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Erik Ten Hag is out at Manchester United, and for the sixth time in a little over a decade, the grandest soccer club in England is searching for new head coach.
Ten Hag is out because he wasn’t very good. He’d won just one of his last eight games in all competitions. United, with a loss at West Ham on Sunday, had slipped into 14th place, one season after finishing eighth, lower than ever before in the Premier League era. Substandard results and performances had become a pattern that, over the past two months, felt increasingly irreversible.
There is also a broader pattern to consider, though, a pattern that shouldn’t necessarily absolve Ten Hag but should scare off potential successors.
Since Sir Alex Ferguson’s retirement in 2013, no United manager has lasted three years on the job.
Five different men — six if you count Ralf Rangnick’s six-month interim spell — have been tasked with maintaining or restoring United’s eminence. They’ve been recruited for a variety of reasons, from a variety of countries, with varying levels of experience and clout. David Moyes was a Brit who’d succeeded at smaller English clubs. Louis van Gaal and Jose Mourinho were massive names and proven winners. Ole Gunnar Solskjaer was a Man United legend. Ten Hag was a trendy hire from Ajax in the Netherlands.
Each came with a plan to mold Manchester United. Each came with a distinct demeanor and style. Each came with his own tactical ideas, his own list of players to target, his own ideals. Very few commonalities connect all five.
And yet all have failed in a seat that, with each passing year, feels more and more poisonous.
Their only commonality is their shared experience at a decaying club that, money and prestige aside, has done nothing over the past decade to deserve a place among England’s elite.
Ten Hag, by some measures, was among the best of the five. His win percentage was better than that of Solskjaer, Van Gaal, Rangnick and Moyes. His two trophies — the 2024 FA Cup and 2023 League Cup — equaled Mourinho’s haul. The circumstances he dealt with — rashes of injuries, executive- and ownership-level turmoil and uncertainty — were arguably more adverse.
So it is silly to cast him as the problem, as the clueless coach dragging a once-proud club down to new depths.
He was the latest punching bag, the face of United’s many problems; but by no means the primary reason those problems persist.
The problems, over the years, have been archaic structures, unqualified executives and poor player recruitment. The byproduct is an incoherent squad of second-rate players who, on paper and on the field, don’t appear to mesh.
That’s what United’s next manager — Gareth Southgate? Zinedine Zidane? Xavi? Ruud van Nistelrooy, the interim? — will inherit. That, plus still-high expectations, plus a backroom structure that still seems to be in flux.
The job is not impossible. But it requires reforms that go far beyond a coach’s remit. Those will fall to new co-owner Jim Ratcliffe; and his top sporting deputy, Dave Brailsford; and CEO Omar Berrada, who was hired away from Manchester City; and sporting director Dan Ashworth.
The reforms are, supposedly, underway. But until the changes prove material … why, other than a lucrative salary, would any coach want this job?
Van Nistelrooy, a former United striker, and most recently a Ten Haag assistant, will take charge until United’s brass finds someone self-confident (or delusional) enough to take on the challenge.
And in the meantime, the 2024-25 season, like several before it, already seems lost.