Michael Carrick has been sacked by Middlesbrough after two and a half years in charge. Although the former England and Manchester United midfielder was liked and admired by Boro’s owner, Steve Gibson, his failure to lead the team out of the Championship ensured his first managerial posting ended in disappointment.
Carrick led Boro into the playoff semi-finals in 2023 but they missed out on top-six finishes in the past two seasons. The 43-year-old has become the 17th Championship manager to have lost his job since last August.
Although Boro often played attractive football heir failure to translate possession into points undid a manager who never seemed to master the knack of making the right substitutions at the right moment. Well before the team finished 10th last month, underwhelmed Riverside regulars were becoming seriously disgruntled.
With hindsight Carrick – whose assistants, Jonathan Woodgate and his brother, Graeme Carrick, have also left – may regret sticking to his passing principles when a little more tactical flexibility might have served him better. In mitigation he lost his main striker, Emmanuel Latte Lath, to Atlanta in January and Ben Doak, a key winger, sustained a season-ending injury in the same month.
Carrick had made clear he hoped to lead Boro into next season but a post-season review by the hierarchy has come to an alternative conclusion.
Gibson and Kieran Scott, the head of football, must find a replacement capable of ending Boro’s decade-long absence from the Premier League. Although Scott is a big fan of the former Luton manager Rob Edwards, Gibson can expect to be inundated with applications from candidates attracted by the club’s impressive infrastructure and, on paper at least, relatively strong squad.
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Contenders could include Sheffield Wednesday’s Danny Röhl, the former Nottingham Forest and Leicester manager Steve Cooper, the former Wolves head coach and Boro midfielder Gary O’Neil and the former Burnley and Everton manager Sean Dyche.
Elsewhere in the Championship, the Millwall head coach, Alex Neil, has signed a new deal “for the foreseeable future”. He joined in December and the team missed out on the playoffs by two points after winning their final five home games.
