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Former Manchester United skipper Ashley Young has cautioned the club that bringing in Antonio Conte as a potential successor to Michael Carrick would be a "disaster."
Simply put, his philosophy and expectations are the complete opposite of what the current squad would offer.
The trophy-laden Italian, who claimed five Serie A titles as a player with Juventus, five additional ones as a manager with Juventus, Inter Milan and Napoli, along with the Premier League with Chelsea, is currently without a club after parting ways with Napoli by mutual agreement in May.
Carrick is believed to still have the backing of the Manchester United leadership, despite Como inflicting the club's second-worst defeat in the Champions League era on Wednesday evening and stretching a winless run to seven games.
Moments after the final whistle in northern Italy, Carrick headed straight to the section of the stadium where the away supporters were seated, offering an apology for the performance. He made that his priority over addressing his players and was openly critical of the effort on display—"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 rough patch strangely comes on the heels of an impressive run last season under Carrick's interim stewardship, when the side accumulated more points from the final 17 fixtures than title-winners Arsenal. The puzzling part is that it's largely the same group of players now producing vastly different outcomes.
'People Get Annoyed at Conte'
But would Conte, who transformed Chelsea following a dismal 2015–16 campaign to deliver the Premier League crown in his debut season, be the right appointment? Young, who spent nearly nine years at Old Trafford before an 18-month stint at Inter under Conte, doesn't believe so.
"He is crazy," the 2020–21 Serie A title winner said on The Overlap Daily show.
Conte is relentless and exacting, qualities that yield results but rarely endure. He is well known as a short-term solution, having held 10 roles over 20 years as a manager, with his longest tenure spanning three seasons at Juventus over a decade ago. The former midfielder has otherwise stayed two years or fewer at every other club he has managed.
Young questions whether Manchester United players already criticized for their lack of physical output would flourish under 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 principles involves getting his players to "eat grass," as he has previously stated. Not in a literal sense, of course, but as a metaphor for the sheer amount of ground they are expected to cover during 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.