Erik ten Hag | 2024/25 | Sacked

Erik ten Hag

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I think he’s average. He’s probably good at building departments, making them work together, but I don't trust him to make good football decisions because he’s too close to bang average coaches like Southgate and Boothroyd. It might not matter much depending on Wilcox and Berrada’s influence
England, Brighton and Newcastle seem to have done well since his time at the clubs so he is certainly doing something right. Hopefully the people we have can complement eachother and make it work.
 
England, Brighton and Newcastle seem to have done well since his time at the clubs so he is certainly doing something right. Hopefully the people we have can complement eachother and make it work.

The major problem is they are not in charge of BHA, anymore. The odd CL finish is not good enough. They need to be involved with title races and the business end of all cup competitions.

Berrada has it in his locker, as does Blanc, but both were involved with sports-washing regimes which, of course, don't play with an even hand.

One thing we cannot be tolerant of is repeated failure going rewarded. Mates rates, and the like. If we are not going in the right direction, executive heads need to roll, too.
 
Correct. Ashworth is an FA man, an “FA-type” through and through. I’d rather we just got rid of him and let Berrada and Wilcox run it. There’s too many of them IMO, and Ashworth is the one with the mediocre record. No wonder he’s stalling on sacking Ten Hag. He probably thinks a season in mid table is pretty good.

The major problem is they are not in charge of BHA, anymore. The odd CL finish is not good enough. They need to be involved with title races and the business end of all cup competitions.

Berrada has it in his locker, as does Blanc, but both were involved with sports-washing regimes which, of course, don't play with an even hand.

One thing we cannot be tolerant of is repeated failure going rewarded. Mates rates, and the like. If we are not going in the right direction, executive heads need to roll.
 
Correct. Ashworth is an FA man, an “FA-type” through and through. I’d rather we just got rid of him and let Berrada and Wilcox run it. There’s too many of them IMO, and Ashworth is the one with the mediocre record. No wonder he’s stalling on sacking Ten Hag. He probably thinks a season in mid table is pretty good.

What's mediocre about Ashworth's record?

Also, what's so great about the records of Berrada and Wilcox?

Ashworth seems to have done a job good at the places where he worked. Now he needs to step up because its United. It's the same for the others.
 
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.

We don't create lots of chances, we don't make high XG. We were 11th for XG last season and we are 11th for XG so far this season.

So ETH's high risk philosophy gives us mid table creation stats and the risk gives us mid table XGA stats aswell.

Compared to the previous 3 seasons our XG has been getting progressively worse as has our XGA.

ETH has spent 600 million to make us a considerably worse side. The squad and manager combination is the worst by someway in the post SAF era.
 
If that's what he needs to do and hasn't done it yet despite it clearly not working then he's not a very good manager. Time to go buddy

For me, this is the thing. I felt this way last season around November when he didn't even experiment with the formation. He let us struggle throughout the whole of last season without even trying to make a change in tactics or even just formation.

LVG dabbled with a 532, 4312, 433, 4231 and 4141. Moyes tried a 4141 near the end of his tenure. This guy has had 18 months where our tactics haven't worked, yet we're supposed to believe he's able to tinker to make a change. My feeling is that he's not as good tactically as people want us to think, which is quite obvious to see in his in-game management.
 
What's mediocre about Ashworth's record?

Also, what's so great about the records of Berrada and Wilcox?

Ashworth seems to have done a job good at the places where he worked. Now he needs to step up because its United. It's the same for the others.
What I'm getting is that if we sack Ashworth now, we'll know to blame Wilcox in 3 months so we can sack him too. Then 3 months later, we'll know it's all Berrada's fault, so we can give him the boot. Of course this will eventually lead to there being nobody left to blame, which will be very difficult for many to contend with. But until then, there will always be a clear person to focus their rage on, which will give them a sense of purpose and fulfillment, or something.
 
This is how we’ve decided we’re getting through this two week international break isn’t it? Just a wall of silence where he’s neither backed or sacked.
 
He was already publicly backed a few weeks ago? They're not going to come out every week backing him, that would be ridiculous.

He should be gone, but people furious they haven't said he's staying are weird.
 
He was already publicly backed a few weeks ago?
Sir Jim of Brexit publically declined to say whether he still has faith in Ten Hag when asked by the BBC on October 4th. Weird way to back him.
 
The 'win percentage' is such a stupid stat. ETH would also have a higher 'loss percentage', and it'd be just as stupid if people were focusing only on that. Points per game (ppg) is the most accurate way to do it as it evens out wins, draws and losses with their respective weightings.

