Bruno Fernandes did not sugarcoat it. After Manchester United’s 4-1 Champions League demolition at the hands of Como on Wednesday night, the club captain stood in front of the cameras. He delivered a raw, unflinching assessment that Old Trafford’s hierarchy will have found deeply uncomfortable.
“Obviously it’s not the first time,” Fernandes told TNT Sports, his frustration barely contained. “Again we started with the wrong foot.”
That phrase — not the first time — cuts to the heart of United’s crisis. This was not a one-off disaster. It was the latest chapter in a slow-motion unraveling.
Manchester United fell to one of the most embarrassing European defeats in their history as Champions League upstarts Como ran out 4-1 victors on Wednesday. This heaped yet more pressure on head coach Michael Carrick.
Nico Paz was the architect of the destruction, with his display stretching United’s winless run to seven games. The Argentine, effectively on loan from Real Madrid, was unplayable — scoring in the second and 57th minutes and teeing up a third. Anastasios Douvikas added a second just after the break before Jacobo Ramón headed in a fourth, with Joshua Zirkzee’s 90th-minute finish serving only as consolation.
For Como, it was one of the biggest nights in the club’s history — Cesc Fabregas’s side playing United off the park in a performance that sent a statement to the rest of the competition.
What made Fernandes’s post-match words particularly striking was not their anger — it was their resignation. The captain spoke not like a man rallying his troops, but like one staring into an abyss.
“They scored very early. Not much pressure on the ball. Not really many good movements without the ball. It’s many things not going our way,” he said.
The goal he referenced came in the second minute — Paz striking before most United fans had settled into their seats. From that moment, Fernandes admitted the psychological damage was done.
“Conceding the goal very early makes us feel going into the game already in a mood of a defeat. It’s very difficult to get out of that at the moment, without being ourselves and trying to push and trying to be brave, trying to have the ball, trying to make something happen.”
The word “brave” is telling. It implies that United’s problem is not merely tactical but temperamental — a collective fragility that surfaces the moment adversity strikes.
The crisis is made more jarring by the contrast with what came before. Fernandes was in imperious form last season, setting a new Premier League single-season assist record with 21. At that time, United finished a comfortable third to seal a return to the Champions League after two seasons away.
Since Carrick’s appointment, no team had won more Premier League games than United’s 11 in the second half of last season, while only Manchester City scored more goals in that period. It felt like the beginning of something. It now looks like a false dawn.
This season has been a different story entirely. Sunday’s 1-1 draw with Leeds extended the winless run to six matches before Wednesday’s defeat. This left United with just seven points from their opening seven Premier League games.
Carrick was seen holding his hands up apologetically in front of the United fans who stayed until the final whistle — a haunting image of a manager running out of goodwill.
Fernandes’s closing words offered no comfort:
“If we’re not able to do that, it’s going to be very difficult to get out of this situation.”
For a captain who set records last season, championed Carrick’s appointment, and carried this club through so many dark nights, that admission is as close to a public SOS as you will hear from inside a dressing room.
United now sit on just three Champions League points from three games, stranded in the lower half of the league phase table. With Roma, Sporting CP and Bayern Munich still to come in Europe, the path to the knockout rounds narrows with every defeat.
Como embarrassed them. Fernandes knows it. And right now, he has no answer for how United fix it.
The expectations built last spring feel very distant. United’s next assignment is Roma in the Champions League on November third. For Carrick and Fernandes, it cannot come soon enough — and yet, based on current form, it may not come soon enough to save either man’s season.
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