Man Utd Could Start 2026/27 With the Same Back Four as Their 2022/23 Opener

Manchester United have spent £219.7m on eight defenders across the four years that followed the summer of 2022. And yet, when the Premier League season kicks off this weekend, Michael Carrick could send out the exact same back four that started United’s opening match of the 2022/23 campaign four years ago.

Lisandro Martinez, Harry Maguire, Luke Shaw and Diogo Dalot lined up together on August 7, 2022 under Erik ten Hag, in a game United lost 2-1 to Brighton. Martinez had just arrived from Ajax for £56.7m. Four years, two permanent managers and one interim spell later, that same quartet remains available to Carrick heading into Saturday’s trip to Hull City, and in six of his 17 Premier League games in charge last term, he chose exactly that combination.

Ten Times in Four Years

The strange part of the story is how rarely all four have actually played together. Across four seasons, Martinez, Maguire, Shaw and Dalot have started the same match just ten times, with 60 percent of those appearances coming under Carrick alone in his first months in the job.

The quartet lost their first two matches together, including a 4-0 defeat to Brentford that ranks among the darker afternoons of the Ten Hag era. They did not appear together again until October 30, 2022, a 1-0 win over West Ham. Tyrell Malacia, Raphael Varane and Victor Lindelof were rotated through the back line in between, while Maguire found himself out of the side for spells early in that first season and missed a month with a hamstring injury.

Injuries have been the constant thread running through the back four’s history. Martinez and Dalot both missed matches that same season with fitness issues. Dalot’s record has held up reasonably well from there, but Martinez has not been so fortunate. The Argentine lost most of the first half of the 2023/24 season to a foot injury, then ruptured his ACL in February 2025 and did not return to the pitch until nine months later, in November. Shaw’s story is similar in shape if not in detail. Across the 2023/24 and 2024/25 seasons combined, he made just 27 appearances in all competitions, a run of muscle problems and setbacks that kept United guessing on his availability week to week.

A Managerial Change That Reshuffled Everything

The summer of 2024 added three new defenders to the squad in Leny Yoro, Noussair Mazraoui and Matthijs de Ligt, with Ayden Heaven and Patrick Dorgu following in January 2025. Varane and Aaron Wan-Bissaka left that same summer. None of it settled the back line, and a mid-season managerial change made consistency close to impossible. Ten Hag departed in October 2024, replaced by Ruben Amorim, who lasted just 14 months in the role and, remarkably, never once selected the Martinez, Maguire, Shaw and Dalot combination in that time.

Amorim’s commitment to a back three, and his reluctance to move away from it even as results worsened, defined much of his tenure. He finally relented in December 2025, fielding a back four for the first time against Newcastle and keeping his first clean sheet in months. Two weeks later he was gone, unhappy at having been pushed into a tactical change he had resisted for so long, and Carrick stepped up from within the coaching staff.

Carrick’s Immediate Answer

In his first match in interim charge, a 2-0 win over Manchester City, Carrick turned straight to Martinez, Maguire, Shaw and Dalot. He picked that same four on five further occasions and did not lose any of them, winning five and drawing one. The results carried United through a difficult moment, though the underlying defensive numbers told a more complicated story. Only two clean sheets came from those six matches, and three of the five wins finished 3-2, evidence that the foundations were far from airtight even while the results piled up.

De Ligt’s absence has been a quiet factor in all of this. The Dutch defender has not played a single minute in the nine months from November 2025 on, dealing with a back problem, which means he has never actually been available to Carrick for a single session as head coach. He returned to first-team training this week, offering United a defensive option they have not had access to in almost a year.

No Fresh Faces at the Back

The clearest sign of the problem is how little defensive investment has followed Dorgu’s arrival 18 months ago. Malacia left this summer, Lindelof and Jonny Evans both departed last year, and no replacement has come through the door. If Carrick wants to keep building on the platform he set in his opening months, reinforcements at the back look like an obvious gap still to close before the September 2 deadline.

Carrick’s version of United built its results on defending close to the edge of its own box, compact and difficult to break down. Pre-season has shown something different, or perhaps an evolution of it. United have pushed higher up the pitch, working harder to press and counter-press opponents in the moments right after losing the ball. It very nearly backfired in a 2-4 defeat to Ruben Amorim’s AC Milan in Wroclaw, where the fourth goal conceded came from a single ball played over a high defensive line that was caught badly out of position.

The Left-Back Question

That Milan result illustrated why left-back remains the position United most need to strengthen. Shaw will need regular rotation given the extra fixtures that come with European competition, and supporters have been calling for Dorgu to get a run in his more natural role there, but Carrick has mostly used him as a left winger so far. A new left-back with real recovery pace would suit the higher defensive line United are now working toward, most of all for the moments the press does not land and the defense is left exposed in behind.

Age is the other factor hanging over this back four. Maguire and Shaw are both past 30, while Martinez is 28 and Dalot 27, prime years for defenders in theory, but a group being asked to adapt to a real change in style of play for a second time in under a year. Whether their bodies and their habits can make that shift together is a separate question from whether they can still do it individually.

Carrick Has Time on His Side

What Carrick does have, unlike the two men before him, is a proper runway to work with. United confirmed him as permanent head coach on a two-year contract in May, with an option for a further season attached, giving him a level of security Ten Hag and Amorim were never afforded once results turned against them. That timeline gives a defense still working out its best form the room it needs to develop. Rather than needing instant results to save his job, Carrick can treat the opening weeks as a chance to test how far his higher-pressing approach can go before autumn fixtures pile up.

Saturday’s opponents will offer an early gauge of that. Hull City return to the Premier League after a play-off win in the Championship, and their preparations have not been entirely smooth either. Goalkeeper Jack Butland, a £3m summer arrival from Rangers, is likely out until Christmas after arm surgery, while £20m record signing Konstantinos Tzolakis, who arrived from Olympiacos on a club-record fee in late July, is expected to deputise between the posts. Butland’s move to the MKM Stadium was a straight swap of sorts, with goalkeeper Ivor Pandur heading to Rangers in the opposite direction, and he signed a two-year deal with an option for a third. Hull also made 18 year old Lucas Herrington the most expensive Australian in the sport’s history with a £17m move from Colorado Rapids, though their pre-season form has been short on goals, scoring just once in their last three warm-up matches.

Reintegrating Rashford

Carrick has also had to think about how to bring Marcus Rashford back into his squad plans following the forward’s loan spell away from the club, on top of managing Kobbie Mainoo’s disappointment at a World Cup that did not go the way he had hoped. Speaking to Sky Sports about the season ahead, Carrick set out his priorities for the opening weeks: building fitness and cohesion across a group still adjusting to his methods, while working out how the reintegrated players fit into a team that has changed its shape twice in twelve months.

Four years on from that opening-day defeat to Brighton, a huge amount has shifted at Old Trafford: three head coaches, eight new defenders, two changes of tactical identity and a combined outlay that would buy most Premier League squads outright several times over. And still, when Saturday comes around, the four names written into Carrick’s back line at Hull could be the very same four Ten Hag picked on the opening weekend of 2022/23. How long that stays true, with De Ligt back in training, Shaw needing careful management across a longer fixture list, and a left-back still on the wish list, is the question United now have to answer.