Erik ten Hag isn’t the answer to turn Manchester United around, but the club keeps asking the wrong questions

Most managers have a smaller impact on the success or failure of their squad than is generally stated. There is a reason why one of the best predictors of a league table at the start of the season is the wage budget. Talent that wins out. As Bill James famously noted, many coaches will prompt a reasonable upswing simply by addressing the issues the previous guy created. Once they’re settled and creating problems of their own, it’s time to make a change.

The top tier of coaches — Arsene Wenger when he took the Arsenal helm, Antonio Conte at the peak of his powers — can deliver the tactical or organisational changes to transform a club, their presence meaningfully raising the ceiling, at least for a time. Then, as Manchester United know better than anyone else, the very greatest managers ever repeat the trick on more than one occasion.

If there are those who change the course of a club for the better, there must be those who do the opposite. Occasionally legitimately bad managers get appointed, more often than not coaches are hurled out of their depth or bequeathed roles that do not suit them. It would take a manager with a lifetime’s experience under the big club spotlight to corral the oversized squad that Graham Potter was handed at Chelsea. That club has a rich history of picking the wrong coaches at the wrong moments, Andre Villas-Boas’ high line hardly suited for an ageing John Terry. They are not alone in that regard. Arsenal replaced a manager who defined a club with an introvert more focused on tactics than being a figurehead. They set Unai Emery up for the damage his tenure at the Emirates Stadium did to his reputation.

In the last 13 years, Manchester United have discovered new ways to set good coaches up for a fall. David Moyes found it too hard to be the guy after the guy. Louis van Gaal got a squad ill-suited to his methods. Jose Mourinho, well he might have been as at fault for that fall out as anyone. Now they find themselves trying to make yet another assessment on a besieged coach, three months after they concluded Erik ten Hag was the best man for the Manchester United job.

Without the afterglow of an FA Cup to blind them, the United hierarchy, who met at Old Trafford on Monday, are going to have to ask the same questions all over again: is Erik Ten Hag one of the bulk of managers whose presence has a broadly negligible impact on results or does having him as a manager actively hinder his club’s progress? Is the Manchester United squad a collection of midtable talents playing midtable football while they wait for something to change? Or is a potential Champions League contender being held back by a coach ill suited for the job?

Ten Hag’s approach isn’t working

Certainly there is a compelling argument in the affirmative for the latter question. Since his appointment Ten Hag has endeavored to apply at Old Trafford the principles that brought him great success with Ajax. Without possession, Manchester United’s forwards push high, the idea is that the midfield and defense are supposed to follow, squeezing the opposition and forcing the sort of high turnovers that would allow for this side to be “the best transition team in the world,” as Ten Hag promised he would deliver in the summer of 2023.

His players, however, are ill suited to that approach. Too few of his forwards press with the requisite intensity — last season United ranked 10th in attacking third ball recoveries and sixth in passes allowed per defensive action — while few if any players in the midfield or defense have the pace to back themselves one on one against top forwards. They drop back and suddenly space opens up for opposition teams. The problems are only exacerbated from there. Ten Hag’s side tend to defend man-to-man, all it takes is a few players dragging their defender out of position and you have situations like Tottenham’s opener late last month, when Micky van de Ven advanced from his own half to the United penalty area without a single attempted challenge.

United have improved this season in terms of their expected goals (xG), both for and in particular against, but the bar for that is staggeringly low. Through seven games they have gone from having the fifth worst defense in the Premier League for xG allowed to the seventh, from the 10th best attack to the ninth. They are as resolutely, aggressively midtable by the metrics as they are by their points tally. Last season an absolute heater of a year in terms of results turned a lower midtable side into an upper midtable side. Now, some finishing difficulties has an upper midtable side in lower midtable. 

The system doesn’t fit the players and to exacerbate the manager’s eye for talent needs corrective lenses. The best additions United have made since the summer of 2022 have been qualified successes such as Lisandro Martinez and Andre Onana. Onerous contracts have been granted so that Casemiro and Christian Eriksen can offer quick fixes. Antony’s acquisition has been an unmitigated disaster. Mason Mount’s hasn’t been much better, a young footballer who needed to get his career back on track seeing his talent frittered away.

Meanwhile Jadon Sancho, unceremoniously drummed out by Ten Hag, is getting back on course quite rapidly with Chelsea. The unshiftability of Casemiro forced the sale of Scott McTominay, a peculiar but ultimately useful player for a club in United’s position.

This is where it gets embarrassing for the supposed best in class hierarchy. Extending Ten Hag’s current contract in the summer meant the manager kept his outsized influence over transfer policy and that meant more players arriving that bore his fingerprints. Joshua Zirkzee is getting more shots than skeptics thought, he’s just not doing much with them. Noussair Mazraoui looks usable and it is too soon to judge Manuel Ugarte. Maybe the same is true of Matthijs De Ligt, but his early appearances are a timely reminder of why both Juventus and Bayern Munich have been so willing to move on a 25-year-old once considered the next great center back.

Even Ten Hag has his doubts, no matter that he might have claimed he was rotating his options when he united the Leicester City 2018-19 center back pairing of Johhny Evans and Harry Maguire at Villa Park. Evans might have been that away to a superior Aston Villa side. He won’t be in the medium or long term. Digging so far into the depth chart in such circumstances is invariably the sign of a manager scrabbling in search of an answer.

The rot at United goes deeper than the manager

All this would suggest that Ten Hag is a net negative then? Quite possibly, but the great delusion that post Sir Alex Ferguson United have trapped themselves in is that the manager is the cause of, and solution to, all of their problems. And yet no matter the identity of the man in the dugout, United get gone when the going gets tough. How many times in the past 13 years have they checked out in just the same fashion that they did once Tottenham started the better at Old Trafford? All the signs on the pitch suggest there is something that has taken deep root at Carrington, a profound brittleness that no manager has yet successfully addressed. 

Recruitment issues that predate Ten Hag take their toll too, such that anyone engaged in the joyless task of putting together a combined Aston Villa Manchester United XI before Sunday’s game might have quite easily concluded that nine, 10, maybe even 11 representatives should come from Unai Emery’s side. A team with headline talent such as Bruno Fernandes and Onana ought to better than 14th. Still, the rest of the squad hardly screams top four or five contenders.

Ultimately it is a manager’s job to address these problems. Few if any of the players Ten Hag inherited have showed sustained improvement, those he has identified as improvements are often anything but, and those who have left the club have made a compelling case that it is simply unreasonable to assess any talent by how it fares in a Manchester United shirt. His man management has hardly been an unqualified success either; he has done little to ease the pressure on Marcus Rashford amid his recent dip and evidently was unable to coax out the prodigious talent of Sancho. The deeper rooted issues at the club may be beyond the abilities of most coaches but one of the wealthiest clubs in the world can still afford the best, even as PSR forces them to mind the pennies.

When Ten Hag was appointed in the summer of 2022, there was a profound sense that the wrong steps might take Manchester United further away from the top six at a time when they were just clinging on to. They had been a pretty average team with an extremely average xG profile and the goal difference of a definitionally average Premier League team. Two and a bit years later, you could describe the team in much the same terms. No matter what the cup competitions might say, the mediocrity is being entrenched. For a club like Manchester United that simply can’t be good enough.