Paul Pogba Supports Michael Carrick as Manchester United's Manager

Michael Carrick walked into a muddled Manchester United season and walked out of it with the job for keeps. Paul Pogba, watching from afar, believes the club have finally made the right call.

From uncertainty to control

The 2025/26 campaign did not begin like a season that would end with Old Trafford smiling again. Under Ruben Amorim, United lurched between ideas, performances swung, and the table told the story. Champions League football felt distant, the mood flat, the direction unclear.

Then the club turned to one of their own.

Carrick was handed the reins on an interim basis at the start of the year, a low-key appointment on paper that quickly changed the tone of United’s season. Across 17 Premier League games, he stitched together a record that demanded attention: 12 wins, three draws, just two defeats. That is title-contender form, not caretaker survival work.

The style changed as sharply as the results. Carrick pushed the team onto the front foot, encouraging an aggressive, attacking approach that finally matched the roar from the stands. United played higher, passed quicker, and looked like a side intent on dictating games rather than surviving them. The connection between team and crowd, frayed for so long, began to repair.

Third place and a return to the Champions League after a two-year absence turned what once looked like another lost campaign into a platform. For the first time in a long while, there is a sense that United can build rather than rip up and start again.

A job he had to lose – and never did

Publicly, the club insisted there would be no rush, no emotional decision based on a short burst of form. They spoke of processes, of assessing all “available and suitable options.” Privately, it felt like Carrick’s audition to fail.

He never did. The results, the performances, the mood – all of it pointed one way. The interim tag always felt temporary, and last month the inevitable became official as Carrick was confirmed as permanent manager.

That decision has now drawn praise from a man who knows both the club and Carrick from the inside.

Pogba’s seal of approval

Speaking to Sky Sports, Pogba did not dress his verdict up. He backed Carrick.

“I think he’s doing a great job and he did it also at the time when he was the assistant of Ole Gunnar Solskjaer,” the former United midfielder said, pointing to a relationship that stretches back to his own days at the club.

“He’s a great guy, he has experience, he was a great player, and he has a very good connection with the players, you could see it when he took the team.”

Those lines matter. Pogba has worked under a carousel of managers at Old Trafford and knows the difference between a distant tactician and a figure players trust. His emphasis on Carrick’s connection with the dressing room echoes what many inside the club have hinted at: the players respond to him.

“I think it’s going to be good for United,” Pogba added. “I wish them the best, obviously, for him and all the staff and the players.”

This is not a casual observer talking. Pogba, across his two spells, pulled on the United shirt 233 times. He has seen the club at its most chaotic and its most hopeful since Sir Alex Ferguson retired.

Now, as United step back into the Champions League and into another pivotal summer window, Carrick carries both the weight of expectation and the backing of one of the club’s most high-profile modern midfielders. The question is no longer whether he deserves the chance.

It is what he does with it from here.