The one thing that concerns me about Utd is they could easily be bought off to soften their attitude towards City’s accountability. Sporting sanctions will have very little meaning to the Glazers, they judge success on P&L column not a W/L column. There is no way those owners are voting for a sanction that lessens payments but has significant sporting sanctions. They will have an estimate in their head of speculative lost earnings in best case scenario and if that number got met, they’d snatch it. They don’t give a single shit about how it affected anyone else.

Part of me feels sorry for Carrick, he is a thoroughly decent guy who pulled off a miracle last season. The Utd board needed a candidate who would tolerate underwhelming recruitment, who they can trust in a press conference and is just happy to have the job. The last thing Utd wanted was a Ten Hag, an Amorim or a Conte who would skewer them in the media so they went with a candidate that will protect them. Jason Wilcox owed Michael Carrick an interview, he owed Carrick public support and he owed him shared accountability, it is total cowardice that he hasn’t done that. You learn everything about a person and their values by how they behave when their back is against the wall and Carrick is learning right now that success is theirs, failure is his.

Marcus Rashford was given a new contract for one reason only which of course was never disclosed to him. He was having a great season during the time the club was put up for sale and the Glazers didn’t want to lose an asset of that value and it affect the sale price, exactly the same thing they did with Mason Greenwood. They told Rashford how important he was, what they planned to do with the team and how much the club loved him, meanwhile Omar Berrarda was offering him significantly more to come to City but he decided to stay with his boyhood club. Once INEOS came in, they looked at those players transactionally and wanted them out. If they had’ve just been honest with players and said “we don’t really care about you, we just want to make more money from the sale of this football club and you being under contract helps us do that” then none of this would have happened. Subsequently they could’ve offered to cancel his contract but they didn’t because he can make them money in a sale. Undoubtedly Marcus Rashford made his own mistakes which he will readily admit to but when your employer is working hand in glove with individuals who are abusing you and your family then it tends to fracture the relationship a bit. I once asked Utd why they did that and the individual said (I kid you not) “well people have to work with Fox News”.

Unsurprisingly, a Utd player who has played a total of 3 minutes in the last couple of games has been singled out in the media by people who have an odd fixation with him. It is total nonsense to claim that players have an issue with him internally such as Cunha. The individual(s) who wrote this invented bullshit didn’t write that not only is he carrying an injury but he recently had a death in the family. This fact would’ve obvious to anyone who is informed on the situation so either the individual(s) that write this nonsense are either completely uninformed or deliberately omitted a key contextual detail which is extremely unethical. So which is it?

I had a conversation with an individual who is in a position of knowledge and he said to me “A number of players don’t feel welcome at the club and feel that there is a deliberate targeting of higher paid players to get them to leave. A number of the defenders wanted to leave this summer because they have been told they are being replaced in a year and some of those players are down to the last year of their contract. Those players are not going to play through injuries for fear of jeopardizing a move and they feel that when they have played through injuries and had a poor game as a result, nobody ever explains to the fans that they have been carrying injuries. Half that Utd team don’t want to be there because they feel like the club don’t want them to be there. I don’t care what anyone says, INEOS did not expect to be here at this point