I think it's very likely it'll be something like this.
It's no secret that our recruitment team and at least the past 2 managers haven't seen eye to eye. I suspect the "issues" Wilder clearly had with the club are fairly well known within the game via agents etc.
Carrick sounds like he's an intelligent guy, he won't be oblivious to the fact that our recruitment side of things has been a problem for a while. He'll want to be satisfied that he's either happy to work within a structure that maybe Wilder or Warnock weren't, or that he'll have a bit more control/input than they did over how recruitment is done.
He's probably interviewing us as much as we've been interviewing him.
These things about people ‘not seeing eye to eye’ on recruitment, isn’t it the same at every club? Look at where clubs are signing players from these days; Zambia, Ecuador, Iran, Latvia, Honduras, Georgia, Morocco, as well as the more usual places like Scandinavia, France, Germany.
There’s absolutely no way a manager or Head Coach has the time or capability of sourcing and scouting on this sort of scale. There will almost certainly be a staff at each club whose job it is to source and scout players and potential signings according to the needs of the first team(and the youths these days) and general growth of the club. A manager will either give the nod to a deal or be fully aware of the situation before accepting the position(purely because this is so commonplace now, the role of a managerial has changed considerably from what it was even 10 years ago).
You very, very rarely hear a manager or Head Coach distance themselves from signings until a result or two goes against them, or they want more new players and don’t get them. They only complain when they feel pressure from outside, which will almost certainly be because results aren’t quite what was expected. Some managers even claim credit for signings only to try and distance themselves later on(Warnock and Akpom, for example).
Likewise, managers very rarely say thanks to a recruitment staff when a signing does well. Bola and Dijksteel are two fine examples. Roundly slaughtered for their first year, they’re now considered good and very useful players. Woodgate took lots of flak for those deals, as did Bausor(as if he scouted and signed them personally).
Then there is the way supporters react. A lot of posters on here like to criticise Gary Gill or Bausor or the chairman for signing players the manager doesn’t want or players that don’t deliver. There’s loads of examples, an interesting one is Guedioura. People slammed Boro for “giving Karanka Guedioura when he wanted Jese,” etc but then Karanka signed Guedioura for Forest. Gary Gill or Neil Bausor can’t have signed him for both clubs, can they.
It’s an easy way for some people to apportion blame to people they feel deserve it, or to suit their own agendas. The bottom line is recruitment at almost every club in the world, certainly of the size and scale of Boro and above, will operate a recruitment set-up that is collaborative in nature. Any manager who pretends they didn’t know this, or can’t work in it, or thinks it’s unusual, just isn’t being honest IMO.
We need to move past this idea that one man(ager) signs all the players. Wilder lost his best midfielder and didn’t get a replacement. I can understand his annoyance. But even with that, we should not have been in the bottom three under him. His and any other person in that role is to coach and prepare the team to get results. Any Boro manager who takes a team into that sort of league position is always in big trouble.
Some stuff went against Wilder, obviously, but he didn’t have it bad. How many clubs spent more than Boro in the summer? What was it, 12 new signings? Four last January, plus Neil Taylor. 17 players in less than a year. Not bad. Imagine if he’d have had to work under the same constraints as Lennie, for example, or Mowbray(especially during the first year or two of his reign). He’d have been fuming.