.
Managers are handed bloated squads assembled by multiple predecessors, tied to long contracts that assume instant success, then assessed in isolation from recruitment strategy, player power and executive meddling.
Players and their representatives exert increasing influence, often outlasting the coach tasked with maximising them.
Meanwhile, ownership groups with vast resources but limited football literacy continue to make decisions that are both expensive and oddly detached from on-pitch reality.
'Good managers make good sides'
"Good managers make good sides, there's no such thing as a side making a manager," Brian Clough once said. Strong leadership ultimately shapes a club's success, yet the modern game leaves barely any wiggle room to provide that platform in the first place.
Carrick's appointment is a symptom, not a solution. It reflects a game obsessed with the cult of the manager while simultaneously undermining the conditions required for elite management to flourish.
Read more: Man Utd appoint Carrick over Solskjaer for interim manager role
Until that contradiction is addressed, clubs like Manchester United will keep cycling through familiar faces, wondering where all the great managers have gone, and quietly ignoring their own role in the disappearance.
And now, in an era where two seasons now constitutes longevity, the very concept of an interim manager even begins to feel absurd.
If every appointment is temporary by design, the distinction is ultimately meaningless, and the instability is no longer a consequence of failure, but of the operating model itself.