Ultimately, neither manager is clearly ahead of the other. Their ppg is almost identical, to the extent that ETH is fractionally ahead at the moment but will drop below Ole if we lose our next game. ETH won two domestic cups, but had an easier run of fixtures in those cups. Meanwhile Ole did better in Europe, despite probably having slightly harder fixtures.

The only real difference is that ETH's good period was all bundled together in one big batch, then his bad period has likewise been all bundled together. Whereas Ole constantly had smaller runs of form for a few months where we were good, then a few months of bad, then good, then bad, etc. I would say that Ole's good periods were clearly better and more fun to watch than ETH's though.
Good post
 
Maybe the current management team wants to show that they can withstand pressure to make difficult decisions. Fine. Let's see how this pans out till the end of the season. I won't really be watching United's games if we still have sucky tactics, but will stay in touch enough in way which does not impact on my mental health. Ironically, I will probably be relocating to the Netherlands for work and have to understand the Dutch psyche anyway. Studying EtH probably gives me a better sense of how they think. An unusual and fascinating people indeed.
Am sure you’ll like it. It’s a good place with good people. I know it was tongue-in-cheek, but I don’t think you’ll find ETH particularly representative, he’s a bit of a one off.
 
Yes, yes. You were right. Well done. Can we please move the feck on from all of these "I told you so, look how clever I was" posts from the usual suspects, please?
Pigeon, that’s all very well, but if any of the usual suspects had put their hands up and admitted they were wrong, I’m sure we wouldn’t be getting the ‘I told you so’ posts from the other usual suspects.
 
Can’t believe he hasn’t got to feck yet.
I just came to type this. I really can’t believe a manager has survived this horrible run of results overall and his appalling stats in Europe. We are one point less than our last year abysmal campaign! I know it’s too soon but with the way we are playing, I don’t see redemption for him and our team
 
It would point to Eth not being capable of motivating the players on match day. Lacking poor man management skills. In the past he's often spoke about building a strong, fit, robust team that runs more than the opposition. This never materialised, and in most games we are the ones being overrun, outran, out muscled and out scored !!
Also it would mean, training against poor team mates, will be easy, but when competing against top quality opposition you will be found out.

Imagine, you're a left back, against Antony in training.. You will be prime Roberto Carlos,.. Then on Match day you meet Saka.. It's a different ballgame
 
I genuinely thought he was going to be sacked this week. Now that that didn't happen... November international break is the next logical break point, and if not then the summer. Sadly I get the feeling the cost to sack him is playing too big of a role for the new owners.

Unfortunately if they’re going by the narrative of it’ll be too expensive to fire him they’ll find out it’ll be even more expensive not too when we’re out of Europe and our league form/position will see us with no European football next season and most likely a mid table finish so not much coming in financially from a league finish either.

Sticking with ETH because of the cost of moving him on is basically writing a season off in October and extending his contract was just stupid, if he had 12 months left as he originally did we may have seen ETH fighting to show he deserved to stay rather than just doing the same thing every game and it not working then simply saying “we stick to the plan eh ? We trust the process eh ? We go again”

We’re in October so a new manager bounce with the decent looking set of fixtures we’ve got upcoming could see us go on a good run and bring some confidence back to the players, this is ETH’s third season and it’s turning out to be the worst so far which is scary based on last season and the fact he’s now had over £650 million to spend to have a squad that HE wanted.
 
The 'win percentage' is such a stupid stat. ETH would also have a higher 'loss percentage', and it'd be just as stupid if people were focusing only on that. Points per game (ppg) is the most accurate way to do it as it evens out wins, draws and losses with their respective weightings.

Ultimately, neither manager is clearly ahead of the other. Their ppg is almost identical, to the extent that ETH is fractionally ahead at the moment but will drop below Ole if we lose our next game. ETH won two domestic cups, but had an easier run of fixtures in those cups. Meanwhile Ole did better in Europe, despite probably having slightly harder fixtures.

The only real difference is that ETH's good period was all bundled together in one big batch, then his bad period has likewise been all bundled together. Whereas Ole constantly had smaller runs of form for a few months where we were good, then a few months of bad, then good, then bad, etc. I would say that Ole's good periods were clearly better and more fun to watch than ETH's though.

Yup. It's currently 1.78 for ETH and 1.79 for Ole. Both were nowhere near good enough ,and yes, Ole's football was better under our good runs.

