Erik ten Hag | 2024/25

Erik ten Hag

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It is never too late to sack a manager.

He had another pre-season + many signings + he is in his third season at the club.

Another dull performance and defeat against Liverpool then something must happen.

Otherwise we have the same talk in 4-5 weeks.

Either he can't or is too stubborn to change something.
 
I've said since early in the first season that the lack of attacking threat is a glaring problem under him. We had far more threat going forward under Ole.
 
3KDré said:
Yes. I've said this before. Whenever we have played closer to what he wants - it has been an unmitigated disaster. There's been two instances : when he first came in (Brighton and Brentford) and last season.

Ironically, the trophies we have won which he cites as success, both have also come when he abandoned his philosophy and we played counter.
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Feel the same, the more he is pushing his ideas and principles, the worse we get.
The clearest example is when we went from looking like a non league team against Brentford and Palace, to then look like a more than decent PL team playing better teams in Arsenal, Newcastle and Brighton. Like pressing a switch.

Also agree on the cup games, a few of the games there felt different. But we also need to remember some rather shocking performances in our FA cup run. We went full strength for some reason against bottom half league 2 side Newport and still managed to make a meal out of it. Game was 2-2 for some time and we had to push what we had to squeeze out the the win.

Coventry had us on the backfoot ever since they dared to push forward and was the closest offside you`ll see away from reaching the final. We won the cup in the end and a win is a win, but him swinging that trophy around, pretending it means he is THAT guy rubs me the wrong way tbh.
 
We cannot keep using the previous seasons as benchmark for comparison and say we look better than last year. The same was spouted in his first season when he took over from a season where players quit halfway through.

The real benchmark should be where we want to be, which at least in my opinion is comfortable top 4 and within 10 points of the top. If anyone doesn't stand up to those standards/cannot achieve it, should not be managing us.
 
bleedred said:
We cannot keep using the previous seasons as benchmark for comparison and say we look better than last year. The same was spouted in his first season when he took over from a season where players quit halfway through.

The real benchmark should be where we want to be, which at least in my opinion is comfortable top 4 and within 10 points of the top. If anyone doesn't stand up to those standards/cannot achieve it, should not be managing us.
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Yep. We looked like a bottom half side all last year. It's a pathetically low bar to judge progress against.
 
Big Ben Foster said:
That's the million dollar question, isn't it? After yesterday's game I've been seeing a lot of posts in here saying his system will need time to implement and he deserves patience as a result - as if we're in season 1 of his tenure and he's just getting started.
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Indeed. He should have spent the last two years implementing his system. Other managers can do so in a matter of weeks or months.

He's here, and he's going to have to be given time or sticking with him, and allowing him to impact recruitment this summer was entirely pointless, but as it stands, thinking he's going to suddenly improve to a point where he's good enough to take the club to where the fans, and INEOS want it to be is based on nothing but blind faith.

At any other top club, he'd have been sacked in the summer and a poor start was going to put the pressure on him early.
 
Rolaholic said:
Watching Chelsea running riot this afternoon had me thinking, have we ever scored more than 4 under ETH?

I know we've conceded 5 or more a few times but can't remember us having a goal fest over these passed 3 seasons.
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Not remotely possible when he tells his team to keep the ball and play it safe. It looks like we are playing better with more structure but in fact, we taking less risk and playing it safe. Once we go behind and needs a goal or 2, it will look exactly like last season where teams would come at us. As long as ETH cannot get this team to score early, every game will be a struggle. If Liverpool scores first, it is likely a huge scoreline.
 
Why are we still just putting XI individuals on the pitch with no recognisable tactics or gameplan? When Sir Jim came in everyone said his team would decide the style they want us to play and the manager would implement it but this doesnt seem to have happened.

If Erik wants to keep his job he needs to drop what ever it is he is unsuccessfully trying to do and switch to a more attacking style thats more suited to the squad we have and actually start sending the players out motivated to win.
 
If Slot and Maresca have good start to their Liverpool/Chelsea careers than that'll just add some more pressure on ten Hag. Won't write him off yet but issues that were there last season won't all just go away even with many players fit again and new signings.
 
His tactics involve the midfields and defenders passing the ball to each other sideways an enormous amount of times, having wingers slow down the play as much as possible. This is actually worse if you want to build a side on transition based attacking. His tactics rely too much on a winger like Garnacho doing really well on 1v1s against opposition fullbacks and creating a chance. The complete lack of tempo means we’ll continue to struggle to score goals this season. You can blame individual players all you want but this is just poor tactics.
 
VP89 said:
It wasn't a huge collective failure. First goal should have been easily dealt with if not from human error by Maguire. The second goal was shortly after a corner where Dalot ball chased and vacated his left back position, leaving two Brighton players camping at the back post.
The next closest to them was McTominay, who was also not an Ajax player if you're curious.

Dalot has been a very good asset for us but he made a mistake for the second goal. I disagree he's the best pound for pound footballer we have, but I agree he's much improved.

