📅 October 9, 2026

What the Tottenham Matchday Programme Says: Baleba, Santos, and Spurs’ 25 Old Trafford Defeats

By Mav Jones · Manchester United fan writer

The matchday programme for Saturday’s game against Tottenham went up on the club’s Issuu page on Thursday, and it says more than the press conferences will. Michael Carrick’s notes confirm Carlos Baleba played in the Lausanne friendly and the club counts it as his “first minutes in a red shirt”. Andrey Santos names the four best players in the squad. The stats page gives United’s home record against Spurs as 67 wins in 103 games, and the infographic on page 69 carries the number the whole weekend hangs on: Spurs have lost 25 league games at Old Trafford, more than any visiting team has lost at any single away ground in the Premier League era.

Here is what’s in it, and what’s worth knowing before 5:30 on Saturday.

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Carrick’s notes

The manager’s column is short and does the job a manager’s column does: thank the crowd, mention the break, look ahead. Two lines in it carry information. He calls Baleba’s closed-doors game against Lausanne-Sport his “first minutes in a red shirt”, which is the club’s own framing of a match it had only confirmed with a gallery, and he describes the squad as “ready to kick on and get back to winning ways together”, which is as close as the programme gets to acknowledging that United have won once in the league since August.

The pull quote is “We’re at the beginning of an intense and exciting run of fixtures.” That run is eight games in the next month, per the match preview on the next page, starting with Spurs and taking in Atlético on Tuesday.

The numbers the club put in print

The preview pages are where the programme earns its £4. The stats column on page 7 and the infographic on page 69 give a cluster of figures that the club has published and we can use without caveat:

• United at home to Spurs, all competitions: played 103, won 67, drawn 17, lost 19.
• Spurs have lost 25 Premier League games at Old Trafford. The programme says no team has lost more at a single away ground in the Premier League era, and the chart puts Aston Villa, West Ham and Everton behind them. Spurs’ defeats are the only ones that can “be beaten, as it were”, by Everton at Arsenal, who have lost 26 times at Highbury and the Emirates combined.
• United’s league record at Old Trafford in calendar 2026: 9 wins from 11. Two defeats. One of them was the derby.
• United rank 4th in the Premier League for expected goals and 1st for shots taken. The programme’s line on that is that it “will only take some more precise finishing for the Reds’ scoresheet to profit”. The 26 first-half shots at Fulham are the reason both halves of that sentence are true.
• Spurs’ start is their worst after five games of a Premier League season: two draws, three defeats, goal difference minus six.
• Last season’s fixture ended 2-0 at Old Trafford in February, Mbeumo and Fernandes, which ended a run of eight games without a win against Tottenham. It’s described as the “end of the Spurs curse”.
• Mbeumo has had a hand in seven goals in his last six league games against Spurs, six scored and one assisted, across his Brentford and United careers, including both meetings last season.

One number in there worth sitting with: 9 of 11 at home this calendar year. United’s problems this season have mostly happened away from Old Trafford, and the programme is quietly making that case.

Mainoo won the September vote, and it wasn’t close

Kobbie Mainoo was the club’s Player of the Month for September with 82 per cent of the fan vote, ahead of Matheus Cunha and Youri Tielemans, having finished second in August. The “did you know” box adds a claim the club attributes to its own data: going into this run of games, Mainoo led the division for possession won, for pass completion on forward passes under high pressure, and for take-on success rate. Shea Lacey took Goal of the Month for his strike against Brighton in the Carabao Cup, his first senior start, cutting in from the right and beating Jason Steele at the near post after eight minutes.

The programme also carries Harry Maguire’s line from after Fulham, which reads better three weeks on than it did at the time: “You’ve got to ignore the noise and really believe and think about what we have done this year, along with what we need to work on and improve on. We are not far away.”

