Erik ten Hag | 2022/23 & 2023/24

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TsuWave said:
People talk about his stint at Ajax like it's the stuff of legends. All due respect, it is the Eredivisie and it is Ajax (they have been a dominant force there for so long). Yes, they hadn't won the league for some years before he took over, but they were clearly not far off it - they'd finish second, 1 point off the champions the season before he took over. He got to the semis of the 18/19 CL, but then went out in the group stages of the CL in both 19/20 and 20/21 - being dispatched from Europa League by Getafe and Roma respectively.

His CV doesn't really match-up with the way people talk of/perceive him. The most impressive thing were some performances showed good football, but the guy has already said he's not going to play that way here - so what we're left with is not really impressive

Also, as it has been previously mentioned in this thread - the guy seemingly can't coach the players he found here, can't coach the players he brought in - having some influence on transfers - but somehow the structure that will distance him from recruitment will magically find the players he can coach?
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They were a good team and on the verge of winning the league the season before he came. They also made EL final with a very young team the same season.

Yet his fans maintain that they had been deeply in crisis before the miracle worker appeared. It’s kind of similar to his first season at United in their eyes where it was also a huge miracle (not a simply good outcome) to finish 3rd and win a major, huge, massive trophy.
 
I just remember the false hopes culminating in the week before our mauling at Anfield, when Ten Hag had been recreating the Okocha/Allardyce shuffle with Antony and Lisandro Martínez while lifting the Milk Cup.
 
AndySmith1990 said:
You're making up rubbish for the sake of using it as an excuse to lambast others who say anything negative.

I think our team is terrible, the manager is terrible, and we'll be on the end of many more thrashings this season. Does any of that make me happy? No. I was happy when Fergie was here winning trophies and we had a team of committed, talented and professional players.

I want Ten Hag sacked because I care more for the plight of the club I love than I do about any individual. Will it make me happy when he's sacked? No. There's nothing to be happy about regarding this club right now.

Weirdos who pick sides and make it personal always fall into the trap of thinking it's some fanboy battle, where one side will celebrate pathetic shit like us losing a game so we can gloat, or vice versa.

Adults whose focus is on the wellbeing of the club. Whatever gives us the best chance of improvement must be done. All this juvenile back and forth fanboy bollocks detracts from what matters most
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If you care more about the plight of the club, the manager is not the biggest issue by a long shot.

United fans argue because some cling to some weird idea that all we need is some special manager who will make a clearly dysfunctional club work.

Thinking “a better manager will get more from these players” is settling for mediocrity , for short term manager bounce as far as I’m concerned.

I understand why fans do this, otherwise where is the hope? But I’ve been angry for a long time. Moreso angry because I don’t think it’s that hard for us make changes to use our resources better but I feel our owners couldn’t give a f**k and are more concerned with retaining control (probably ego) then putting in competent structures that allow professional people make all the decisions.

Im not angry at our own fans as much as I am just surprised that some people are still clinging to this sack the manager idea. What happens with SJR and whether he is any good, will determine the long future of the football side of things.
 
Malone_Post said:
Absolutely on the money.

The worst thing about it though?…He said this an interview in 2020…

‘Only once in his career has Pep made a mistake – in his first year at Manchester City when he completely underestimated the power and speed of the Premier League’
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Yep. Bizarre that he's targeted players like he's never watched us or the PL in his life.
 
SirScholes said:
The managers
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In the same way Ighalo and Weghorst were players our managers got because that’s all United could get them , martial has been dumped on multiple managers. Same way the club kept on many players, with contract extensions , for no other reason then padding out the squad with bodies and keeping squad book value higher.
 
If we keep ETH, he should never be involved in transfer anymore. Basically, all his signing is average at best, yet other clubs are extracting maximum value because they know Erik wants them. Any one of United old boys probably able to identify better targets than ETH. Glazers basically feck up everything by refusing the sell else we would be in a better place or at least there are funds available in January transfer fix some issues. I am quite sure that January market would be quiet, no Europe soccer next season. Let's see Erik can make this group play better football.
 
