COMMENT
So Erik ten Hag keeps his job. But only after we all watched a soap opera in which Jim Ratcliffe and his gang flirted with Thomas Tuchel, Mauricio Pochettino, Kieran McKenna and Roberto de Zerbi. It’s no secret that Ratcliffe and his right-hand man, Dave Brailsford, also admire Gareth Southgate. And, according to The Athletic, they talked to Thomas Frank from Brentford and Marco Silva from Fulham. Any well-known manager who didn't get a call from them can feel thoroughly insulted.
You wonder if Ratcliffe has ever heard a song by Leonard Cohen called Everybody Knows, from the album I’m Your Man. ‘Everybody knows you’ve been discreet,’ Cohen sings, ‘but there were so many people you just had to meet. Without your clothes. Everybody knows.’
This isn’t just a crappy way to treat an employee. It’s also a sign that Ratcliffe and Brailsford are all over the place. They’re trying to insist that they set the style of play and the coach has to fall into line, but it’s clear from their dance card that they don’t really know what they want.
Southgate is naturally cautious, inclined to build a team from the back; McKenna is gung-ho, getting his left-back to bomb down the wing. Tuchel is combustible and built to last about 18 months; Frank is calm and has been in place longer than any other manager in the Premier League whose name is not Pep. Poch and De Zerbi both fell out with the owners at their last club – both, it seems, in a wrestle for the control that Ratcliffe craves.
Back in February, Ratcliffe said he would rather ‘walk to the right decision than run to the wrong one’. Well, so would anyone, obviously. But by taking two and a half weeks from the Cup Final to the announcement that United are sticking with Ten Hag, Ratcliffe has made a messy situation worse. He has shown all those possible future managers that he is prepared to play the field. And he has ended up giving Ten Hag a vote of not much confidence.
To be fair, there were pros and cons. If you admire Ten Hag for the game plan he came up with in the last fortnight of the season, you also have to blame him for the glaring lack of one over the previous eight months. If you feel for him having to cope with United’s endless injuries, you have to concede that he made one of the bigger ones worse by rushing Luke Shaw back at Luton. If you respect the way he stood up to Cristiano Ronaldo, you have to acknowledge that he started the row with Jadon Sancho.
Anyone keeping a close eye on the situation might well be ambivalent about Ten Hag. But all these points could have been made before the Cup Final. Most of them were there in our comment piece following the fiasco at Palace.
Two years in, Ten Hag’s strengths and weaknesses are not hard to spot. He is honest and decent and, although not great at English, usually good at being blunt (he called the story about all the players bar four being for sale ‘totally crap’, even though the club has never denied it). His team are at their best in the domestic cups, at their worst in the Champions League. He has had one good season in the league and one bad.
His record as a shopper is wildly uneven, with some good buys (Lisandro Martinez, Casemiro and Christian Eriksen at first), one awful one (Antony) and several in between or unproven (André Onana, Mason Mount, Tyrell Malacia, Rasmus Højlund). Even his management of United’s young meteors has been mixed. He deserves more credit for promoting Kobbie Mainoo, straight from the Under-18s, than for his handling of Alejandro Garnacho, which has risked burning him out. And he took ages to see how much Amad could bring to the team.
He is a reluctant rotator, which is a problem at a club with a large playing staff. As a man-manager, he seems to be best with players he has known a long time, like Martinez (if only the same applied to Antony). After benefiting from Marcus Rashford’s goal rush in 2022-23, he seems to have had no idea how to coax him back into that form in 2023-24.
The manager’s job is to make the team greater than the sum of its parts. Ten Hag has only done that in the cups, and in the league in his first season (up to a point). No Dutch manager has ever won the Premier League, and the odds on him changing that forlorn fact in the next year are 25-1. We can only wish him well, and hope that the way he was in the last three games – defiant, inventive, successful – is the way he intends to be from now on.
Tim de Lisle is the editor of United Writing and a sportswriter for The Guardian. If you’re still on Twitter, do follow him and United Writing. If you received this piece by email, please feel free to forward it to a fellow Red.