I agree with every word you say but there is an inherent contradiction here. If the manager is not the key determinant of success or failure in a well run club, then why do you think he is in a badly run club?
Erik ten Hag | 2022/23 & 2023/24
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I agree with every word you say but there is an inherent contradiction here. If the manager is not the key determinant of success or failure in a well run club, then why do you think he is in a badly run club?
This fanbase needs to get it through their thick skulls that's it's okay for us to keep sacking managers until we land on the right one. It's what Chelsea have been doing for over a decade and they've won more than we have in the last decade.
It's romanticism plain and simple, a desire for us to return to being the club we were under Ferguson. Those days aren't coming back.
I just hope if he does end up staying and dragging the club out of the mud some of you (most) don't celebrate with him.
I do agree we look truly awful every week and ETH's press conferences sound deluded when we do win. I don't really buy the xG & xPts stat when used in that way but there is no doubt we are a very poor team.
Trying to understand what we are attempting to do this season feels impossible. As other posters have pointed out I can't think of any team that deliberately stretches vertically in the way that we do. Low block and counterattack or high press and high defensive line have been footballing conventions for a long time. I've seen it mooted and it feels like the only thing that makes sense is this idea that the attacking players are being pushed up to work on the high press (and learn those patterns) with the idea that after signing quicker defenders we will push the defense up next season. There is no real evidence for that outside of us nearly selling Maguire and being linked to Todibo, Yoro and other younger, quicker defenders. Given that it hasn't helped us be solid playing so deep I don't really understand why you wouldn't just push the defenders up and accept the goals from balls in behind instead. Onana could sweep up some through balls anyway.
Even if that was the case it doesn't excuse the poor attacking play. We don't seem to produce quality chances for any of the players and the system just seems to allow the wide players to shoot from whichever ludicrous position they are in.
Well it matters massively for the clubs finances and existing/potential sponsorship deals. More money and CL football to offer means you can attract a higher calibre of player.
We can't just say we'll take a break from competing (or tying to) for 5 years to work on something.
For every Chelsea theres a Watford or a Palace.
I hope you follow him out the door if he goes
"Does Erik need to stop winding people up?"
Our stats have actually been consistent all season, regardless of the team we had out there. There’s nothing anomalous about it unless you believe the entire season to be anomalous. We have been very open from game 1 until now, with full team healthy and with half of the team out. Haven’t really adjusted aside from select few games here and there.
We are currently 10th or 11th best team in England.
We will never win a PL or CL with him in charge.
Jokes on you. I haven't celebrated a trophy since the chosen one was sacked.
Do they have a personal grudge against Eth that only you are privy to?
At United post SAF we've basically just wanted every new manager to be Fergie. Be a head coach, head of recruitment and director of football all rolled into one. Because that's what Fergie did for us and he could do that because he was a genius. It's why the clubs structure hadn't modernised by the time he retired. We didn't need people in those other roles, but the mistake the Glazers made was they expected a new manager to be able to do this. But there isn't another Fergie out there and likely never will be. So our success and failure depended entirely on one man the manager.
In a well run outfit the position of manager become less important. It doesn't mean it's still not important to get a top coach who fits the club/players/philosophy but it just means that sacking a coach and hiring a new one become less of a wrench and doesn't cause as much upheaval as it has doen at United the last decade.
Depends. What does dragging us out of the mud mean? Top-6? Top-4? Title? Tighter defeats against Palace and Bournemouth?
Unless you're talking about a very specific stat like shots conceded here, there is no way all of our major expected stats have remained consistent from game to game this season, regardless of the team selection. That's pretty much impossible with our results list, I would guess.
Indeed, people waffle on about the time Fergie got in the 80's but they seem to forget that we sacked a manager mid-season who'd won the FA Cup the year before so we could hire Fergie. And the club in fact sacked a series of 5 underperforming managers over the space of 15 years before we found the right man.
This "5 year plan" thing is such nonsense that only we can come up with. Clubs do have long term plans, yes, but nobody plans to be irrelevant for 5 years before it gets better. So we pull off this perfect plan after 5 years and then what, challenge for the league and dominate football forever?
Yep United fans shouldn't celebrate the club they support being successful. Makes sense.
If he does stay, and if he does turn it around I will be celebrating, of course I will, that does not make me a hypocrite, it makes me reactive, all I want is for Utd to do well, be entertaining, be successful.... no player or manager comes before the club.
Right now I do not think that ETH has demonstrated he is the right manager to take us forward, if he proves me wrong then we both win there is no contradiction.
Why would people not celebrate if the club does well? Hope you never celebrated a player doing well after you criticised one of their performances before
Still going with the "fans who don't support the manager aren't real fans of the club" rhetoric?
