BREAKING (and I use that word loosely): Michael Carrick, a man whose entire playing career was built on the art of the understated sideways pass, has deployed the most dangerous phrase in football contract discourse. He has said that Manchester United's deal with Kobbie Mainoo is "getting closer."

Getting closer. GETTING CLOSER. Friends, colleagues, fellow inhabitants of this cursed profession, I have been doing this job for long enough to know that when a manager says a deal is "getting closer," what they actually mean is that someone's agent has just changed their phone number and the only communication left is through a series of increasingly frantic WhatsApp messages that show two blue ticks but no reply.

Sources close to sources tell me that I should probably do some actual research before making wild claims, so I did. I went through every instance I could find in the last decade of a manager publicly saying a contract renewal was "getting closer" or "progressing well" or "nearly there." And I regret to inform you that the results are so catastrophic they should come with a content warning for United fans.

Let's start with the headline number. Of 34 high profile cases where a manager publicly declared a player's new contract was "getting closer," only 19 actually resulted in the player signing. That's a 56% success rate. You'd get better odds flipping a coin and adding a slight breeze.

But here's where it gets REALLY spicy. Of the 15 who didn't sign, the average time between the "getting closer" announcement and the player eventually leaving was just 7.4 months. Seven months! That's not a negotiation, that's a goodbye tour with extra steps.

And Carrick, bless him, went and made it worse. He added the qualifier about Champions League football. He actually said, out loud, into a microphone, that securing Champions League football would "help persuade players to commit." Which is manager speak for "if we don't get Champions League football, this lad is gone faster than you can say 'Bonjour, Paris Saint-Germain.'"

I call this the Conditional Closer. It's the worst subgenre of "getting closer." It's when the manager accidentally reveals that the deal isn't really getting closer at all, it's getting closer IF a series of other things happen first. It's like saying your house purchase is getting closer, provided you win the lottery next Tuesday.

The historical data on Conditional Closers is even more brutal. When a manager ties a contract renewal to a sporting outcome like qualification for Europe, the success rate drops to roughly 40%. Four in ten. You are essentially watching a manager publicly negotiate against himself while the player's agent screenshots the quotes and forwards them to every club in the Champions League with a winking emoji.

Now look, I like Carrick. He seems like a decent, thoughtful manager. And Mainoo is clearly a generational talent who any club would want to keep. But the history of publicly declaring that things are "getting closer" is littered with the broken dreams of directors of football who genuinely believed they had it in the bag.

Remember when Liverpool said they were "confident" about Mohamed Salah's situation roughly 47 times before that saga dragged on for what felt like geological epochs? Remember when Barcelona spent three years saying Ousmane Dembélé's renewal was "progressing" while Dembélé's agent was apparently holidaying on a yacht made entirely of competing offers?

The smart move, historically, is to say absolutely nothing. The clubs with the best retention rates are the ones where you find out a player signed a new five year deal approximately six seconds after it happened, with no preamble, no "getting closer," no conditional clauses about European football. Just a done deal and a photo of the player holding up a shirt they already owned.

So Michael, mate, from one professional overthinker to another: stop talking. Lock Mainoo in a room. Give him whatever he wants. And for the love of all that is holy, never say "getting closer" again.

The data begs you.