Ten Hag himself said we need to do better in both boxes and I agree with this sentiment. Broadly speaking we aren't as poorly drilled defensively as people are claiming. I've seen Raya bail out the great arsenal defence in both the wolves and villa game from chances that were better than what we've conceded.
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Agreed but you could see the difference in our setup with and without mount.

I think it remains to be seen how much better we continue to be defensively when we have a striker instead of mount. Clearly with Mount, we dominated Brighton in the first half, they barely threatened. But the situation definitely changed once we had a striker instead of Mount. I'm not optimistic about a better balance being achieved
 
I've got the feeling that RvN is there as an insurance policy for Ineos in case they need to sack him early on.
 
BeretWearingEnt said:
It’s not written off, it just doesn’t impact the future in any real sense. It will undoubtedly affect the decision making of the people who determine whether Ten Hag keeps his job, but last season does not affect this season on the pitch.

So I’ll choose to keep turning up, backing the team, hoping for better. That’s how I’ve supported for 40 years or so, whether we’re awful, the best in the world, or mediocre as we are now.
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Undoubtedly yes.

That's all any if us do. But inbetween matches pointing out that United are Awful, mediocre or the best. Doesn't make any of us better or worse United fans though.
 
I do think tactically he’s quite lacking. He reminds me quite a lot of Southgate in that his subs always seem to be pre-planned or defensive to hold on to something.

Realistically, having seen him now for 2 years, the best we can really expect is for him to keep it pragmatic and hope that the likes of Bruno and Rashford can produce enough to get us in the top 4. If he does any better than that I’d be very pleasantly surprised.
 
mav_9me said:
Agreed but you could see the difference in our setup with and without mount.

I think it remains to be seen how much better we continue to be defensively when we have a striker instead of mount. Clearly with Mount, we dominated Brighton in the first half, they barely threatened. But the situation definitely changed once we had a striker instead of Mount. I'm not optimistic about a better balance being achieved
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I think the high press is more exciting when Mount plays. I wasn't happy with Zirkzee's efforts in the press and can see why Ten Hag is taking his time with him until he understands his role off the ball.

Rashford was also more proactive off the ball, trying to win it back.
 
r0663664 said:
Not remotely possible when he tells his team to keep the ball and play it safe. It looks like we are playing better with more structure but in fact, we taking less risk and playing it safe. Once we go behind and needs a goal or 2, it will look exactly like last season where teams would come at us. As long as ETH cannot get this team to score early, every game will be a struggle. If Liverpool scores first, it is likely a huge scoreline.
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The semblance of control comes from the fact that in place of a striker we were playing with an extra midfielder for the first half yesterday.

Once Hojlund comes back into the team watch us revert back to what we saw last season.

ETH has not got a clue. Idiotic fan sentiment and weak management by Ineos (bowing to fan pressure to not sack him) has fecked the whole season.
 
Atheist said:
His tactics involve the midfields and defenders passing the ball to each other sideways an enormous amount of times, having wingers slow down the play as much as possible. This is actually worse if you want to build a side on transition based attacking. His tactics rely too much on a winger like Garnacho doing really well on 1v1s against opposition fullbacks and creating a chance. The complete lack of tempo means we’ll continue to struggle to score goals this season. You can blame individual players all you want but this is just poor tactics.
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Yep. He did the exact same thing after losing his first two games in 22/23. Just reverted to extremely safe football and had a good run of games starting with a win against Liverpool and everyone thought we were on our way up. In reality, we were mediocre and were unbelievably lucky that Rashford was having the season of his life. If Rashford was playing like he was last season, we would have finished 6th or lower. When ETH finally tried to have us play attacking football last season, we played the most disorganized press I've ever seen and unsurprisingly started leaking in goals. He simply doesn't know how to set up his team to switch seamlessly from attack to defense, you can talk about players at his disposal all you like but his tactics are bad.

I suppose we're early into this season, though. Let's see if he can surprise us after 5 or 6 games.
 
VP89 said:
Im addressing this point

"or in his third season at United hasn’t managed to tactically set up his team to a level that comfortably exceeds that of Brighton."

Far too early to suggest what he can and can't do in season 3.
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I’m not suggesting “what he can and can’t do in season 3”. I’m stating what he hasn’t done by season 3.
 
RedSky said:
League Stats for all below Managers. Added their first 78 games (as today was Ten Hags 78th League Game). Ignored Moyes, mainly because I don't want to think of that season ever again. Worth pointing out that Jose and Ole's downfalls started about now, so imagine there stats will begin to decline now. But technically on a Pts per game ration, Ten Hag is currently 4th highest among the United Managers.

