The bit in bold may be true, but it isn't enough by itself. Rangnick met the same criteria, but nobody in the dressing room would listen to him beyond a single half against Palace. We've had similar experiences under Moyes, Van Gaal, and Mourinho. There's a very good chance that the lesser lights in your list like McKenna or Frank would be completely ignored. There's so much pressure at United, it's crushed managerial legends, most talented but less established managers wouldn't stand a chance.
In terms of the candidates you listed that are more promising - Nagelsmann, Emery, Amorim - how exactly would we go about getting them immediately? I think it's especially naïve to expect Emery to bail out on Villa in the Champions League where he has a huge amount of credit built up, to join us in a comparatively worse situation. Amorim is also in the Champions League. I think with both of them the amount of money it would cost to get them on board at this time would be too much to fit with the INEOS approach to not get ripped off. We refused to be held to ransom for Ashworth, choosing to go without instead, so I expect we'd rather wait to get the right manager in than go back to being shaken down.
Still, it all comes down to what the INEOS team think is the best way forward. I'm happy to trust them to make the good, well informed decisions, we'll have to see what happens.
Of course my brief summary of why various candidates would be better than Ten Hag isn’t enough for you - I could write paragraphs and paragraphs and you’d still find objections to each one. But that’s because your focus is a negative, fear-based case against hypothetical replacements, rather than a positive case for keeping Ten Hag.
Thankfully that’s completely irrelevant to the deep dive the Ineos team will have been doing on replacements since May. As I predicted many pages ago, you’re only asking for names so you can pick holes in any and every alternative because you’d rather stick with the failure that Ten Hag has proved to be. Fair enough, but focussing on possible future failings of hypothetical replacements over the actual, current failings of the guy who’s currently overseeing relegation form is bizarre. Actual failures are more damaging to our club that hypothetical failures. And that’s where we seem to differ.
You could find some similarity between every single candidate and every single failed ex Utd manager since Fergie, but I can more easily counter with the fact that Ten Hag has already lead us to a worse PL and CL performance than any of them. So again, that seems to me to be a fundamentally flawed argument in favour of keeping him. You could use that exact same justification to never ever change the manager, which is obviously an absurdity.
It’s been pointed out to you again and again that there is no formula or criteria that will determine success for new appointment. Failure is more likely than not for any of them, because success for Ud means the PL and CL, and that’s an incredibly hard level to get to. Someone can have an impeccable record and experience and CV and still fail. Someone could have a much more limited CV and succeed. Whoever is ultimately chosen, there will be enough potential positives about their candidacy to make them more attractive than keeping someone who we know for a fact is not cutting it.
As for attainability, it’s easy to propose hypothetical obstacles for every single possible candidate on the planet, but that’s just not a sound basis for concluding that not a single one is attainable. We don’t even know if any of the names suggested are on their list, and you have no more insight on them being unattainable than I do on them being attainable. Unless you’ve been reaching out to their agents to check, it’s nothing but baseless speculation on either side. And that is also not a sound argument for not replacing a failing manager.
When you look at the bigger picture, it’s hard to imagine that Ineos wouldn’t be able to lure a replacement, no matter what time of season it is. Big clubs finding new managers mid season is a perfectly normal and routine thing that happens in football and there’s no reason to think doing so will be peculiarly elusive only for Utd. That’s just something you seem to have pulled from thin air because you’d rather see Ten Hag sink another season first, at which point you seem to think all your hypothetical objections to possible replacements will magically disappear.