He's the ultimate "benefit of the doubt" manager. You kind of feel he's a shite coach but at the same time he's picking a team of 11 from 13 players ( exaggerated, but not far off since he only has like 2/3 choices to make in terms of personnel).
 
Oranges038 said:
Utd are 6th, and still you have people who can't accept that this team just isn't any better than that.
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I don't understand why people should accept this when United have finished 3rd, 6th, 2nd, and 3rd the last four seasons.
 
Chumpsbechumps said:
If you care more about the plight of the club, the manager is not the biggest issue by a long shot.
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This point is being thrown around by some people as if they have made some profound observation. Which is just ridiculous. More than one thing at a time can be true.

Are the owners ultimately responsible? Yes. They are not going anywhere, though, so going over it again, and again, and again, and again is just pointless.

Is the structure of the club (or lack thereof) terrible? Yes. Remains to be seen what or if anything changes anytime soon.

Is the squad subpar? Yes. Ten Hag shares a big part of the blame for that. No one put a gun to his head and forced him to spend 200M on Casemiro, Mount, and Antony.

Has he been exposed as out of his depth? Yes. A good manager doesn't need world class in every position to deliver decent football. At least enough to not lose 3:0 at home to Bournemouth, be 1W/1D/3L, finish last in a Champions League group, and have a negative goal difference all around. We are the same as we were exactly 2 years ago.

Should he be sacked as soon as possible? Yes.

Could his replacement go down the same route? Yes. But every candidate should be doing their due diligence on what they are signing up for before taking the job. Not my problem if they come here and find out it's not what they expected. Maybe once the pool of candidates dries up and enough of them have rinsed the club out of substantial amounts of money when they get sacked someone inside the club will have a lightbulb moment.

Does any of that make me happy? Not at all.

None of those takes anything away from the others. It is that simple.

I believed in Ten Hag and he was probably the best candidate at the time. I wanted him here. But he was always a calculated risk. An unknown. It simply hasn't panned out. Time to cut our losses and move on. Well... unless the replacement is Graham Potter. I'd rather stick with Ten Hag then and bet on the minimal chance he comes good.
 
Oranges038 said:
I don't pick any sides, I agree this squad is terrible, but I don't agree right now that the best thing for the club now is to sack ETH. The best thing for the club is to put the structure in place, gut this squad and start over, take a few years of 7th/8th placed finishes and build a team that will peak in 3-4 years time. Utd are 6th, and still you have people who can't accept that this team just isn't any better than that. It's going to take a few years to build a winning team that will play consistently week in week out for a few seasons. Let him continue to gut it and if he can't finish the job and rebuild with a proper structure, then bring someone else in.

We'll see tomorrow about how many will be joyously thumping their chests about being right.
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United are not 6th best team in the league with these players no chance. That’s just more excuse to excuse what is going on and deflect from the manager not getting the best out of the team.

and joyous chest thumping is more nonsense, most will be right that we’ll probably get embarrassed, no one will be happy getting stuffed by Liverpool even if they expect it
 
Zlatan 7 said:
United are not 6th best team in the league with these players no chance. That’s just more excuse to excuse what is going on and deflect from the manager not getting the best out of the team.

and joyous chest thumping is more nonsense, most will be right that we’ll probably get embarrassed, no one will be happy getting stuffed by Liverpool even if they expect it
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Even being generous this is a borderline top 4 squad, it's nowhere near the level of City, Arsenal and Liverpool when we have attacking options that have no goalscoring ability, barring Marcus Rashford who everyone on here has decided is shit but who can score goals when on form unlike the others, and only 2 centre backs of any quality and both of them seemingly can't stay fit.

6th is no disgace for this squad, particularly given the absences it's about in line where we should be, the issue is that it feels like a completely false position given that we've had 1 convincing performance in league which indicate that even being 6th isn't sustainable and this manager probably isn't going to be the one to make us genuinely competitive near the top of the table in the long run.
 
