Manchester United have not backed Erik Ten Hag! It's not what you think it means

The football club have not provided a structure to enable the manager to succeed

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The cycle for Manchester United is familiar.

1. Hire a new manager when the club is outside the Champions League places.

2. Invest heavily in expensive signings that first year to get back into the Champions League.

3. Invest a little less the following summer.

4. Eventually watch it all fall apart requiring you to sack the manager again.

When things start taking a turn for the worse, fans will look at how United’s transfer spending tends to drop once they’re in the Champions League and say things like ‘of course things are falling apart, the club didn’t back the manager this summer.’ Then they’ll cite lists of players the club were linked to signing but ultimately didn’t.

Meanwhile rival fans will comment that Manchester United have spent over £1.2 billion in transfer fees over the past decade, and net spend of over £900 million since the summer of 2014 which is the second highest in Europe. In just the three transfer windows of the Erik Ten Hag era the club has a net spend over £367 million - also the second highest in Europe¹. How can you say he hasn’t been backed?

Those rival fans are correct. You can’t say United have been cheap and aren’t spending their money when they’re spending more than everyone else. United fans are also correct, the club aren’t backing the manager.

That’s because “backing the manager” doesn’t mean throwing around tons of money just to sign whoever the manager says you should sign.

A football club’s success is ultimately going to come down to how good their players are. The clubs with the best players more often than not are going to finish at the top of the table. Someone needs to pick which 11 players are going to start each match, where they’re going to line up on the pitch, who is going to come off the bench and when. So for that, the club hires a coach.

There is a perception around the sport that the coach has an incredibly big impact on how well the team would do. This effectively makes him the most important person in the football club. If we operate under the assumption that this is true, then when a football club hires a manager, it should be doing everything its power to see that a manager is walking into an environment that gives him the greatest chance to be successful. A coach needs to put a player in a position where he can do the things he’s best at, a club needs to do the same thing with their manager.

Manchester United have not done that.

Erik Ten Hag is a coach. For him to be his best his focus should be on coaching the players. Erik Ten Hag is not a scout, therefore he shouldn’t be tasked with scouting players Manchester United are interested in signing. He’s also not an accountant, so he certainly shouldn’t be responsible for managing transfer budgets that requires paying attention to the long term financial health of the club.

A proper club would leave the scouting up to the scouts, the budgets up to the finance department, while the coach worries about coaching the players.

Despite their efforts, Manchester United have not been a proper football club. In the old days, the manager and chief executive could do everything themselves as Sir Alex Ferguson and David Gill did. The game has changed drastically in the era since these two left. It’s not feasible to do it that way anymore and making comparisons to those two is akin to comparing apples to oranges.

Yet when they left, United’s new Executive Vice Chairman, Ed Woodward, thought he should maintain the same structure. This ultimately led to Woodward hiring Jose Mourinho and giving him the keys to everything. Mourinho was given a three year budget, only to go and spend it all in his first two years. When he needed more in his third season he looked to the club only to be told there is no more, you spent it already. Thus Mourinho couldn’t go after his top targets, and well United couldn’t really go after anyone in the summer of 2018.

You would think the club would have learned their lesson from this but it would ultimately take another few years for the club to start putting in some semblance of a modern structure.

John Murtough, who lead the charge in United’s renewed investment into their academy starting in 2019, was appointed Football Director in March of 2021. Former United midfielder Darren Fletcher was appointed as the club’s Technical Director. The 2021-22 season was quietly as tumultuous behind the scenes as it was on the pitch, with United letting go of many long time scouts as they overhauled the club’s scouting, data, and recruitment departments.

Changes to your entire recruitment department of this scale are not going to bear fruits overnight. A lot of work needs to be done ranging from simply building the models and loading the database to actually scouting the players. Nevertheless these are the people who should be in charge of providing the manager with quality players.

The recruitment department needs to work together with the manager but only to the point of understanding what profiles and attributes a manager is looking for.² From there, they are the ones that should be finding players.

After-all, this is their full time job. While Erik Ten Hag is coaching the team in the training, scouting future opponents, and preparing his tactics for the next match, the scouting department is scouting potential signings. This is the department you build so when a manager says I want to sign Jadon Sancho to play on the right wing they can do the due diligence and say “actually Sancho has been playing more on the left recently and he prefers to play on the left.” They’re far more suited to being able to identify talent than a coach who hardly has any time left over for that.

This was the structure that Erik Ten Hag worked under - and had success with - at Ajax. Like any manager he wanted more power, even though he isn’t a scout.

A good club would hold firm on the power structure. With United having just restructured the back end of their football department and this being the first full time managerial hire that John Murtough was overseeing, United were finally in a position to tell candidates, “this is the structure we are going to have and it’s the structure you will agree to work under.” Instead, United relented.

C: The Athletic

United didn’t just undermine all the work they had done the past few months trying to revamp their structure, they also took away anyone’s ability to say no to Ten Hag. Right away that caused problems.

Ten Hag was given a budget of about £120 million³ his first summer which he chose to spend on Tyrell Malacia, Christian Eriksen, Lisandro Martinez, and Frenkie de Jong. Only de Jong made it very clear right from the start he had no interest in leaving Barcelona. The power vacuum that was created meant there was no one that could say, let’s stop wasting our time here and move on to another target. This is the guy Ten Hag wanted and he remained fixated on him.

