Erik Ten Hag is out at Manchester Unitedand for the sixth time in just over a decade, England’s biggest football club is looking for a new head coach.
Ten Hag is out because he wasn’t very good. They had won only one of their last eight games in all competitions. United, with a loss to West Ham on Sunday, had fallen to 14th place, a season after finishing eighth, lower than ever in the Premier League era. Poor results and performance had become a pattern that, over the past two months, seemed increasingly irreversible.
However, there is also a broader pattern to consider, a pattern that should not necessarily absolve Ten Hag, but should scare off potential successors.
Since Sir Alex Ferguson’s retirement in 2013, no United manager has lasted three years in charge.
Five different men (six if you count Ralf Rangnick’s six-month interim spell) have been tasked with maintaining or restoring United’s eminence. They have been recruited for various reasons, from various countries, with different levels of experience and influence. David Moyes was a Briton who had succeeded at smaller English clubs. Louis van Gaal and José Mourinho were huge names and proven winners. Ole Gunnar Solskjaer was a Man United legend. Ten Hag was a hot signing from Ajax in the Netherlands.
Each came with a plan to shape Manchester United. Each one came with a different behavior and style. Each one came with their own tactical ideas, their own list of players to target, their own ideals. Very few commonalities connect the five.
And yet they have all failed in a position that, with each passing year, seems more and more poisonous.
The only thing they have in common is a shared experience at a failing club that, money and prestige aside, has done nothing over the last decade to deserve a place among England’s elite.
Ten Hag, by some measures, was among the best of the five. His winning percentage was better than Solskjaer, Van Gaal, Rangnick and Moyes. Their two trophies, the 2024 FA Cup and the 2023 League Cup, equaled Mourinho’s. The circumstances he faced (arising from injuries, turmoil and uncertainty at the executive and ownership levels) were arguably more adverse.
Therefore, it is foolish to present him as the problem, as the clueless manager dragging a once-proud club to new depths.
He was the ultimate punching bag, the face of United’s many problems; but it is by no means the main reason why those problems persist.
The problems, over the years, have been archaic structures, unqualified executives and poor player recruitment. The byproduct is an incoherent team of second-rate players who, on paper and on the field, don’t seem to fit together.
Is that what United’s next manager, Gareth Southgate, will do? Zinedine Zidane? Xavier? Ruud van Nistelrooy, the interim? – will inherit. That, plus still-high expectations, plus a secret structure that still appears to be in flux.
The work is not impossible. But it requires reforms that go far beyond the role of a coach. Those will fall to new co-owner Jim Ratcliffe; and his top sports deputy, Dave Brailsford; and general manager Omar Berrada, who was hired from Manchester City; and athletic director Dan Ashworth.
Reforms are supposedly underway. But until the changes prove material… why, other than a lucrative salary, would any coach want this job?
Van Nistelrooy, former United striker and most recently Ten Haag’s assistant, will take charge until United’s top brass find someone confident (or delusional) enough to take on the challenge.
And meanwhile, the 2024-25 season, like several previous ones, already seems lost.