Ole managed for 127 league games, whereas ETH has only managed for 83. It's a safe assumption that ETH will be nowhere near 1.78 ppg if he somehow stayed on for 127 league games. Overall, both tenures generally had me of the belief that were/are complete wastes of time.
 
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I think he’s average. He’s probably good at building departments, making them work together, but I don't trust him to make good football decisions because he’s too close to bang average coaches like Southgate and Boothroyd. It might not matter much depending on Wilcox and Berrada’s influence
Some people here think any of this guy can make big mistakes because they are « football people ».
For now, I am disappointed by their decisions, especially keeping ETH.
But they know things we don’t so we should blindly follow them.
 
I think you can point to lots of individual moments, but at the end of the day, winning a cup and beating big teams on the way takes a bit more than luck. The majority of teams never win any trophies, including teams like Spurs who have lots of good players.

A side point, but I also think United’s fan base is a big part of why we win so many second rate trophies, even when we’re not a great team. Using the Spurs comparison again, they’ve arguably been a better team than United over the last decade, but United have won five (?) trophies in that time, and Spurs have won none. I sometimes wonder whether our huge support is an important factor in this, because our team and management hasn’t been very good in that time.
We have one of the most expansive team in the world and it’s easier to get motivated for 2 FA cup games than for an entire season.
So if we judge ETH on the FA cup run, we should also see that he is abysmal in the league 2 seasons in a row. And the league is our bread and butter. He should have been gone long time ago.
 
People can point to injuries, to Utd maybe getting the rough end of some calls but if you actually watched the games you know that the pathetic results and points total over the last 18 months massively flatters the performances. This isn't a team playing reasonably well under difficult circumstances shafted by fate, it has been a shambles of structural insanity, comically mismatched styles against the attributes of the player, woeful in game management, an inability or unwillingness to adapt, that has often been bailed out by individual moments.

I ask anyone to look back at that Liverpool FA Cup match, started well for 25 mins then the midfield legs ran out trying to make the incompetent set up work, somehow they couldn't sprint constantly for 90 mins. In the match thread the team was getting ripped apart, Liverpool wasted countless transition opportunities, chances that don't show up on XG because they were not getting shots off, but 5/6 4 on 2, 5 on 2 breaks were messed up by Liverpool, they really should have been 3 up before Utd started to recover a bit physically, then Cup chaos with Bruno at CB carried Utd through.

This was one of his triumphs but showed everything wrong with his approach, there is nothing sustainable about it.

Depressing he is still in charge, how can anyone who has watched his approach have any faith in him? I just don't get it, if he is such a good coach, why do his teams look so badly coached?
 
What's mediocre about Ashworth's record?

The evident mediocrity of it? Doing a decent job at West Brom. Doing a decent job with England. Doing a short stint at Brighton. Doing a short (and unimpressive) stint at Newcastle.

I'm not saying he's BAD, but he is an FA-type and has his fingerprints on appointing or working with coaches like Hodgson, Boothroyd, Allardyce, Sampson, and Southgate.

Look at City hiring Hugo Viana. Sporting won feck all for years until Viana came in an appointed Amorim and signed hit after hit. That's a standout job. Ashworth has never done a job like that. Maybe he will at United, but no one can say that his record shows he can. I think we've gone all out for someone who is quite middle-of-the-road.

Ashworth might be good at organising a club, but I would hope he does not have the primary say in who we hire as a head coach.
 
Am sure you’ll like it. It’s a good place with good people. I know it was tongue-in-cheek, but I don’t think you’ll find ETH particularly representative, he’s a bit of a one off.
Haha thank you for the reassurance! I actually think that EtH maybe has style of speaking which gets fully translated in Dutch with nuances and all. And perhaps his standard of English just gives people the wrong impression of what he really means. Anyway, I am looking to meet really lovely Dutch people in the Netherlands next year!
 
What do you mean by Ten Hag tactics?

Are we at a point where managers now trademark their tactics?

:lol:


What do you mean? In his first season we've beaten every single big team at OT. So clearly it's not an isolated statistic. He even beat Barca in Europa League that year.

The thing that gets us in trouble are his suicidal tactics that he abandoned after the 1st season in charge.

How do I know it's not just a fluke?
So while we are currently playing suicide ball, ETH has shown that when he wants to he can ditch that and get us a result as evidenced by matches against City and Pool in the FA cup.
 
