Manchester United confirmed on Thursday that Michael Carrick has left his role as men’s first-team head coach, and Mauricio Pochettino is widely reported to be the man they want next. Before the ink is dry, three former United players have set out three very different ideas of what Pochettino would be walking into, and what he should demand.
Ferdinand: the “human element” is what United need
Rio Ferdinand is the most enthusiastic. Speaking on his YouTube channel, he said Pochettino’s name “jumps off the list” of candidates, and explained why in terms of man-management rather than tactics.
“I look at Pochettino, and one of his biggest assets is that human element of his management and building confidence with his players,” Ferdinand said, as reported by Football365. “That’s a big part of Manchester United at the moment because we’ve got far too many broken individuals.”
He went further on the state of the dressing room. “He’s got to build team morale. Their morale, their confidence is on its knees, it’s below the decks,” he said, pointing to Pochettino’s experience with high-profile squads at Tottenham and Paris Saint-Germain. Ferdinand was also realistic about the target: in his view, United first need to stabilise and get back into the Champions League.
Scholes: “a little late to the party”
Paul Scholes, Ferdinand’s former team-mate, likes the appointment but worries about the timing. “My only concern with someone like Pochettino is that we might be a little late to the party,” he said on The Good, The Bad & The Football, in comments carried by Football365. “I think his best work was a few years ago, particularly at Southampton and Tottenham. That was probably the time he should have gone to Manchester United.”
Scholes was careful to add that he still thinks Pochettino is a brilliant appointment who could be perfect for United. His bigger point was about power. “Forget Jason Wilcox and Omar Berrada bringing players in. Whoever is responsible for recruitment, the manager must have a massive say,” he said, arguing that the new man should take control of the club in the way Sir Alex Ferguson once did.
Neville: two defenders in January, or walk away
Gary Neville, speaking on The Overlap, took Scholes’s argument about control and turned it into a list of conditions. “He needs two defenders in January,” he said, according to GOAL. “They have to give it to him or else he shouldn’t take the job.”
Neville also wants guaranteed budgets for the next two summer windows, and he was blunt about the current back line. “Because if they have Dorgu at left-back and Mazraoui at right-back and Heaven and Yoro at centre-back, he will have to do one hell of a job coaching to get them up the league.”
Three views, one fault line
The disagreement is less about Pochettino than about what is actually wrong at United. Ferdinand’s diagnosis is psychological: a squad of “broken individuals” who need rebuilding as people before they can be rebuilt as a team. That is an argument for a coach, and it suggests the current players can be improved.
Neville’s diagnosis is structural. On his reading, no amount of confidence-building turns this defence into a top-four unit, so the new manager’s leverage is greatest before he signs. Scholes sits between them: he wants the manager to own recruitment, but his doubt is whether this Pochettino is the same coach who built Spurs a decade ago.
The context is stark. United are in the relegation zone after one league win in ten, and Carrick, the club legend who steadied them as interim head coach last season, paid the price. Neville had already argued that sacking Carrick would not fix United, as we covered in Neville says sacking Carrick will not fix United, and Peter Schmeichel was scathing about how the club treated Carrick, as we reported in Schmeichel on United’s treatment of Carrick.
If Pochettino does arrive, he will find that all three pundits agree on one thing: whoever takes the job needs more say, more patience and more players than Carrick was given. Which of those he can actually extract from the hierarchy may decide whether Ferdinand’s optimism or Scholes’s caution proves right.
Subscribe to Punditfeed on Google News for all the latest updates from the world of sports!