Santos: “Play with confidence and, if you make a mistake, just go again”

The big interview is with Andrey Santos, and it’s the most revealing thing in the issue. The 22-year-old has made five appearances without a goal, and the programme’s box describes Jason Wilcox’s assessment on signing him in July as “an outstanding midfielder with excellent technical qualities and the ability to impact the game at both ends of the pitch”.

Three things from it. First, on Carrick, who played his position: “He always says to us: ‘Play with confidence and, if you make a mistake, just go again. Try and play forward as much as you can.'” Santos says the connection between the midfielders and the manager is “very important for us”, and that he’s had “a period of adaptation to the ideas, to everything.”

Second, on the midfield he’s competing in: “I know we fight for the same position, but we are very proud of each other.” He names Bruno, Baleba, Mainoo and Mount as the men he’s fighting, and calls Tielemans “a top player and a top guy”, with “a lot of energy, a lot of quality, a lot of power”. That’s the pivot competition laid out by one of the competitors: six players for two places, and Santos has started once in the league.

Third, asked who’s the best in the squad, he picks four: Maguire, Bruno, Zirkzee and Rashford. Zirkzee is the surprise in that list. The initiation song, for the record, was “Parado no Bailão”, with dancing, and the squad’s Ireland camp game of choice was Werewolf, which he had never played and has since told his friends in Brazil to buy.

Everything else

The programme’s cover star is the squad photo, with a free poster inside. Bryan Mbeumo gets a four-page feature for scoring in both league meetings with Spurs last season, which puts him on a list of United players to do the “double” against Tottenham that runs from Enoch “Knocker” West in 1910-11 through Jack Rowley, Denis Law, Best, Charlton, Hughes, Solskjaer, van Nistelrooy, Scholes, Giggs, Rooney and Ronaldo. Law’s entry is the one to read: four goals against Spurs in 1963-64 on the way to a club-record 46 in a season and the Ballon d’Or, and 15 goals in 19 games against them in all, a club record he shares. There’s an extract from Sir Alex Ferguson’s new book Games of My Life, a piece on the club’s new official book Kings of the World about the 2005-08 side, with a Carrick quote on the cover, and a fan-pages section from United supporters in Denver who’ve been getting up before dawn for kick-offs.

The Tottenham pages record that De Zerbi’s last league line-up was in a 4-3-3 and that this is meeting number 208 between the clubs. The referee is Stuart Attwell, with Jarred Gillett on VAR.

What it adds up to

The club’s own print has United fourth for chances created, first for shots, nine home wins from eleven this year, and the best home record against this opponent of any fixture on the calendar. The opponent has two goals in five games. If the programme is right, Saturday is the easiest match United have had since August. If Saturday goes the way of the last five, the programme’s optimism will be the thing people quote back.

The confirmed line-ups land about an hour before kick-off. The predicted eleven is here, and the case for why both managers are nervous is here.

The video side

The confirmed team sheets go up on the TikTok account about an hour before kick-off, with the headshot line-up panels, and the match clock follows. It’s called “Man United, for Americans”, and it’s where the line-ups and the arguments go.

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Sources: United Review, Manchester United v Tottenham Hotspur, 10 October 2026, vol. 88 issue 5, published on the club’s Issuu page on 8 October 2026 (76 pages): Michael Carrick’s notes (p5), the five-point preview and stats column (pp6-7, including the 103/67/17/19 home record, 9 of 11, the 25 Old Trafford defeats, 4th for xG and 1st for shots, Spurs’ worst start after five games, the 2-0 last February and the eight-game run, Mbeumo’s seven goal involvements in six), Catching Up (p8: Mainoo’s 82 per cent, the possession-won and pass-completion claims, Lacey’s Goal of the Month, Maguire’s quote), the Andrey Santos interview (pp16-20), the Mbeumo “dual scorers” feature (pp40-44), the Home Comforts infographic (p69) and the team pages (p76, officials). Every number above is the programme’s own and is attributed to the programme; the possession and pass-completion claims about Mainoo are the club’s figures and have not been checked against an independent source. The Baleba fee is not in the programme and is not stated here.