Not only have the owners stuck by Ten Hag but they doubled down in the transfer market. United could pay the price for years
September 30, 2024 2:49 pm
The Manchester United reboot was predicated on change. There was a sense that the worst was over on Christmas Eve last year, when Old Trafford giddily toasted Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s arrival. The Glazer family, though still the majority owner, was no longer in control of the football empire.
Few thought then that six games into a new Premier League season the great Ineos revival would have lost all its momentum. The only tangible success is to remove the target from the backs of the reviled Glazers. Moves behind the scenes to “change the narrative” have been undermined entirely by the same inertia that Ineos believed was behind them.
That Monday morning angst familiar to United fans is back, processing yet another defeat, astonishingly the fourth in eight games in all competitions. Erik ten Hag is no more plausible now than he was in losing a record 14 Premier League games last season.
How hollow does the FA Cup success against Manchester City feel now? What is that worth, and the Carabao Cup for that matter, laughably presented by Ten Hag as evidence of his value, in the aftermath of another dispiriting 90 minutes going backwards against a major rival?
United’s new chief executive Omar Berrada’s vision of a title challenge in 2028 appears absurdly optimistic based on what we have seen. Sunday’s evisceration featured all four of Ten Hag’s summer acquisitions, players said to have won the transfer window for United.
Joshua Zirkzee has good feet, but so did Jadon Sancho and Antony, one of whom is elsewhere and the other beyond use. Zirkzee was said to be an investment, a development player with potential. Except he followed a striker just like that bought a year prior. Rasmus Hojlund shows glimpses of something, just as Zirkzee does. But the Premier League is not an apprenticeship. It is an industrial complex full of guvnors, players who have served their time.
That is not to say there is not a place for the tyro. United have built a brand on talented academy footballers, but they thrive only in stable environments run by serious managers. Savinho is a 20-year-old earning £40k a week yet he is already a killer at Manchester City. Jeremy Doku is 22, and looked like he had a decade of Premier League experience when he made his Etihad debut a year ago. Ten Hag cannot make inexperience an issue when the two City examples had little.
Granted they slotted into an evolved team of champions. But that is the game Ten Hag is in. He is the manager of Manchester United not FC United of Manchester. Which begs the question of United’s newly installed hierarchy, how is he still in his post? How do we reconcile his retention with an industry-leading fellowship of Berrada, sporting director Dan Ashworth and technical director Jason Wilcox?
What were they thinking when they convened for the Monday morning debrief at Carrington? This mess is on them as much as Ten Hag. They endorsed him after considering at least three candidates in the summer: Thomas Tuchel, Roberto De Zerbi and Kieran McKenna. Credit to Ten Hag for manipulating the post-FA Cup victory over City brilliantly from his holiday villa in Ibiza. What was an unrepresentative if terrific win became something of far greater significance than it actually was, essentially a decent 45 minutes at Wembley in which United for once matched City stride for stride.
We’ve all had unforgettable Saturday nights but the pitiless reality of the workplace bites back soon enough. United under Ten Hag are mired in a relentless Monday-morning vibe. And the leadership are caught in a trap of their own making, having to double down on a flawed decision. To sack him now would be an admission they got it wrong, that they were duped when drunk on an FA Cup high, reading far too much into a freak outcome.
Yet that is what they must do if they are to arrest an alarming slide. Sacking Ten Hag is said to be off the agenda at least for the next two games, against Porto in the Europa League on Thursday and Aston Villa on Sunday. A two-match stay is its own proof of failure. Ten Hag is either their man or he isn’t. Even if, by some miracle, Ten Hag were to avoid defeat or win a match before the international break, where is the evidence that it would mean anything long term?
There is still no identifiable shape or rhythm to United’s play. Zirkzee does not appear to have the instinct for goal required of a top striker. Manuel Ugarte is rendered just as helpless in midfield as those who came before by the absence of any discernible method or system. Matthijs de Ligt has obvious promise, but for the same reasons looks closer to Harry Maguire 2.0 than the commander United need at the heart of defence.
United looked brittle and short of ideas against Spurs, which is the default habit under Ten Hag. Whatever plan Ten Hag thinks he has, he appears incapable of communicating it. Players take their cue from the coach. It is his job to build confidence, that great intangible that allows players to brush off mistakes and go again. United are a team weighed down, fearing the worst, unable to respond to the slightest setback. One goal conceded becomes three too easily.
None epitomises the current state of affairs more than Marcus Rashford, who plays as if he were serving a punishment. It all seems such hard work. Was it only October 2022 that Unai Emery replaced Steven Gerard at Villa Park? If ever there were a rejection of patience theory it is Villa under Emery, a team every bit as aimless and listless under Stevie G as United are under Ten Hag.
Villa were 17th in the table after 11 matches when Emery took over. Playing a brand of vibrant, identifiable, attacking football, Emery guided Villa to seventh, and in his first full season in charge qualified for the Champions League. After six games they sit two points off leaders Liverpool, seven spots above 12th placed United.
What was it about his credentials, winning the Europa League four times with Sevilla and Villareal, and a domestic quadruple with PSG, that escaped the forensic eye of United’s new hierarchy? He twice extended his contract in April and May this year, when it was already obvious United were looking elsewhere and is now out of reach, contracted to Villa until 2029.
If the two-match interregnum is a thing, then the looming international break offers a window in which to act. Not to do so would risk further damage to the club and the credentials of the Ineos leadership charged with rebuilding it.
