Nobody grows up wanting to be a caretaker manager. You don't get the pre-season, you don't get the transfer window, and you almost certainly don't get the job at the end of it — but for a few weeks or months, the entire trajectory of a football club runs through you. BBC Sport's More than the Score podcast recently turned its attention to exactly this phenomenon, using Michael Carrick and Mal McFarlane as entry points into one of the sport's most thankless and fascinating roles.
The moment a caretaker is named, the clock is already running. There's no honeymoon period, no grace in defeat, and the squad in front of you was assembled by someone else with a completely different idea of how football should be played. The first training session isn't about tactics — it's about reading the room. Who's lost confidence? Who was frozen out? Who needs an arm around them and who needs a hard conversation?
Carrick's stint at Manchester United in November 2021 remains one of the more instructive examples of how an interim can actually shift momentum. Handed the reins after Ole Gunnar Solskjær's dismissal, he oversaw three unbeaten Premier League games and a Champions League win at Villarreal — before Ralf Rangnick arrived. He didn't reinvent United. He steadied them. That's the job.
What's striking about most successful caretaker spells is that they rarely involve radical tactical overhauls. The managers who tend to get results — and occasionally earn the permanent role — are the ones who simplify rather than complicate. They pick a shape the players already know, restore some basic defensive structure, and let the relief of a fresh start do half the work.
The failure mode is the opposite: trying to prove too much, too fast. An interim who arrives with a new system, new training methods, and a point to make about why they should be given the job permanently almost always ends up doing neither. The players don't buy in quickly enough, results don't follow, and the board appoints someone else anyway.
Mal McFarlane's experience — discussed alongside Carrick's in the BBC Sport episode — adds a different dimension to the conversation. Caretaker appointments at clubs lower down the pyramid carry their own specific weight: smaller squads, tighter resources, and the very real possibility that the person doing the job is also a coach, a scout, and occasionally the one locking up after training.
Perhaps the strangest part of caretaker management is the ending. If you do badly, you're gone. If you do well enough, the club brings in someone with a bigger name and you step aside graciously. The middle ground — where you've done just enough to be considered but not enough to be certain — is where careers quietly stall.
Carrick walked away from United after Rangnick's appointment rather than stay on in a coaching capacity. That decision said something. He'd had a taste of the top job, handled it with composure, and wasn't interested in reverting. Eighteen months later he was managing Middlesbrough. The caretaker role, for all its constraints, had told him something about himself.
That's the thing about interim appointments that rarely gets discussed: they're as much a test of the manager as they are a solution for the club. Some people find out they're ready. Some find out they're not. Both are useful pieces of information — even if only one of them feels like it at the time.
The BBC Sport More than the Score podcast episode is available on BBC Sounds.
Nobody grows up wanting to be a caretaker manager. You don't get the pre-season, you don't get the transfer window, and you almost certainly don't get the job at the end of it
Sources
BBC Sport — Football
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