Manager​
Win %​
Loss %​
Clean Sheets​
Games​
W​
D​
L​
GF​
GA​
GD​
Pts​
Pts PG​
Pep​
73.08%​
10.26%​
31​
78​
57​
13​
8​
194​
67​
+127​
184​
2.36​
Jose​
56.41%​
16.67%​
36​
78​
44​
21​
13​
126​
61​
+65​
153​
1.96​
Ole​
53.85%​
20.51%​
24​
78​
42​
20​
16​
138​
86​
+52​
146​
1.87​
Ten Hag​
53.85%​
30.77%​
27​
78​
42​
12​
24​
117​
103​
+14​
138​
1.77​
LVG​
51.32%​
23.68%​
29​
76​
39​
19​
18​
111​
72​
+39​
136​
1.79​
Klopp​
50.00%​
20.51%​
24​
78​
39​
23​
16​
150​
98​
+52​
140​
1.79​
Arteta​
50.00%​
30.77%​
28​
78​
39​
15​
24​
121​
84​
+37​
132​
1.69​
Rangnick​
41.67%​
29.17%​
6​
24​
10​
7​
7​
33​
33​
0​
37​
1.54​
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So statistically Ole was better

And more chance of giving some team a battering
 
OverratedOpinion said:
I'm honestly not sure, from what I see there is a lot of talk about the tactical issues (which do persist despite obviously not being as glaring as last season).

The problem is that whilst I understand the meaning behind this thread not becoming another breakdown of everything that went wrong last season that is a different thing than judging the fairly flat performances with the context of what happened last season included.

He scored the goal, that is clearly effecting play whether it was going in or not. It's a unique circumstance I understand but it's the right call and should be for a number of reasons. You can't change rules to be based on what would have happened if they weren't broken.
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Yeah I have no qualms accepting the offside, I just think it sucks as clearly just rank luck for Zirkzee.

How I’m seeing it is basically every game you have the performance (is is bad, acceptable or good) and the result (with the same 3 options) and I’d say we’ve seen:

Fulham. Good performance, good result.
Brighton. Acceptable performance, bad result.

What we need to know/find out is after, for example, 5 games are we still seeing acceptable/good performances because I don’t mind losing games like Brighton - unlucky to not go 2-1 up, created chances but bad defensive errors and away from home - if the general trend is consistent I.e. we are playing decently because that’s what matters over the course of a season.
 
Next 5 games and only one I would bank on us winning, playing like this.
Liverpool, Saints, Palace, Spurs, Villa.
 
I have been very critical of him but you watch some of the other teams and it makes me question our players a lot as well. Whilst not being to create in possession is largely due to the coaching but in transition situations we seem to have some of the dumbest players in the world. We constantly got overloads yesterday but our players just kept making bad decision after bad decision
 
golden_blunder said:
So statistically Ole was better

And more chance of giving some team a battering
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Shows the impact a manager can have despite the players at his disposal. Ole's first game in charge was the first time we scored more than 4 goals in the league in 5-6 years.
 
So depressing watching a manager he beat regularly more competent in a league he’s only just joined while Erik has been here 3 years. Not good.
 
I rewatched the Brighton chance they had before we went right up the other end of the pitch and had the offside goal. They had 5 players in our box vs our 3 defenders and they messed up an easy chance to get a goal. The ball is intercepted by Maguire and 20 seconds later we have the ball in their net. Crazy end to end stuff, just like the Fulham game where they had a two on one opportunity. The risks just don't look well calculated ones to me even though we didn't pay for them on either occasion.
 
We haven’t even played bad in the first two games . We’ve shown some glimpses of what we’re trying to do. Our issue is we can’t score goals and let’s face it, that’s the biggest single issue in the game. You don’t score goals/take your chances, you don’t win.



It’s that simple. We don’t have anyone who is going to score bags of goals for us and that’s the problem.
 
ForeverRed1 said:
We haven’t even played bad in the first two games . We’ve shown some glimpses of what we’re trying to do. Our issue is we can’t score goals and let’s face it, that’s the biggest single issue in the game. You don’t score goals/take your chances, you don’t win.



It’s that simple. We don’t have anyone who is going to score bags of goals for us and that’s the problem.
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Doesn’t ever look like it’s been prioritised though and he has to take responsibility for that? Especially in first two years.
 
Daydreamer said:
I’m not suggesting “what he can and can’t do in season 3”. I’m stating what he hasn’t done by season 3.
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As I said, it's gameweek 2. Very early to conclude what has or hasn't been done by season 3. We made two silly mistakes but our defence isn't as bad as people are claiming. Arsenal themselves needed bailing out in both games by their own keeper.
 
BluesJr said:
So depressing watching a manager he beat regularly more competent in a league he’s only just joined while Erik has been here 3 years. Not good.
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One took over the greatest Liverpool team for 30 years, and the other took over from whatever was left after the Rangnick interim era and Glazer mismanagement
 
Fearthegrimp said:
I know by the letter of the law the Garnacho goal was offside, but surely the rule should be reviewed where an accidental touch on the goal line with no opposition anywhere near to prevent the goal and with no suggestion of interfering with play, the goal should stand?
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I think scoring a goal definitely comes under the definition of interfering with play!
 
BluesJr said:
Doesn’t ever look like it’s been prioritised though and he has to take responsibility for that? Especially in first two years.
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Sure. Although now we have top footballing people and a structure I’m sure their are multiple people who can step in and make decisions/suggestions.


So far we have bought 2 potential world beaters.. but nothing that is for the here and now.


City, Fulham and Brighton we missed so many chances, chances a top striker buries. It’s wasteful and will continue to cost us points.
 
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