RORY65 said:
Even being generous this is a borderline top 4 squad, it's nowhere near the level of City, Arsenal and Liverpool when we have attacking options that have no goalscoring ability, barring Marcus Rashford who everyone on here has decided is shit but who can score goals when on form unlike the others, and only 2 centre backs of any quality and both of them seemingly can't stay fit.

6th is no disgace for this squad, particularly given the absences it's about in line where we should be, the issue is that it feels like a completely false position given that we've had 1 convincing performance in league which indicate that even being 6th isn't sustainable and this manager probably isn't going to be the one to make us genuinely competitive near the top of the table in the long run.
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Finishing 2nd and 3rd under ole and then expecting a title challenge only for it to go tits up and then finishing 3rd under ten hag is then a disgrace to spend £400mil to start calling the team a 6th place squad.

we may not be as good as city or Liverpool or anywhere near winning the league but we should be beating enough teams to not be expecting a 6-10th place finish
 
Zlatan 7 said:
Finishing 2nd and 3rd under ole and then expecting a title challenge only for it to go tits up and then finishing 3rd under ten hag is then a disgrace to spend £400mil to start calling the team a 6th place squad.

we may not be as good as city or Liverpool or anywhere near winning the league but we should be beating enough teams to not be expecting a 6-10th place finish
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In 2020 we had a front 3 of Rashford and Martial who both got 17 league goals and Greenwood who ended up getting 10. None of our attacking options are going to get anywhere near that because outside of Rashford they're not capable of doing so, plus then we added Edinson Cavani to those options for the 20/21 season.

We now have a kid who we're trying to manage physically and the corpse of Anthony Martial flanked by a desperately out of form Rashford, another kid in Garnacho who is still developing and Antony who is just a total dud. Ten Hag has to take a huge chunk of the blame for the bad signings and for not maybe getting 100% out of 2nd rate players but given where the squad is we're nowhere near the best 3 sides, so at best we're in the pack with the likes of Spurs, Newcastle and Villa (which is where we actually are right now despite the poor standard of performances).
 
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Zlatan 7 said:
we may not be as good as city or Liverpool or anywhere near winning the league but we should be beating enough teams to not be expecting a 6-10th place finish
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This should be the main point when discussing EtH.

No one in their right mind expects or expected these players to challenge for the league but for them to look this bad, this consistently is an issue with management as much as player quality.

People discuss this season as if we’re playing Bayern, City or Arsenal every week when in fact we’re playing teams with fewer resources & their own injury/squad issues.

EtH is having to mitigate a very difficult scenario but he is not currently excelling in those circumstances, rather succumbing to them. Injuries, fallouts, whatever to have played ‘well’ in what 2/3 games & have so many losses pre-Christmas is sackable in itself.
 
Malone_Post said:
Absolutely on the money.

The worst thing about it though?…He said this an interview in 2020…

‘Only once in his career has Pep made a mistake – in his first year at Manchester City when he completely underestimated the power and speed of the Premier League’
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That quote of his gave me so much hope….but seems even with that insight/foresight into the EPL, he himself got it wrong :(
 
What I don't understand about him is why have we not seen any sort of pattern in our play on how he wants us to play. Yes we have lots of injuries and even if the players might be shit at it, there should at least be some sort of visible patterns of play. What is his play and why can't he coach it into the team?
 
Freak said:
What I don't understand about him is why have we not seen any sort of pattern in our play on how he wants us to play. Yes we have lots of injuries and even if the players might be shit at it, there should at least be some sort of visible patterns of play. What is his play and why can't he coach it into the team?
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He can, he does and you can see it. It just doesn't work most of the time.
 
He picks the same teams, makes the same mistakes and gets the same shit performance and results. He is just as much at fault as the players.
 
Pressure intensifies off the back of the City result. They will be absolutely rocking and baying for blood tomorrow. If he sets up as he usually does, this will be the biggest defeat of the season.
 
