Former Manchester United captain Ashley Young has warned the club that hiring Antonio Conte to potentially replace Michael Carrick would be a “disaster.”
In short, his style and demands are the antithesis to the group of players he would inherit.
The serial-winning Italian, who won five Serie A championships as a player with Juventus, five more as a manager with Juventus, Inter Milan and Napoli, and the Premier League with Chelsea, is currently available after leaving Napoli by mutual consent in May.
Carrick is thought to still retain the support of the Manchester United hierarchy, despite Como handing the club its second-worst Champions League-era defeat ever on Wednesday night and extending an ongoing winless slump to seven matches.
Immediately after the final whistle in northern Italy, Carrick made a beeline for corner of the stadium where the traveling United fans were housed, apologizing for what had just happened. He prioritized that over engaging with his players and was critical of the effort he saw—“If you don’t run and you don’t run forward and you don’t run back, you ain’t going to win.”
The current streak bizarrely follows a remarkable run last season during Carrick’s interim leadership when the team took more points from the final 17 games than champions Arsenal. What’s weird is it’s mostly the same players now getting massively different results.
‘People Get Annoyed at Conte’
But would Conte, who revolutionized Chelsea off the back of a dreadful 2015–16 season to take them to the Premier League title in his first year in charge, be the right person instead? Young, who spent just shy of nine years at Old Trafford and then 18 months at Inter with Conte, thinks not.
“He is crazy,” the 2020–21 Serie A champion said on The Overlap Daily show.
Conte is intense and demanding, which brings success, but it doesn’t last. He is famously a short-term fix, having held 10 positions in 20 years as a manager, and his longest appointment lasted three seasons at Juventus more than a decade ago. The retired midfielder has otherwise done two years or less everywhere else he’s been.
Young questions whether Manchester United players already accused of lacking physical capacity would thrive to that style of management.
“[Conte] is a bit like Diego Simeone on the sidelines. You hear him non-stop,” Young said. “Training is intense, there’s a lot of running. There was a lot that he did. The training sessions were a lot of 11 vs. 11, at times a little bit boring.
“Meetings were long. If we lost a game, we could go into a meeting and stop literally everything [else]. You could be in there three or four hours. I think that’s one of the reasons why he doesn’t last long at places because, not just the players, the board he tries to test mentally. I think people get annoyed at him and they’re like, no it’s time for you to go.”
One of Conte’s coaching mantras is getting his players to “eat grass,” as he’s said in the past. Not literally, of course, but metaphorically by the amount of ground they cover in a match.
“A lot has been talked about Manchester United’s running stats. If they’re not going to run and Antonio Conte goes in there, it’s going to be a disaster,” Young concluded.
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