Carlisle United's failings mean a total overhaul is needed

That data. Bottom of League Two with one of the division’s top budgets. Twenty-three defeats from 40 games, and only seven wins. The kind of miracle needed for survival that even those authoring the Bible would feel a bit far-fetched.

A season of 49 players, 42 of them in the league. A best winning run of one match. Those are the numbers (there are plenty more, if you’re really in need of a miserable time). And then come the visuals.

What the eye tells you about Carlisle United in 2024/25, its decisions, its judgements. Chiefly: what their spending has landed them with – a squad entirely unsuited to the task of finishing even 22nd in a mundane division, a group that cannot win, a group that is lacking in so many of the level's fundamentals.

Just writing those words makes you want to scream. It reflects, and let’s get this right, the most dangerous and damaging spell of misjudgement this club has ever seen in the department of team-building. Corrective action must therefore be ruthless.

It is, if we are honest, not a team at all, no longer. Dean Walling, a player who knows and knew what a team should look like, made that cutting point on BBC Radio Cumbria after the Chesterfield defeat: the most flattering 2-1 setback imaginable.

Who was rallying the others, he asked? Who was pulling things together, who was trying to drive a belated set of standards from an admittedly sorry cause?

Deano could only pose the question, in the absence of the answer. More likely, he seemed to conclude, this is a group of individuals stumbling to the line, knowing relegation is imminent and who knows what reckoning will come next for them all.

Well, first for the bonfire ought to be the structures and the particular manning of them that produced this business. Take the January transfer window alone: a single-aim period, or should have been. With greater largesse than most if not all of their rivals, why could United not identify that they needed hardened players, canny professionals, to dig them out of trouble, rather than a fleet of No10s and so forth in theory equipped to make a failing head coach’s system work?

United's January window, overseen by sporting director Rob Clarkson, has proved disastrous (Image: Richard Parkes)

Why were the delicate and in many cases unready arrivals judged to be the ones? Why were these “club signings” – not manager-led signings, not any more – felt to have the mettle for the fight? Why were deals, some of considerable length, handed out to those who came in, United’s precarious EFL status hung on the pegs of too many without either the fitness, skill-set, background or character (or a combination of those, including the odd one that makes your brain ache) to transplant a new backbone into an XI crying out for one?

United’s failings are not just down to January 2025, but nor is it right to hang everything on the distant past. Yes, previous windows only made the Blues worse; their legacy has been damaging close to ruinous. But Carlisle had the means to correct some of it on an emergency recruitment basis. They failed catastrophically in that short-term aim.

Seriously – you regard what we saw at Chesterfield, admittedly an injury-strewn night (but, guess what, other clubs get those too), and after trawling for the words to describe it, fail to get past ones such as incompetent, dreadful and disgrace.

That this is the sum total of all the supposedly well-backed and modern efforts behind the scenes at Brunton Park…well, that should be the last rites for much of it. Anyone with responsibility for this – and here the gaze turns primarily to Florida – must know that to leave largely alone is to add another episode of negligence to this already disturbing story.

United’s judgement, its eye for signings, its handle on circumstances, appointments and the scrapping of them…all these things have failed them. Those overseeing and running these areas have fallen utterly short. It might be painful for some to consider this but Carlisle do not arrest this fall, do not become credible again, without a fresh and much more realistic and savvy approach to what is needed.

Put this in another and especially pointed way: do you trust these people, these measures, to get a quick and true handle on what this plummeting team and club will need to compete positively in the National League, to avoid this woeful job getting even worse down there? Do they have the wherewithal to identify what is right and what would be so much more waste?

Is there a scrap of evidence to say that they do?

It’s easier, sure, to call for things to go, harder to pinpoint what and whom might specifically need to come in. Veering away from an overhaul on that basis would, though, be little other than a cop-out. 2024/25’s output has been that of the worst season in United’s history, in a great many ways.

The only case made for things to be left be, then, can be made by the deluded, or those with an interest in covering their own backsides. It won’t do. It’s time to tear the house down.