I genuinely don't know. The consensus always seemed to be a new manager given the resources available to them at United. Needed 3-4 years to turn us into title winners. That was the opinion of most fans when we hired Jose, Ole to an extent and certainly when we hired Erik 2 years ago. But now we seem further away than ever, and people not least Ten Hag himself are talking about needing a few years just to get back in the top 4.
What if you support the manager though.
Well I suppose, some seem to support the manager more than the club. To the point they take any criticism of them personally. It's weird.
Yeah the usual clichés summed up nicely
Yeah dont worry. If Ten Hag stays and we only lose 18 games next season, instead of somewhere between 19 and 22, I wont be celebrating with him.
But Ten Hag fans can celebrate 20+ defeat seasons so long as their guy isnt sacked, or blamed. Lucky them.
Back in the late 2000s when we were winning everything, there was an Arsenal-supporting poster in here named Pete who would waffle on about how his club was in the middle of a "five year plan" and how they would dominate football when this plan finally came to fruition.
Unsurprisingly, it never happened and everyone ridiculed him for it.
Funnily enough, Arsenal's current 5 year plan is going pretty well after 3 years of complete dross
If anyone shouldn't celebrate it should be him. He's the one that put it in the mud in the first place.
Isn’t that basically the noise/variance?
We obviously were lucky. We were saying this when we were in the fifth place that we were being very lucky, and it is unsustainable. Guess what, it was unsustainable and now we are 8th (might still finish ninth or tenth).
If you play like a borderline relegation team, and find yourself near UCL zone, do not expect to qualify for UCL. Which is what me, Sarni, Skills etc have been saying for 6+ months now.
Big difference in resources and ambition between those three clubs, not a great comparison.
That kind of logic exposes the issue with discussions online. If ETH stays and squashes the concerns that he has created then anyone that has a brain should update their view to the new context. There is no virtue in having an opinion and sticking to it for the sake of it, there is also no virtue in building your opinion based on the fear of it being outdated in the future.
This is not a venture capital backed start up trying to hoover up market share by driving losses over 5 years to try and become a Unicorn. This is the equivalent of an Apple saying let’s stop manufacturing iPhones till we get the best possible phone ever conceived to be ready to go into production.
A. They will lose their best employees and will not be the attractive option for investors that they are now.
B. That best phone will never come to fruition, ever.
Colloquially yes. Variance with a positive impact equals luck and variance with a negative impact equals bad luck.
When you lower the standards, they will continue getting lower. From a few years to winning the title, to a few years to top 4, to a few years to mid table.
The standards should be set that any time you did not build a team challenging for the title within the first two seasons, you have already failed. That’s why I wanted Jose out after his second season despite the second place with 81 points. That’s why I wanted Ole out after his second full season despite getting the second place.
Set very high standards, get good managers, sack them (or put them on pip) if they cannot maintain the standards. The opposite of what we have doing: setting low standards and keeping the managers despite failing at them.
The standard for any United manager is - they deserve at least 3 seasons and are fine so long as they meet certain minimum requirements (which are now, pathetically, win a cup or qualify for Europa most of the time)
The standards at any top club are - they get a season and if they haven't improved the football and results, then they're fecked off sharpish. And if they improve the team in the first season, they still have to improve again in the second.
This. People act like if ETH stayed and won the title or something next year all of us that want his ass on the street wouldn't be jumping for joy and thrilled at seeing the club back on top. Only simpletons take such absolute stances, anyone with a brain should be able to update their opinion based on new information.
It's not luck though, is it? You know far more about stats than I do, but a continuously changing environment is an awful thing to try and extrapolate from if you want actual decent information. If we were talking about a more normal season here I would be happy to entertain this train of thought, but unless everyone thinks we will perennially have the sort of injuries and player rotation we've had for a large part of this season, then what is the point of discussing it? This is why these stats are only so useful in a massively dynamic game such as football, the context is lost in them.
It truly doesn't make sense. If you look at the kind of team ETH has been trying to create, it's going to immediately clash with any recruitment head or DoF that has a basic understanding of the Prem. Are we all forgetting about when he pushed to have key transfer decisions and refused to work with Rangnick or when he committed to the idea of playing with two #8's last summer and pushed to sign Mount?
For whatever misguided reason, he's clearly very confident in what type of team he thinks will achieve success and I don't see how he's just going to sit there and accept Ashworth or Wilcox telling him that De Jong lacks the defensive awareness and physicality for a Premier League midfielder. It just seems like a huge conflict waiting to happen. Giving him another season under the new structure is pointless when he's clearly devoted to his transfer philosophy.
Dunno. I watched United games and I thought we were clearly very lucky to be in the position we were. I also saw the xPts/xG and that basically confirmed what I thought, that we were lucky and it was unsustainable. That’s why I was very confident to predict that we will end in mid table when people were saying that we are just x points away from UCL zone.
I still think we are lucky to be where we are. We should be in bottom half of the table. Heck, if we were unlucky instead of lucky, we might have got relegated.
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