The evident mediocrity of it? Doing a decent job at West Brom. Doing a decent job with England. Doing a short stint at Brighton. Doing a short (and unimpressive) stint at Newcastle.

I'm not saying he's BAD, but he is an FA-type and has his fingerprints on appointing or working with coaches like Hodgson, Boothroyd, Allardyce, Sampson, and Southgate.

Look at City hiring Hugo Viana. Sporting won feck all for years until Viana came in an appointed Amorim and signed hit after hit. That's a standout job. Ashworth has never done a job like that. Maybe he will at United, but no one can say that his record shows he can. I think we've gone all out for someone who is quite middle-of-the-road.

Ashworth might be good at organising a club, but I would hope he does not have the primary say in who we hire as a head coach.

The reality of the matter is, we don't know that much. None of the people we hired - Berrada, Ashworth, Wilcox - have performed the roles they now have at a big club like United. We have to trust the people who hired them that they could identify that they had the scope to do well in bigger roles at a bigger club (or choose not to trust).
 
Haha thank you for the reassurance! I actually think that EtH maybe has style of speaking which gets fully translated in Dutch with nuances and all. And perhaps his standard of English just gives people the wrong impression of what he really means. Anyway, I am looking to meet really lovely Dutch people in the Netherlands next year!
ETH is just as awkward in his native language. He has very poor communication skills and seems to be socially awkward.
Edwin VdS actually called him a “weird man” in his leaving speech
 
I wonder what and how these guys are pitching to potential managers if this and the Tuchel rejected us thing are true. Adult Disneyland requiem.
Probably a lower level of money with caveats built in to protect the club, and no absolute control over transfers. Not every coach wants to work like that
 
Probably a lower level of money with caveats built in to protect the club, and no absolute control over transfers. Not every coach wants to work like that

I don't think there are many/if any coaches that have absolute control over transfers at any top club in europe, so that's a given. In terms of remuneration, I'd also expect us to have a pulse on managers' current contracts - though I did read that money was supposedly an impasse with Tuchel. Hopefully TheAthletic or another platform manages more insight
 
I should probably read your entire conversation but why are you fixated on the paying him upfront? The issue for United as far as I know isn't about cash flow but accounting, if you sack him you have to write the entire cost of his sacking in your books at the date it happened regardless of the payments choices. So if United are in a difficult situation when it comes FFP/FSR then the issue with sacking him is that you have to quickly offset it with a legitimate injection of revenue.

I'm not. The person I'm replying to takes the view that the cost of paying the manager off may be prohibitive and that might be why he's not been sacked or why some aren't convinced on moving him on him. I disagree, taking the view that this won't be imperative - especially when the club took the choice to take his option up in the summer.

I don't know the ins and outs of PSR, and if what you say is correct then fair enough. I think it's unlikely that the club would, (at least partially) by virtue of taking up an option in his contract and extending it by a year, put themselves in a position where they can't sack him due to PSR restrictions. That'd be beyond incompetence, because the terms of his contract are known. Noting they considered moving him on in the summer, this must have been considered when they decided to stick with him then.
 
We know the club has many big issues - that's why the club is where it is, cutting costs wherever possible and shaking everything up behind the scenes. Leaning on the line "then there's much bigger issues" in several posts isn't giving anybody anything to think about - we already know there are.

But yeah, I don't know what you're arguing anymore apart from a church&state-style separation between the football and the money, as though the two have no impact on one another.

To make myself as abundantly clear as it is possible to do so without drawing a picture, I have provided a possible reason as to why not everyone at the club is on the same page over Ten Hag's immediate future. Once again, if you have alternative theories, by all means put them forward and we can discuss them.

I'm not, however, particularly interested in digressions that simply restate points I've already addressed, nor am I interested in speculating on the potential payment plan of somebody's outstanding salary beyond what's been reliably reported (because come on now, that just sounds dull as feck), so I'm unwilling to expend further effort on either of those topics with you.

The "bigger issue" I refer to is that if a club as big as United, cannot afford (due to PSR or overall cost) to sack a manager, despite INEOS professing to know what they're doing, then thats clearly a major problem.

Re the bolded point, that's not what I said.

You have provided a reason. I disagreed and you asked me to provide mine, which I did. You don't agree. That's fine.
 
Sir Jim of Brexit publically declined to say whether he still has faith in Ten Hag when asked by the BBC on October 4th. Weird way to back him.
Ratcliffe has made it indirectly clear he wants ETH gone. It's Berrada & Ashworth who are still backing ETH
 
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