When he finally relented, United had no choice but to pivot to Casemiro, a midfielder who is the complete opposite of Casemiro. No scouting department in the world would have those two names next to each other on a shortlist. United have said they had had open dialogue with Casemiro all summer long but forgive me for not giving them the benefit of the doubt on this one.

When United started out the season with back to back losses, Ten Hag demanded more money for more signings. United relented and Ten Hag dropped another £142 million on the aforementioned Casemiro and his Ajax right winger Antony.

Eagle eyed readers will realize that £142 million is more than the initial budget of £120 million⁴. That money doesn’t just appear, it has to come from somewhere. Just weeks after the transfer window shut, Murtough confirmed exactly where it came from; next summer’s transfer budget.

C: The Athletic

A year later, United’s spending would unsurprisingly be based on how much money they could raise from selling players. United ultimately ended up with a net spend of about £120 million taking United’s net spend over the last two years to roughly just north of £300 million.

Let’s do the math real quick. If Ten Hag was given two years’ budget that first year and then one year this past summer, that’s £100 million of budget each year. Right in line with what United’s reported annual budget is. Only Ten Hag has spent that much in just two years.

You can see where this is going. Maybe he’ll have another £100 million to spend next year, but eventually the borrowing against future budgets is going to run out. There’s not going to be anything left to spend and you’ll be left with a repeat of the 2018 summer window. The fans will shout about how cheap the club is and that they’re not backing the manager, even though the club gave him a three year budget and he spent it all in two years.

It’s hard to blame Ten Hag for this because he should never have been allowed to do any of this in the first place. Most managers want control over all the transfers even though there’s no reason they should have it. They’re not scouts.

Modern football has become so tactical and so demanding, coaches have to spend more time than ever scouting their opposition and coming up with game plans they don’t have time to go out and scout potential transfer targets. It’s no wonder the list of Ten Hag’s signings essentially reads as players who formerly worked with Ten Hag or players who played in the Eridivisie against Ten Hag (and that midfielder from the team that won the Champions League five times). He doesn’t have time to scour Europe looking for new players, the ones who played well against him are obviously going to make an impact.

United’s failure is that they let him do this. It’s a red flag when a coach comes in and immediately wants to sign all of his old players. The best coaches in the world don’t do that. The best coaches in the world don’t have much to do with personnel decisions at all. They’re just credited with them because the sport is still deeply rooted in the idea that the manager controls everything. That’s what fans want to read and the people actually doing the work are happy to stay in the shadows.⁵

United needed someone who could say no. They needed someone who could suggest alternatives when Ten Hag was demanding players that weren’t feasible.

There is certainly a cap as to how successful a manager can be under the Glazers ownership but the club still can be successful⁶. You just need to be smart and efficient.

United finally decided to modernize the club and empowered someone to build up the backroom structure. Except none of that actually matters if the man who did that then just ceded the power over to the manager anyway.

The point of having this structure is so that Manchester United could have a plan of what they want to be. That will guide what kind of players they sign, and they’ll hire coaches who would be a good fit for these types of players. By giving all the power to Ten Hag, it’s no longer Manchester United’s vision, it’s now Ten Hag’s vision.

That’s a problem for the club because no matter what they say, managers are never really thinking about the long term health of a club. They know that managers have a short shelf life. What they’re interested in is being successful right away.

You give that person power, they’re going to spend £60 million on a 30 year old and give them a five year contract. The manager isn’t going to care about what that contract looks like in five years, statistically speaking he’s unlikely to still be at the club.

United needed someone there to look after the long term interests of the club. You need someone to say, we shouldn’t spend big money to sign two 30 year old midfielders because we’re just going to have to spend tons of money again in two years to replace them. Only by then a lot of other players will be past their prime and we’ll need to replace them too. When the price of Antony rises by £30 million to a total of £80 million, someone needs to have the power to say, we’re going with option B because in an FFP world, that £30 million would be far better spent elsewhere in the squad. Eventually this will all fall apart on the pitch and the manager will be sent on his way, but the club is still going to have to deal with this.

If United wanted to truly back Erik Ten Hag, they would have stayed firm on the structure they had just built. No matter what Ten Hag says or wants, his strength is coaching and that is what he should focus on. The recruitment department will worry about finding talented players for him to coach.

When United gave Ten Hag the keys to everything they gave him the power to take on responsibilities he’s not qualified to handle, further taking his time and efforts away from what he’s really good at and should be focused on. By relenting to his wishes, United are only backing Ten Hag to dig his own grave.

1. They trail only Chelsea in both those categories thanks to Todd Boehly

2. This shouldn’t be that difficult. It’s also their job to pick and hire the manager!

3. When these numbers are reported, fans always assume that means “£120 million to spend on transfer fees.” The reality is it’s usually £120 million to spend on total packages including transfer fees, wages, bonuses, and agent fees.

4. There was about £20 million offset in player sales

5. It’s also much better job security if you’re not going to get blamed when things go wrong

6. When it comes to the first team it’s not a lack of spending. It’s how much money is wasted. Stop wasting the money and you’ll be much more successful.