Erik Ten Hag to stay at Manchester United

INEOS sticking with the current coach isn't too surprising or much of a long term move

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Manchester United ended weeks of speculation Tuesday with a late night announcement that Erik Ten Hag will be returning as their manager for next season. United had been conducting a season long review in determining whether to bring back Ten Hag and conducted interviews with several other candidates before opting to stick with the Dutchman.

On the one hand the move is a bit of a shock. By no means does Erik Ten Hag deserve to retain his job. The performances his team have put on the pitch have been dreadful. The team structure has been awful. This sequence that occurred in the FA Cup match against Liverpool wasn’t a rarity, it was something we saw every single week.

Rather than try to fix things Ten Hag would often just blame injuries. Yes United suffered some big injuries to important players, but that doesn’t account for just how bad they were though. Plenty of other teams dealt with injury crises of their own and came out better than United. Missing key players will impact your final results, but it shouldn’t drag you down into having a non-penalty goal difference of -0.35 per game. That’s just an ineffective style.

The other problem is this wasn’t new. United’s structure was bad even before last year. Before the injuries hit. This exchange is from the end of the 2022-23 season, and Kees is a big Ten Hag fan!

Ryan O’Hanlon’s article from April outlines how, statistically, United’s performances under Erik Ten Hag have been the club’s worst since Sir Alex Ferguson retired.

O’Hanlon has even more stats to back this up here

The numbers only go on to get worse. Of the 96 teams to play in Europe’s big five leagues last season United finished 95th in shots faced. That’s not the result of an injury to a center back and a left back. That’s just a bad system. Despite it being open season in terms of shooting at United’s goal, a defensive midfielder still needed to beg Ten Hag to let him play defensive midfield for the final few games!

United are only four games removed from losing 4-0 to Crystal Palace. You can argue this was the worst defeat of the Erik Ten Hag era. You can also argue that it’s not even among the top three worst losses of the Ten Hag era!

In two years United have played 14 Premier League matches in the city of London. They’ve won only two of those games - both against Fulham - and both came with essentially the last kick of the ball. That’s hardly a ringing endorsement.

This past season saw 162 more goals scored in the Premier League compared to the 2022-23 campaign. 116 more were scored in open play compared to the previous year. That’s an average of 5.8 more open play goals per team. Then there was Ten Hag’s United, who scored six fewer open play goals despite their first choice attackers being mostly available this season.¹

United managed to finish eighth in the table thanks to the talented players they have as their underlying numbers were far worse. They finished with a -0.33 expected goal difference per game - 14th in the league.

The bigger issue is, as I showed above, this wasn’t a one off. Things were good in Ten Hag’s first season in charge but not great. They finished the 2022-23 campaign in third place, but were sixth in expected goal difference with a much more respectable +0.45.

That mark was still lower than the +0.49 they put up just two years prior in 2020-21. There were only four key players from the 2020-21 team that weren’t there in 2022-23 - Paul Pogba, Mason Greenwood, Edinson Cavani, and I guess Nemanja Matic - only none of them played more than 55 percent of the minutes that season. This team had added Raphael Varane, Lisandro Martinez, Christian Eriksen, Jadon Sancho, and a still elite Casemiro. It’s not a stretch to say they should have been better.

Ten Hag’s saving grace has been that he’s won two trophies in two years. Despite that, his resume doesn’t scream that he can turn this all around. He’s had success in the Eridivisie, which is a few levels below the Premier League, with the largest club in that division. In Europe his claim to fame is that five years ago he made a run to the Champions League semifinal, only to blow a two goal lead to an English with such a reputation for being bottlers their name has become synonymous with the term “bottlers.”

Earlier this season an article was written on The Athletic where opposing coaches - including some from League Two’s Newport County - went on the record to talk about how easy it was to play against United. A League Two side knew where United’s vulnerabilities were and attacked them to draw level from a 2-0 deficit!

It’s hard to imagine anyone would objectively look at what United did this season and decide a coach unproven at this level should stick around.

And yet, it wasn’t all that surprising that this is the decision INEOS came to. In the most recent episode of The Fergie Fledgelings podcast, I closed the show by asking both my co-hosts if Ten Hag would be sacked. Both said yes without hesitation but I hesitated as I said I was leaning towards he’d be sacked but I still thought he might stay.

For the past few months I’ve constantly gotten the vibe that INEOS search for a new manager wasn’t about 2024-25 but rather about 2025.

Those links with Gareth Southgate just never went away and when there’s smoke there’s usually fire. The one thing that never made sense was timing. Southgate was never going to walk away from England just before the Euros and why would you want a manager who can’t start until after your preseason has already began? Southgate’s contract runs until the end of 2024. If you need to get him out of it in November, that’s a bit easier. Or if you’re only looking for him to take over in 2025… that makes a lot more sense!

