📅 August 11, 2026

Squad Preview: United v Leeds at Croke Park, and Where Every Position Actually Stands

By Mav Jones · Manchester United fan writer

Manchester United play Leeds United at Croke Park on Wednesday night, and the occasion is worth a paragraph before the football. This is the first club football match ever staged at the ground, and the first football of any kind there since 2009. Eighty-two thousand seats, a stadium built for hurling and Gaelic games, and two of English football’s oldest enemies playing a friendly in it. Kick-off is 7:30pm in Dublin, which is 2:30pm Eastern.

It’s also the first of two remaining looks at this squad before the season starts. AC Milan follow in Wroclaw on Saturday, then it’s Hull City away on 22 August. Carrick has ten days and two friendlies to settle on a team. Here is where every part of the squad stands going into it.

The headline: Rashford and Mainoo are back

Nine players flew out of Manchester on Sunday morning to join the camp at Carton House, and two of them matter more than the rest. Marcus Rashford is in a United squad for the first time since December 2024, with the number 14 shirt reportedly waiting for him. Kobbie Mainoo travelled with him, both having been given extended breaks after the World Cup.

Matheus Cunha is back too, having missed the Sweden leg of the tour with illness. Senne Lammens is available. For the first time this summer, Carrick has close to everybody.

Goalkeepers

Senne Lammens took the gloves last season and hasn’t given them back. He is 24, he wears 31, and the goalkeeping conversation at this club has been mercifully quiet since he settled in. He starts on Wednesday.

Behind him it’s thinner than the list suggests. Karl Darlow arrived on a free this summer to be the experienced backup, but he is one of three players the club describes as being at different stages of recovery from longer-term injuries. He travelled to Dublin without being ready to play. Tom Heaton is 40 and had his own scare during the PSG game that the club never explained. Dermot Mee and Fred Heath make up the numbers.

Altay Bayindir went to Celta Vigo on loan with a buy option and Vitek was sold to Middlesbrough, so the department is tidier than it was. It’s also one Lammens injury away from being a genuine problem.

Defence

This is the part of the squad Carrick spent his summer thinking about. United finished third last season and conceded fifty goals doing it, a number that tells you the attack carried a defence that wasn’t good enough.

At right-back, Diogo Dalot remains the incumbent and Noussair Mazraoui the alternative, and there’s a decent argument that the competition between them is the most settled thing in this back four. Centrally there’s real depth for once: Harry Maguire has been the most comfortable footballer on the pitch through this pre-season, Leny Yoro is 20 and looks like the long-term answer, Matthijs de Ligt is working his way back from injury, and Lisandro Martinez gives Carrick the left-footer the pairing wants.

Left-back is where it gets uncomfortable. Luke Shaw is 31 and going into the final year of his contract, which expires in June 2027. He was excellent against PSG, overlapping while Patrick Dorgu tucked inside as an inverted winger, and when he plays there’s no problem to solve. The problem is that he hasn’t played thirty league games in a season for a long time, and Dorgu, signed as a wing-back, is now viewed by the club as an attacking player rather than the cover. Harry Amass and Diego Leon are 19. That’s the whole of it.

It’s why Arsenal offering Myles Lewis-Skelly around the Premier League this week landed the way it did, and why Lewis Hall at Newcastle keeps being mentioned. Ayden Heaven is another 19-year-old who has had minutes this summer, though his error against PSG was the moment Andrey Santos had to rescue.

Midfield

The most rebuilt part of the team, and still the one with the most open questions.

Casemiro left on a free. Manuel Ugarte is out until spring with the ACL injury he suffered at the World Cup. Mason Mount came off after twenty minutes against PSG with a foot problem, described as a precaution, and his availability for Wednesday is still uncertain. That’s three senior midfielders removed from the picture in one summer.

In their place: Andrey Santos, signed from Chelsea for around fifty million pounds, and Youri Tielemans, thirty-five million from Aston Villa. Against PSG, Santos played 64 minutes, touched the ball more than any other United player, completed 35 of 37 passes and got back to block Ibrahim Mbaye’s certain second goal. Tielemans came on for him in the 65th and inside two minutes had slid Bruno Fernandes clean through.

They still haven’t played together. Tielemans came on for Santos, not alongside him, which means the single most important question about this team, whether those two complement each other or duplicate each other, is untested with ten days to go. Croke Park is the obvious place to find out, and if Carrick doesn’t do it there, Milan on Saturday is the last chance before it gets tested for real at the MKM Stadium.

Around them, Bruno Fernandes made his first appearance of pre-season against PSG and remains the pivot everything turns on at 31. Mainoo is back and needs minutes. Toby Collyer and Daniel Gore are the senior academy options, with Jack and Tyler Fletcher behind them.

Attack

Bryan Mbeumo, Matheus Cunha and Benjamin Sesko arrived together and spent last season learning each other. Mbeumo scored the equaliser in Gothenburg and looks the most reliable of the three right now. Cunha wears the number 10 and is back from the World Cup with Brazil. Sesko is the one to watch on Wednesday only in the sense that he is still recovering, one of the three carrying a longer-term problem into the tour.

Amad Diallo gives Carrick the right-sided threat and has a strong claim on a starting shirt. Joshua Zirkzee remains in the squad. Dorgu’s move forward gives another left-sided option. And then there’s Rashford, who at his best does the one thing nobody else in this group does, which is run at a full-back from the left and go past him, or take off in behind a high line and get there first.

Whether he plays on Wednesday is genuinely unclear. Some reporting has him involved at Croke Park, other coverage suggests Saturday against AC Milan in Wroclaw is more realistic given how little he has done since the World Cup. Either would count as a return.

The young ones

Shea Lacey has been the story of this pre-season, impressing repeatedly in the number 10 role at 19. JJ Gabriel and Tynan Thompson, the latter signed from Tottenham for an initial four million, both travelled to Dublin. Ethan Wheatley and Cristian Orozco, the Colombian teenager signed this summer, are in and around it. A friendly in front of 82,000 is a useful thing to hand a teenager.

The projected eleven

A 4-2-3-1, which is where Carrick has settled: Lammens in goal; Dalot, Yoro, Maguire and Shaw across the back; Santos and Tielemans as the double pivot; Amad right, Fernandes central and Dorgu left; Mbeumo through the middle.

The caveat with any pre-season projection is that Carrick will almost certainly play two different teams across the two halves, and the second one will be younger. Treat the above as the side that starts rather than the side that finishes.

What is actually worth watching

Three things. Whether Santos and Tielemans start together, because everything about the shape of this season depends on it. Whether Rashford gets on the pitch, and what he looks like when he does. And whether the back four keeps a clean sheet against a Leeds side with Dominic Calvert-Lewin and Lukas Nmecha in good form, because fifty goals conceded is the number Carrick spent his summer trying to fix.

Leeds are missing Illia Gruev, still recovering from a meniscus injury, but have integrated Harry Wilson and Tarik Muharemovic quickly. They won’t treat this as an exhibition. Nobody from either of these clubs ever does.

United lost their opening friendly to Wrexham, then beat Rosenborg and Atletico Madrid and drew with PSG. Two more, then Hull.

Kick-off is 7:30pm BST, 2:30pm ET, live on MUTV and ITV1. Full 2026/27 fixture list with kick-off times in ET on our Fixtures page.

The full picture: Michael Carrick at Manchester United: record, tactics and squad

Source: Sky Sports — Man Utd 1-1 Leeds (5-4 pens): match centre