Chumpsbechumps said:
In the same way Ighalo and Weghorst were players our managers got because that’s all United could get them , martial has been dumped on multiple managers. Same way the club kept on many players, with contract extensions , for no other reason then padding out the squad with bodies and keeping squad book value higher.
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We’ve spent a stupid amount of money
It’s on ETH
 
RORY65 said:
In 2020 we had a front 3 of Rashford and Martial who both got 17 league goals and Greenwood who ended up getting 10. None of our attacking options are going to get anywhere near that because outside of Rashford they're not capable of doing so, plus then we added Edinson Cavani to those options for the 20/21 season.

We now have a kid who we're trying to manage physically and the corpse of Anthony Martial flanked by a desperately out of form Rashford, another kid in Garnacho who is still developing and Antony who is just a total dud. Ten Hag has to take a huge chunk of the blame for the bad signings and for not maybe getting 100% out of 2nd rate players but given where the squad is we're nowhere near the best 3 sides, so at best we're in the pack with the likes of Spurs, Newcastle and Villa (which is where we actually are right now despite the poor standard of performances).
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We are not a top 3 side literally because of Ten hag and this stupid obsession with playing out from the back
He had done the hard part, for us on track, won a throphy, now go and sign a striker and a world class midfielder so we don’t need to play mctominay
 
Telsim said:
This point is being thrown around by some people as if they have made some profound observation. Which is just ridiculous. More than one thing at a time can be true.

Are the owners ultimately responsible? Yes. They are not going anywhere, though, so going over it again, and again, and again, and again is just pointless.

Is the structure of the club (or lack thereof) terrible? Yes. Remains to be seen what or if anything changes anytime soon.

Is the squad subpar? Yes. Ten Hag shares a big part of the blame for that. No one put a gun to his head and forced him to spend 200M on Casemiro, Mount, and Antony.

Has he been exposed as out of his depth? Yes. A good manager doesn't need world class in every position to deliver decent football. At least enough to not lose 3:0 at home to Bournemouth, be 1W/1D/3L, finish last in a Champions League group, and have a negative goal difference all around. We are the same as we were exactly 2 years ago.

Should he be sacked as soon as possible? Yes.

Could his replacement go down the same route? Yes. But every candidate should be doing their due diligence on what they are signing up for before taking the job. Not my problem if they come here and find out it's not what they expected. Maybe once the pool of candidates dries up and enough of them have rinsed the club out of substantial amounts of money when they get sacked someone inside the club will have a lightbulb moment.

Does any of that make me happy? Not at all.

None of those takes anything away from the others. It is that simple.

I believed in Ten Hag and he was probably the best candidate at the time. I wanted him here. But he was always a calculated risk. An unknown. It simply hasn't panned out. Time to cut our losses and move on. Well... unless the replacement is Graham Potter. I'd rather stick with Ten Hag then and bet on the minimal chance he comes good.
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Excellent points and this bolded part is something I've suggested time and time again. Erik had just as much to prove as some of the players he's purchased. He's done well at Ajax but he's not credible and even if he was credible he's still accountable. It's amazing how much oversimplification happens on these forums, the ownership is a very reasonable issue but it doesn't isolate the manager of their responsibility.

Erik was hired on the premise of what he conveyed at Ajax which by his own admission he's incapable of doing here. Paul Merson perfectly described this team as a box of revels chocolate with regards to not knowing what your going to get and unfortunately the same can be said for the manager. What does the manager have to offer in his philosophy if he's abandoned what made him successful?

The fact the transition football is unsuccessful (spaces exposed in the midfield, team doesn't transition turnovers into goals, very open to the counter) isn't some random consequence, critically thinking has the manager managed this directive of play for an extended period of time and at a competitive level domestically or in Europe. The longer Eth has been in charge the more questions are being asked when the opposite should be happening.
 