INEOS are making it a point to hire good football people and one of the few things they’ve said publicly is they want those football peopole to make the football decisions. But those people haven’t started yet! They won’t start for another month and when they do start, they need to start building out their teams and processes. Those things don’t happen overnight.

These aren’t the type of people who will take over in July and immediately want to jump into making rash decisions. They’re the type of people who are going to want to build out a long term plan and start enacting it. That itself is going to take months, meaning they wouldn’t really be ready to strike in the transfer market until the summer of 2025.

Combine that with the current state of United. They’ve got an older squad with players who are going to be hard to move, but more importantly, even Sir Jim Ratcliffe has acknowledged that their FFP situation is so bad they’re really not going to be able to do much this summer.

When you look at it this way, it seems like INEOS believe United essentially need to burn a year before they could get going, making next season more “year zero” than “year one.”

If that’s how they see things then it makes sense they wouldn’t be looking to bring in a new manager right now². Why bring in a new guy that will be judged by fans and the media as being in year one when the club itself is operating in year zero? If things don’t go well at the start, you’re new guy may never recover.

This was the point made by Andy Brassell on The Football Ramble earlier this week. The odds of something (or somethings) going wrong at the start of next season are quite high. Therefore it benefits INEOS to keep a fall guy around. It’s hard to see the flaw in that logic.

For months it’s seemed like INEOS have just been hoping Ten Hag could keep the ship afloat just enough that they didn’t have to sack him as they bide their time. This decision doesn’t really feel any different.

Yes they’re discussing an extension with him but what does that mean? Jose Mourinho signed an extension in January of 2018 and was sacked before the year ended. Ole Gunnar Solskjaer signed a three year extension and was sacked 12 matches later. If he’s not getting the job done that extension isn’t going to save him.

Nevertheless, Ten Hag is the guy and for all our sakes I hope he proves me wrong and manages to turn things around. However this is still his third year in charge, he’s got to show something quickly.

For me, I don’t particularly care about just picking up wins. I’m more interested in seeing him improve the underlying numbers - which can’t be done without improving the structure of the team. If you do that, United have plenty of talent that the results will follow.

We can’t be conceding 17+ shots a game again. We can’t be running up and down the pitch all game every game. With all the added time that style of just run run run wears the players down, leads to late goals against, and definitely contributes to the amount of injuries. He should probably get away from the system that often has Diogo Dalot being the furthest man forward considering it took until the final game of the season for Dalot to actually convert one of those chances and it leaves United extremely exposed the other way.

He needs to figure out an attacking structure that isn’t “have Garnacho or Rashford stand on the touchline and dribble towards the middle while the fullback makes an underlapping run exactly to the space they’re trying to go which only creates traffic for them.”

For as good as Garnacho has been on the right wing, I’d still be a little skeptical about running back a front three of Rashford, Hojlund, and Garnacho again. Hojlund isn’t a creator or facilitator, he’s a get me the ball so I can finish type of striker. Both Rashford and Garnacho are we want to get to the middle and shoot type wingers. That’s not a great dynamic when there’s only one ball. There’s a reason United were 10th in xG and 9th in goals scored. You need another creator in there besides Bruno.

If Ten Hag is going to succeed with them, he needs Hojlund to get the ball more and convert his chances at roughly the same pace. He’ll need Rashford to snap into better form. Most importantly, he’s not just going to need Garnacho to improve, he’s going to need Garnacho to make “the leap.” Some of those things might be mutually exclusive.

That’s the job Ten Hag has and I hope he can do it. One thing I’ll be paying close attention to this season is how Ten Hag responds to questions in his press conferences. I’m not looking for him to be more truthful - managers never tell the truth in press conferences and that’s not going to change. I’m looking to see whether he shows some accountability and acknowledges the need to build on things or if he’s going to continue to do what he did last season and just make excuses. If he does the former, it’s an indication that he’s concerned with the project of United. If he’s just making excuses again, he’s more concerned about getting his next job.

Recent history doesn’t give a lot of reason to be optimistic about him fixing things. It seems much more like he’s a lame duck out there just to kill some more time. The vibe I’ve gotten over the past few months has always been that a potential extension would be far more circumstantial than a vote of confidence.

For months United have been kicking the Ten Hag can down the road. Has anything really changed?

1. The injuries were really skewed in affecting the defenders far more than the attackers

2. Or if they were going to, why they were strongly looking at Thomas Tuchel who you wouldn’t expect to last much more than a year.