“I told you so” echoes around the football firmament. Opposing fans have been cantillating Erik ten Hag with the death song, “you are getting sacked in the morning” since the spring, when the record number of defeats in a Premier League season were racking up.
The surprise, of course, is not that he has gone but that it has taken Manchester United so long to accept his failings, which points a neon arrow at the crack unit assembled to rebuild the fallen giant. Monday was self-evidently a painful moment for Ten Hag, but perhaps more so for the guru squad brought in to reinvent the wheel.
At the top of the Old Trafford pyramid sits Ineos owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe. Ultimately responsibility rests with him but since he is the most powerful figure at the club, the one with all the gold, no-one is going to give him his cards. Next in line sits guru-in-chief Sir Dave Brailsford, the god of small things who occupies the throne at the top of the Ineos sporting pyramid dispensing Delphic wisdom like Zeus, or should that be Dr Seuss?
Brailsford was among the group leading the search for a new manager before deciding Ten Hag had indeed passed the leadership review in the summer. Had they begun the process earlier Ineos might have saved a few bob flying about the parish interviewing candidates like Thomas Tuchel, Roberto De Zerbi, Thomas Frank, Kieran McKenna etc. Perhaps it was the weekender at Ten Hag’s pad in Ibiza that swung the day. I mean, who doesn’t like a beach party?
The greater Brailsford’s football imprint grows the more he triggers comparisons with Sir Clive Woodward, a guru from a distant epoch and like Brailsford, a different sport, whose expertise was gobbled up by Southampton. England’s World Cup winning rugby coach was given the role of technical director in the summer of 2005. The appointment was always viewed with suspicion by manager Harry Redknapp, who lasted six months before escaping down the Solent to Portsmouth.
Six months after that, Southampton’s owner Rupert Lowe sold up, removing the glue that kept Woodward in power. Barely 12 months after beginning the Southampton revolution, the “mad professor” as Woodward became known by staff, was gone, taking up a post at the British Olympic Association.
Brailsford’s protector loves him, so he comfortably avoids the fate of Ten Hag. United’s new CEO Omar Berrada and the club’s new sporting director, Dan Ashworth, took up their roles in the post-season and would like to shrug “nowt to do with me guv”. Except they can’t, because the evidence was there before them whether they were in situ or not.
Even in the deepest corners of the respective gardens in which both passed their leave from Manchester City and Newcastle United, there was no escape from the dire telemetry of Ten Hag’s second season. The decision they came to on Monday morning in Carrington was available to them in May, but the club fell for the illusion that a one-off win against City in the FA Cup final was significant. Well Ten Hag would claim that, wouldn’t he?
Instead they assembled in a cluster and rolled out a party line of unity and support. He’s our man, they said, ignoring the prior search for a better version. Thus did Monday’s ever-so cordial sacking delivered by Berrada and Ashworth condemn both twice over. If he was the “right” choice in the summer, he remains so now because neither the conditions nor the circumstances have changed. Of course he wasn’t, as the search for a successor proved.
It is almost possible to feel sorry for Ten Hag, a decent man who trusted what his bosses were telling him, that they were on the same page, in this together, moving forward, committed to him. The poor sap was still peddling his delusions after the defeat at West Ham, claiming sincerely that United turned last season around with that one win in May, and would do so again.
Ye gods. Interestingly the pattern of that game was not unlike Sunday’s across the capital. The difference being United netted in the first half at Wembley when the force was with them, which provided the insurance during the second half when it was not.
We don’t need to revisit the anatomy of Ten Hag’s failings. ChatGPT would suffice for that, rounding up the lethal stats in a thrice, the colossal waste of £650m in player recruitment, the unprecedented defeats, added time goals conceded, paucity of goals scored, etc. No, the focus should fall upon those above, who deemed him fit for purpose.
The fab four of Brailsford, Berrada, Ashworth and technical director Jason Wilcox now find themselves having to revisit the process of finding a man with the constitution to cope with a job that has spat out men of deeper talent than Ten Hag’s.
Far from introducing new methods and visionary thinking to the United project, the technical department has succeeded only in perpetuating muddle.
Indeed, apart from the savings made from the staff cull and cutting back of privileges, all of which have been wiped out by the compensation owed to Ten Hag, the involvement of Ineos has thus far delivered more of the same, and that’s a generous assessment.
Moreover the dithering and bad faith of the summer has seen the one outstanding candidate available, Tuchel, slip out of United’s grasp into the arms of another. The new broom sold itself as the solution to the puzzle of the post-Ferguson era. Instead it has become part of the problem. More Ine-loss than Ineos.