Freak said:
What I don't understand about him is why have we not seen any sort of pattern in our play on how he wants us to play. Yes we have lots of injuries and even if the players might be shit at it, there should at least be some sort of visible patterns of play. What is his play and why can't he coach it into the team?
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I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s numerous reasons for it, we still only have the players to play counter attack, but he’s been tasked with moving us away from counter attacking football.. the media absolutely destroyed Ole for playing it, and called him “small time”
So he tries to coach a new way of playing, but we know from rangnick that most of the players just don’t want to do it, or can’t.. our captain is probably our most talented player but has been described as “uncoachable” so he’s got to shoe horn him in somehow and make it work, he brings in a ball playing goalkeeper, who has a wobble, the press destroy him and they’re ripping him to pieces before and after every game, but we’ve even seen Fergie bring in keepers that didn’t work.. including De Gea for a good while…
We’ve been hamstrung by FFP, we can’t get rid of players he wants to sell, and I don’t actually believe we’ve brought in his top targets, just like we haven’t with previous managers…
On top of that, the players that actually made us look half decent last year have been injured for most of this one and as much as we’d all like to will it into existence, McTominay is not Casemiro, and Reguillon is not Luke Shaw
Compare that to Pep at City.. he’s replaced his back line about 5 times, how many keepers did they go through to get to Ederson?
 
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Zlatan 7 said:
Finishing 2nd and 3rd under ole and then expecting a title challenge only for it to go tits up and then finishing 3rd under ten hag is then a disgrace to spend £400mil to start calling the team a 6th place squad.

we may not be as good as city or Liverpool or anywhere near winning the league but we should be beating enough teams to not be expecting a 6-10th place finish
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Do you really believe that the price tags of the players determines the quality of the squad?
 
Chumpsbechumps said:
In the same way Ighalo and Weghorst were players our managers got because that’s all United could get them , martial has been dumped on multiple managers. Same way the club kept on many players, with contract extensions , for no other reason then padding out the squad with bodies and keeping squad book value higher.
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This would hold weight if we hadn't spent hundreds of millions of pounds and if we didn't have one of the highest wage bills in football. What you're saying is our managers can't be at fault unless they're literally given a bottomless pit of cash to sign everyone they want
 
SirScholes said:
We are not a top 3 side literally because of Ten hag and this stupid obsession with playing out from the back
He had done the hard part, for us on track, won a throphy, now go and sign a striker and a world class midfielder so we don’t need to play mctominay
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No he hadn't done the hard part, we had a goalkeeper who had become a joke and needed replacing, our 2 best centre backs can't stay fit and our attack was solely reliant on form Marcus Rashford hadn't shown for almost 3 years and has only ever shown sporadically.

He takes blame for the signings, I've said that, which mean we didn't sign the world class players you're talking about and he's doing an overall poor job with nonsensical 1-man midfield tactics that don't make sense. He will likely soon be fired but my point is that at best this team as constructed should be competing for 4th, the issue for Ten Hag isn't that we're 7th it's that that seems massively flattering based on performances and our results in Europe were awful. Whoever comes in is going to have to blow this thing up (although we know that won't happen and the cycle will likely repeat) because even with our best 11 playing we've maybe got a couple of players who are capable of being on a title winning team when at their best.
 
AndySmith1990 said:
This would hold weight if we hadn't spent hundreds of millions of pounds and if we didn't have one of the highest wage bills in football. What you're saying is our managers can't be at fault unless they're literally given a bottomless pit of cash to sign everyone they want
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What we need is better players who cost less money but I’m not sure how we achieve that.
 
The Firestarter said:
By investing the millions in building a scouting network instead. Like Madrid did.
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Do you really believe that our scouts cannot identify Bellingham, Tchouameni and all the other obvious talents that Madrid bought over the years? We tried to buy half of them ffs.
 
OrcaFat said:
Do you really believe that our scouts cannot identify Bellingham, Tchouameni and all the other obvious talents that Madrid bought over the years? We tried to buy half of them ffs.
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Did we though, really try to buy them or did we do something half assed as we usually do?
 
The Firestarter said:
Did we though, really try to buy them or did we do something half assed as we usually do?
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If I was a betting man, I’d say we found out pretty soon they didn’t want to come here over Madrid. The point is the scouts are not the problem, really. The best developing talents would rather go to clubs where they’ll get more game time and once they’ve done that they want to go straight to clubs who are already winning. It’s not that we don’t know who they are, it’s that we can’t get them.
 
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