His philosophy on the ball is to play from the back and being aggressive in attack. Basically, as the ball is progressed, he wants everyone to go all out attack, which allows his team to be vulnerable from counter attack but in return the teams will get to create lot of chances. It reflects to the amount of times we conceded goals from losing possession in dangerous area but also having high xG. The number 1 issue about the risk we are taking in his philosophy is we have average and inexperienced attackers who tend to make poor decision making on the final third such as not being clinical and trying to shoot in difficult angle rather than pass/cross. That means there is no balance in this risk because we don’t have world class and clinical attackers who can overweight the high risk of being vulnerable in defense.
His philosophy off the ball is to be proactive by defending man to man. The PL requires great physicality to defend one v one or man to man. We lack the physicality to defend man to man. When I said physicality, I’m not just talking about strength but also stamina, fitness, and also pace.
Ten hag is very naive and too stubborn to adapt. Currently, the risks in his philosophy overweight the benefits due to both of the players he have and the physical demands in PL. He needs to adapt to succeed in here. Pep adapts, he used to play with overlapping full backs in Barcelona, but in PL, he played centre back with great physicality and good on the ball as full backs to adapt with PL’s physical environment and still maintain his philosophy of playing.
May be by playing different formation or structure and still maintain his philosophy by identifying the weakness and the risk of his philosophy and how changing the structure of the team will help ten hag to reduce the risk of his philosophy. I think the idea of playing 352/343 could help him because one, you’re adding centre back in this formation so that means you’re adding another player with more physicality than someone like Antony, Garnacho, Amad, or Rashford. Then, Having 3 centre back means you add extra body during the build up phase means if somehow the team loses possession in midfield, you have 3 players behind to cover.