Don’t you all think his biggest mistakes is to spend huge amount of money on players he don’t know how to use? That’s a dealbreaker for me. It looks like he don’t have a plan with the players and are not good enough to manage it in game. Always late with the subs.
I know the players are way to horrible for the kind of level. But he are responsible for the lack of players by overspending on mediocre players.
I actually think the problem is getting the squad to play a new tactical style at a reasonable enough level. Ten Hag has 3 players who have been coached in some of the patterns, positional adjustments and press triggers that he wants to use - Martinez, Antony and Amrabat. We know that he was very interested in both De Jong, who turned him down, and Gravenberch, who went to Liverpool. Implementing a complicated and mentally demanding style of play, which Ajax showed last season that Ten Hag ball is, will be very difficult for a lot of players to handle. That is especially true in a squad that doesn't have any players who are capable of acting as reference points (When Antony does that, Dalot should do that, etc).
Even when we play well we look slow, as if our players really have to think hard about what they were supposed to be doing. Contrast that with Ajax that looked like they could hit passes blindly. That is probably why he's so determined to play Antony no matter what, and why losing Martinez was such a blow to our build up and overal ability to play. The reference points for the style of play in our squad were gone. Realising that Martinez will be out until January at the least, he's decided to go ahead with the implementation anyway. We see some evidence of that in our defending. Players are missing each other's movements, moving too quickly or too slowly. We also saw signs of a style being formed in the first 30 minutes against Copenhagen, with good build up. Before the first goal there was a good build up on the right hand side, with AWB hitting a blind pass into the path of McT, who hit a first time pass across the goal to Hojlund on the back post. Bruno stepped into open space as the pass from AWB was launched. Then defensively we saw Rashford getting involved in a double press down the right hand side as he got the red card. We also saw some signs of a good press against Fullham.
When we went down to 10 men against Copenhagen, it looked like we had no idea how to adapt to that. Which makes sense, because we probably aren't at a point where we are specifically working on scenarios where we are a man down yet. Players don't look like they know what to do, because they don't.
Luckily once the style becomes second nature to key-players down the spine of the team (Bruno, Rashford, Martinez, Shaw, Antony, Hojlund, etc) then it is much easier for incoming players to adapt to the style, and the more players we have that plays the style on instinct, the faster we will be with the ball and the better we will look.
So how is that better than someone who has?